The harbour and industrial area of Sörnäinen, now Kalasatama (‘fish harbour’), began to be built in 1825, when the building by-laws of Helsinki ordered factories and workshops to be located on the outskirts of the city because of fire risk. Even a harbour railway was built there two years after the first railway in Finland, running between Helsinki and Hämeenlinna, started operation (1862). As the harbour extended, many nearby islands were joined to the mainland. The Suvilahti power plant designed by Selim A. Lindqvist became a permanent landmark of the area. In the 1970s, two other power plants replaced its function, and Suvilahti has since developed into a hub of urban culture. When the harbour operations were moved to Vuosaari, the Kalasatama area was vacated for residential use. In addition to Suvilahti, historical layers are found in the nearby Teurastamo (‘slaughterhouse’) area: the buildings dating back to the 1930s originally housed the slaughter service of the city of Helsinki but now contain a centre of gritty urban and culinary culture.
The design of REDI, the Kalasatama Centre, is based on the winning entry of a design-build competition organised in 2010. Once fully completed, the centre will comprise a service centre and a tower composition of eight high-rise buildings.
The service and entertainment centre REDI, that opened in September 2018, is a hub of traffic. The four-storey service centre is pierced by the metro and the six-lane eastward thoroughfare, Itäväylä. It is also accessible by tram, bus and bicycle. It provides parking racks for several thousand bicycles, and a cycleway running along Itäväylä connects the downtown cycleway network to eastern Helsinki. During construction, metro traffic was suspended for only a few days, when the metro bridge was jacked up to a new place because of the arrangements of quarrying 700,000 cubic metres of rock.
The first floor below ground houses supermarkets and a maintenance yard. Beneath these there is a two-storey parking facility and waste collection station for the whole district, and even deeper down, a parking garage in a cave. Besides shopping opportunities, REDI offers health, wellness and entertainment services. On top of the service centre and traffic routes, at the foot of the residential towers, there is a deck park Bryga open to all, which is connected to the Kalasatamanpuisto park, and courtyard decks for the use of the inhabitants. The Kalasatamankatu street, covered walkway on the ground level, divides the centre into two large city blocks, which are connected together by bridges on the upper floors.
The Bryga park on the roof of REDI is open to all from eight a.m. to eight p.m. The design is creating high-quality, modern landscape architecture with rainwater motifs and compositions of archipelago plants. The metro and the Itäväylä thoroughfare are covered through the whole length of the centre for reasons of safety and noise and particle abatement.
In the future, the Kalasatama Centre will be the home of thousands of Helsinkians. The tower composition will be not only the highest in Finland but also a tower block ensemble of a kind that is rare in the world. To those who approach from the east, the towers will present themselves as the white gate of the capital of Finland. The residential towers will have 24–37 storeys and the highest one will rise up to 136 metres.
The first of the towers, the 35-storey Majakka, (the first skyscraper and the tallest residential building in Finland), was completed in 2019. It comprises 282 apartments. The 32-storey Loisto was completed in September 2021 and has 249 apartments. Lumo One, with its 31 storeys, is the tallest rental building in Finland, completed in summer 2022, with 291 rental apartments. Visio, which also includes rental apartments, was completed in 2023. The building has 24 floors with 240 apartments, as well as a day care centre with a playground on the fifth floor, the same level as the Bryga rooftop park. The 26-storey Horisontti was completed in 2025. It is functionally different from the other towers in that it includes offices as well as a public terrace restaurant on the 24th floor.
The roof terraces, meant to be used by the residents, are connected to rentable party spaces and a sauna. The floors above the terrace level contain large penthouse flats. The average number of flats per tower is 250 and the total number in the whole centre will be 2,000.
Helin & Co Architects are also responsible for the interior appearance and shopfront design of the shopping mall as well as tenant adaptations and, for instance, the architectural design of the free-fall simulator, 7D cinema and climbing facility of the centre. Art will be present in the service centre, extending also to the lobbies of the residential towers, the artists including H. C. Berg, Marco Casagrande, EGS, Pentti Kukkonen, Inni Pärnänen, Silja Rantanen, Heini Riitahuhta, Tapio Rosenius/LDC and Maanlumo Landscape Architects with Huttunen–Lipasti–Pakkanen Architects.
A health and wellness centre commissioned by the City of Helsinki and designed by Helin & Co Architects has been built on a site neighbouring the Kalasatama Centre. It serves the inhabitants of the whole Kalasatama area
Further information on the history of the islands of Helsinki in Tikkanen Sallamaria, Paratiisit ja niiden varjot, on the web page Ympäristöhistoria.