A Bunch of Lines

In 2015 the Alvar Aalto Foundation and the City of Jyväskylä launched an open international competition for an extension to connect two of Aalto’s buildings, the Alvar Aalto Museum and the Museum of Central Finland, and the outdoor area between them in the Ruusupuisto district. The brief was small and exact: a link space, a temporary auditorium, a café and a shop, built only on the marked site between the museums. Its aims were to improve the shared use of the two premises, to develop the outdoor areas so that the forecourt would become part of the whole, and to find a natural connection with the architecture of Alvar Aalto. Rasa Navasaityte’s entry for lab-eds answers that last condition not with a third building but with a bunch of lines.

Each line is drawn as a chain of small steps: one continuous element with a direction and a rhythm, bent where it meets its neighbour. Bundled, the lines rise between the two white museum walls as a lattice that is wall, stair and roof at once. From the forecourt the extension is a porous screen whose members are thin enough to be counted, with stairs climbing between them; from the air it reads as a mass lodged between the two roofs; from the courtyard it meets gravel and grass. The space of the link is not enclosed by the lines but occurs between them.

The renderings of December 2015 were preceded by studies of single bundles in October of that year: dark clusters of stepped lines twisting upward, rendered as free-standing objects on white, and a single wavering line drawn as a chain of steps. These studies are the method of the project. The building is not a figure that was later broken into lines; it is a quantity of similar elements whose relations produce the figure, and the rooms of the extension are the residue between them.

The entry belongs to the practice’s research on architecture between the parts. Navasaityte developed the method further in the competition for the Čiurlionis Concert Centre in Kaunas in 2017, where a family of slab, column and stair parts took the place of the line, and set it out in full in her dissertation, Between the Parts: A Relational Methodology for Ecological Design (University of Innsbruck, 2026).