Teresa Dillon

“I went to the city because I wished to explore it deliberately, to feel what it was like and soak in its landscape”.

Imagine this is a statement from a person who is visiting Helsinki. They have come to the city not to shop, do business, party or visit someone but simply to wander across the city landscape, enjoy its contours, ramble in and out of its neighbourhoods, feel it out. We do something similar when we go walking in the countryside. Usually this activity is considered as restorative, a means to “get away from it all”. Is it possible to think of the city in this way, as a place for rambling, restoring energy and contemplation?

Borrowing from the Scottish, Irish, English & Welsh tradition of the Bothy and the Finnish Wilderness Hut, the Urban Hut explores the potential for creating an open, free-to-use hut, which anyone visiting the city can have access to use for an overnight stay. What if such Urban Huts existed in Helsinki, what would they look like? Where would they be located? And how would they be cared for and managed?

The Urban Hut explores how living structures and objects can act as means to rethink civic design and foster sensibilities towards new forms of urban commons and hospitality.

About the artist

Teresa Dillon is an artist and researcher.