The Kivik Art Centre in Sweden has a rather unusual café:
Image: Bengt Oberger, CC BY 3.0
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Image: Gerry Johansson
Image: Gerry Johansson
That’s a Venturo House, a prefabricated home designed in 1971 by the pioneering Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. Suuronen intended it to be a mass-produced weekend cottage that would be easy for the manufacturer to ship and reassemble. Here’s some shots from the original sales brochure:
“The Venturo is a modular, easily transportable building system, having excellent insulation, low weight and designed for minimum assembly on site. It is built of high quality materials in order to ensure maximum weathering properties for use in arctic as well as tropical climates and is almost maintenance free. Being of low weight and factory reassembled, the Venturo means very low erection and foundation costs, where heavy equipment can be avoided.”
“The roof and corner sections are large double skin mouldings of fiberglass with off-white gel-coated exterior surface as standard, with a 2″ polyurethane foam insulation. The floor is an insulated composite beam construction of marine grade plywood and wood with all fascia parts showing. covered with fiberglass moldings. The facades, available as standard in several colors and designs, consist of prefabricated anodized aluminum framing with insulated prepainted aluminum exterior panels in various attractive colors. Glazing may be either insulated glass or single or double sheet glazing.”
Suuronen designed the parts to fit onto a trailer for delivery, broken down as follows:
So sections “a” and “b” are essentially the endcaps, and each has a footprint of 2.3m x 6.9m (roughly 7.5′ x 23′). Each endcap would fit on a trailer, and one would be shipped with the bathroom and kitchenette inside, the other with the “c” sections inside. On site, the endcaps are connected by the “c” sections (and if the customer wanted a longer building, they could order extra “c” sections). With the whole thing assembled, it offered 45 sq. m. (509 sq. ft.) of space, with an interior ceiling height of 2.4m (roughly 8′).
As it turns out, some of the early buyers were gas stations and café owners. Here’s a Venturo that was added to a BP gas station:
Image: Espoo City Museum
This one was used to expand a café:
Image: Aarne Mikonsaari, CC BY-SA 4.0
Image: Aarne Mikonsaari, CC BY-SA 4.0
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
Image: Aarne Mikonsaari, CC BY-SA 4.0
This one—which looks like it had a bunch of extra “c” sections added—was used as a shop:
Image: Matthäus Gehägeberg, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Venturo design was also licensed to some 23 companies in different countries around the world. This one in Spain is still in great shape, and serves as the Maritime Rescue headquarters of the Red Cross in Alicante:
Image: Mónica Mateo García / Carlos Pérez-Carramiñana
Here’s an abandoned one in Taiwan:
Image: Johan Jönsson (Julle), CC BY-SA 4.0
There was at least one resort area in Taiwan that had a bunch of Venturos:
And here’s one spotted in Osaka, Japan:
As for the original Finnish manufacturer, Oy Polykem Ab, they only made 19 units before the oil crisis of 1973 put paid to the venture(o).
Source: core77