“Kivi is a classic member of the Finnish architectural tradition. He has a tremendeous instinct for buildings.”
Jeffrey Kipnis, Finnish Television interview 2006.

“Kivi Sotamaa and Johan Bettum - these two designers combine a deep appreciation for architectural design in terms of materials and construction with a keen awareness of contemporary fashion and design culture. They are without question the most couture of their generation and produce the most stunning and beautiful forms designed on a computer”.
Greg Lynn, Constellations in Practice, PRAXIS 6, 2004

“Harvinaislaatuisen aktiivisesta kansainvälisestä toiminnastaan huolimatta Helsingissä asuvien Tuuli ja Kivi Sotamaan projekteilla on ollut merkittävä vaikutus kansallisiin kulttuuritapahtumiin”.
Uudenmaan taidepalkintolautakunta, 2002

…”IOCEAN north, Kivi Sotamaa & Michael Hensel has already shown their potential to eclipse the work of Aalto in the 21st century. This is an exciting network whose great promise deserves serious consideration for the Borromini Young Architects Award.”
Cynthia Davidson’s of ANY corporation / nomination for Borromini award for young architects, 2000

Ocean represents architecture’s newest wave: designers who live in different areas ( in this case , Helsinki, Oslo and Cologne) yet practice together in a paperless office located in cyberspace. They create designs that explore the expressive potential of computer software. “Adrift”, their proposal for the Times Capsule, reflects the groups wired , polymorphic sensibility.
Herbert Muschamp_The New York Times Magazine_5th December 1999

The work of OCEAN, a European design collaborative, also evokes dreamscape quality. The group’s Töölö sports Arena (Kivi Sotamaa, Johan Bettum), an unrealized Finnish project from 1997, is a fluid cloudlike structure, with bleachers and a roof that resemble sheets of gauze floating down the stream of conciousness. It could be a bullfight stadium designed by Salvador Dali in free association with Frederick´s of Hollywood.
Herbert Muschamp_The New York Times_14th November 1999

… Ocean’s objective is to formulate [an] architecture that encompasses a broader urban culture. The implication is a use of architecture aimed at producing an urban environment …[through Ocean’s] method of reducing the surface of the city to matter and of anchoring form to the problematic nature of information…
Ole Möystad _ Creating Architecture by means of a Network _ de Architect 6 / 1998

… what is the geometry of the vast, hushed, viscous, deep space of the ocean, I wonder? For that is the space I desire – to make of course, but more importantly, to immerse myself in. I think others desire it as well. Some say so. Toyo Ito writes of ‘liquid space’, Bahram Shirdel of ‘the deep’. So too have Claire Robinson [and] the OCEAN network… Jeffrey Kipnis _ Architecture after Geometry _ A.D., 1998

[Ocean’s] aim is to free architectural practice itself from conventional forms – ‘to achieve a dynamic and fluid organisation from a transgressive process of interaction and communication’. This international network constitutes a departure from the model of the high-profile ‘master’ in charge, …which has dominated architectural practice since the Renaissance…
Ben Van Berkel & Caroline Bos _ The Ocean net – Becoming Unlimited _ AA Files 33, 1997

Every Londoner loves to hate the Barbican. But imagine what might have happened had a Finnish architect been at the helm in 1972. Just imagine…and see a tiny glimpse of it come true as a six week celebration of Finnish culture opens at the Barbican, and its spaces - from lake through to foyers, halls and galleries - become temporalily transformed by the work of the 26-year-old Kivi Sotamaa and Markus Holmsten, two of Finlands youngest and most revolutionary architects.
Hilary Finch _ Out of the forest and into the Barbican _ The Times 19.11.1997

Sensations are believed by some psychologists to be the first stages in the functioning of senses that lead to perception, the process of understanding the sensory information. However, to Gillez Deleuze sensation was not prior to the world of perception or representation, but coextensive with it. It was the world of “lived experience,” exactly what the phenomenologists have attempted to describe. Our focus on sensation in architecture can be seen as an attempt to do what what the ‘phenomenological architects’ failed at - to overcome the experience of ‘reading’ a narrative emerging from structural expression, meaning, history and process, in order to foreground a lived experience - a sensation.

The most sophisticated contemporary work on the subject deploys representation skillfully in order to create sensation through what Deleuze called the Figure - “a form that is connected to a sensation, and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system” [1]. The Figure is an oscillating form between figuration [representation] and abstraction. It is specific in its’ affect, yet never enables a definitive understanding or ‘reading’ to take place.

In Frank Gehry’s work a figurative element such as fish or a rose will often emerge transformed into near abstraction creating the Figure. It is perhaps one reason to his success in capturing people’s imagination because paradoxically, by avoiding telling any stories, the Figure becomes fertile ground for a multiplicity of them as sensible ‘rhythms’ start to emerge from the seeming ‘chaos’ of architectural effects. It is what caused Herbert Muschamp to write that “Bilbao is a sanctuary of free association. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman. It’s a ship, an artichoke, the miracle of the rose” [2].

We, the ‘superficial architects’ of a younger generation, attack the clichés of type and form associated with ‘serious architecture’ just as Gehry has done, because cliché is what prevents the genesis of a sensation “just as opinion and convention prevent the genesis of thought.” [3] Sensations generate superficial, immediate lived experiences at the expense of the intellectual ‘depth’ associated with the conceptual or process driven work, but in so doing they break through clichés and produce fundamentally new architecture and with that, new feelings and new meanings.

—

1 Gilles Deleuze / Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation / Translated and with an introduction by Daniel W. Smith/ Afterword by Tom Conley / University of Minnesota Press / ISBN: 0-8166-4342-3 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4342-4

2 Herbert Muschamp / The Miracle In Bilbao / The New York Times / Published: Sunday, September 7, 1997

“After my first visit to the building, I went back to the hotel to write notes. It was early evening and starting to rain. I took a break to look out the window and saw a woman standing alone outside a bar across the street. She was wearing a long, white dress with matching white pumps, and she carried a pearlescent handbag. Was her date late? Had she been stood up?

UCLA Technology Seminar 2009
http://web.me.com/ksotamaa/Site/Emo.html

http://blip.tv/file/2804320

October
10/22 Kivi Sotamaa lectures at TEDx Helsinki in Finland

September
9/21 Kivi Sotamaa lectures at TAIK in Finland

August
Member of the International Architecture Award Jury [Award by Chicago Atheneum]

May
Kivi Sotamaa presentation at Pratt, New York
Sotamaa participates in Playful -exhibition at Meat Packing District New York

March
Kivi Sotamaa lectures at Texas AM Monday March 2nd.

February
Sirocco, a pavilion to be erected in Helsinki summer 2009 moves into manufacturing phase.

January
Kivi Sotamaa at the Angewandte Kunst reviews in Vienna. Studio Wolf Prix and Cross-Over Studio Francois Roche.