Sami Rintala

Sami Rintala (born 1969) is an architect and an artist, with a long merit list after finishing his architect studies in Helsinki Finland 1999. He established architect office Casagrande & Rintala 1998, which produced a series of acknowledged architectural installations around the world during the next five years until 2003. These works combine architecture with critical thinking of society, nature and the real tasks of an architect, all within a cross-over art field using space, light, materials and human body as tools of expression.

Rintala had his first wider recognition in 1999 with the project Land(e)scape: Three abandoned wooden barns were raised on 10 meter high legs to follow their farmers to the cities as a critical comment on the deserting process of the countryside. In Venice Biennale 2000 Sixty Minute Man was realized; A ship sailed to Arsenal with a garden inside. The park was planted on sixty minutes of human waste from the city of Venice, becoming together with the old boat a three dimensional collage of society waste commenting on the Biennale theme ‘ less aesthetics, more ethics’.

In 2008, Rintala started a new architect office with Icelandic architect Dagur Eggertsson, called Rintala Eggertsson Architects. The office is based in Oslo, South Norway and Bodø, North Norway.
Important part of Rintala’s work is teaching and lecturing in various art and architecture universities. Teaching takes place usually in form of workshops where the students often are challenged to participate the shaping of human environment on a realistic 1:1 situation.

Sami Rintala’s work is based on narrative and conceptualism. Resulting work is a layered interpretation of the physical, mental and poetic resources of the site