PAP Group · · Customer story · Fire alarm systems · 5 min read
The impressive towers of Kalasatama
A shopping centre and five striking tower blocks have risen in Kalasatama, Helsinki, in recent years. PAP has helped deliver fire safety for all of them. In this article, SRV describes how the tower projects have gone.
Kalasatama is one of the most attractive areas in eastern Helsinki. Construction of the area began in 2009, and today Kalasatama combines housing, workplaces, services and transport links into a compact, well-functioning whole. The area currently has 11,000 residents, and around 13,000 people work in its companies.
The Kalasatama towers are the largest project in the history of the construction company SRV. Construction of the complex began with the Redi shopping centre, completed in 2018, and five tower blocks have been completed since then. In the future, the complex will be complemented by three more towers. Four of the tower blocks are designed as residential buildings, and the most recent, the Horisontti tower completed in 2025, is an office building.
The special features of high-rise construction
High-rise projects come with challenges all of their own. Sampo Hirvelä, SRV’s project manager for building services, says that two things stand out above all others. “On high-rise sites, occupational safety needs very special attention. A lot of the work is done in safety harnesses, which makes it more demanding. Tools as well as installation and packaging materials must be carefully secured. Weather conditions also have to be taken into account, because at height the wind adds its own extra challenge to the work. On the towers, cranes were not used when wind gusts exceeded 10 m/s.”
The second challenge relates to logistics. “Moving goods and people from one place to another plays a major role in these projects, and it has to work as efficiently as possible. Lifts are key here. In the towers, in addition to construction hoists, we also used lifts that remain in the towers. Some of them were dedicated to logistics and some to moving people. The aim was to keep the time spent getting around to a minimum.”
The third challenge is scheduling the work stages. “In the tower projects, our aim was to get the building services work started as early as possible. That is why temporary protective walls were installed on the floor slabs before the façades were finished, so that snow and wind could be kept out. This allowed us to start installing building services as early as the slab stage.”
For SRV, building high-rise properties is routine, and the challenges have not slowed down progress on the tower projects. “Before Kalasatama, we had built other tall buildings, such as the Torni hotel in Tampere. We know how projects like this need to be planned and carried out.”
Horisontti is Finland’s tallest office building
The most recent of the Kalasatama towers to be completed is the Horisontti office building. Construction started in spring 2023 and was completed on schedule in April 2025. Horisontti has 26 storeys and 11,500 square metres of lettable floor area. When it was completed, it was the tallest office building in Finland. As a project, Horisontti was also a major employer. “In projects like this, the interior finishing stage is always the busiest phase. The work is then carried out in chronological order, and everything has to go according to plan so that the next stages can start on schedule. At its peak, well over 100 people a day were working on site during the interior finishing stage.”
A large team of professionals also built Horisontti’s fire safety. As SRV’s partners for this part of the project, in addition to PAP Group, there were an electrical designer, a fire safety engineer, an electrical contractor, and sprinkler, lift and automation contractors.
Fire safety in order, as planned and on schedule
The commissioning and testing of fire safety systems always fall at the very end of a project. Horisontti’s fire safety was completed on schedule and without any notable surprises. “The contract went very well. We did not face any major challenges, and the smaller ones were resolved quickly in cooperation between SRV, the fire consultant, the electrical contractor and PAP.”
A key factor in the smooth progress of this stage was that a lot of attention had been paid to Horisontti’s fire safety solutions already at the design stage. “From the outset, we wanted to make sure the building would be adaptable to changes. This was one reason why hardly any changes to the fire safety systems were needed at the installation and commissioning stage. It was very wise to spend a lot of time thinking about this while the building was being designed.”
Verifying that the fire safety systems installed in the building work culminates in the testing stage. “The tests also went really well. We tested the operation of all fire control functions and carried out a blackout test, which simulated a power cut and tested how the systems work when the normal mains supply is lost.”
PAP knew what they were doing
According to Sampo Hirvelä, cooperation with PAP on the Kalasatama Horisontti tower project has gone flawlessly. “PAP has been building fire safety in Kalasatama ever since the Redi shopping centre. They knew what kind of fire alarm systems had originally been installed in the shopping centre, and they also understood how to integrate them with the towers’ fire safety systems. This was extremely helpful to us at the design stage of the towers.”
Exactly the same fire safety requirements apply to high-rise buildings as everywhere else. “The most important thing is that the systems work reliably in all situations. In the Kalasatama towers, everything has worked as it should in the tests, and that is why we are very satisfied with the result.”
Article photo: Mikko Ala-Peijari / PhotoCom Oy
