Finnish architect Marco Casagrande would rather build in a way that lets nature serve as co-designer. Most of today’s construction, he argues, is an industrial illusion. Recycled glass aggregate from Foamit plays a prominent role in the summer exhibition of Onoma, the Fiskars cooperative of artisans, designers and artists in Finland, with Casagrande as both curator and exhibition architect.

Marco Casagrande is one of Finland’s best-known contemporary architects and environmental artists. He has shown his work at the Venice Architecture Biennale several times, taught and built across Europe, Asia and North America, and held a professorship at the Bergen School of Architecture in Norway, among others. He currently holds two professorships in architecture in Ukraine. In 2015 he received the international Global Award for Sustainable Architecture from UNESCO and the Locus Foundation. The Kaste/Dagg/Dew exhibition in Fiskars brings him close to home: based in Karis, Finland, Casagrande visits the Fiskars ironworks village weekly and knows the place and its community of artists intimately.

Marco Casagrande, architect and environmental artists

There is no reality other than nature

It doesn’t take long to steer Casagrande toward the big questions. “Most of the construction work is actually pollution. We imagine we have no choice but to do it this way, but that’s an illusion that industry sells us,” he says. It’s a striking claim from an architect, yet it rests on a consistent line of thought that comes down to a single idea: there is no reality other than nature. For Casagrande, that means nature should be brought into building as a partner — a co-designer — rather than treated as an obstacle to build against. In every project he looks for local knowledge: the centuries-old human skill of adapting to one particular place.

So what does nature mean to someone who works with concrete, steel and glass? For Casagrande, it comes down to the role of a building. Too often a building is seen as a shelter that shuts nature out. “People tend to think of a building as a lump of concrete with a person inside it,” he says. “I think of a building as a mediator. Of course it offers shelter, but at the same time it connects the person inside to the nature around them.”

Glass has many lives

His thinking comes to a head in materials. Casagrande has long wished that more construction work in Finland were done in wood, since the raw material grows practically next door. Even so, he doesn’t reject industrial materials outright — what matters is whether a material keeps circulating or ends its life after a single use. That is exactly why he wanted some 30,000 kilos of recycled glass aggregate from Foamit placed at the heart of the Kaste/Dagg/Dew exhibition, right alongside the works. It doesn’t recede into the background; it lifts the artworks into view. And it captures his thinking about the circular economy: recycled glass, he says, holds a kind of purity, the same presence as a skillfully blown glass object.

“Crushed glass is the most consoling industrial product I know,” he says. Casagrande likens the cycle of glass to the water cycle: from river to ice, to sea, and back to meltwater. Add energy to sand and a transparent surface forms — like frozen plasma. Crush the glass and the energy is released, and the material is ready once again to continue its cycle. Glass is one of the few industrial products you can recycle practically endlessly, and it’s that hundred-percent circularity that makes it feel so natural to him.

So where is the building industry headed? Casagrande believes that centralized infrastructure — energy, water, all of it — will gradually break down, because it simply isn’t sustainable. When it does, responsibility will return closer to people themselves. “Then we’ll start taking better care of the environment and the built environment around us.”