Ideapark Seinäjoki invites customers from all over Finland

Developer: Koy Seinäjoen Ideapark
Constructor: Lehto Tilat Oy
Ventilation for a shopping centre and restaurant premises: ETS NORD

Ideapark Seinäjoki invites customers from all over Finland

Ideapark Seinäjoki was built during one and a half years in Seinäjoki, Finland, in 2018-2019. It was a challenging project and with its 65 million euro contract it was one of the largest construction projects of the Lehto Group.  The construction schedule was very tight, about a year and a half and therefore the designing and building had to be done partially at the same time. There were 100 – 400 professionals from Lehto on site depending on the situation. In all, Ideapark Seinäjoki includes approximately 7 hectares of shopping space and approx. 100 shops. There is also a day-care centre, a gym and other well-being services.

Project Manager Toni Aatsinki from Lehto Tilat Oy is happy with the result.  – The project went just like planned and we were able to stay in schedule.  We were very happy with ETS NORD’s solutions and the ventilation system has operated just like it should, he says.

Long-term and user-oriented building services

ETS NORD participated in creating ventilation for Ideapark Seinäjoki and supplied nearly all commercial kitchen canopies for the shopping mall. The ventilation need for Ideapark is defined based on the utilization degree. The energy consumption of ventilation, heating and cooling is optimised in large premises by utilizing the recirculated air when the shops are closed. This way, you can also recover the condensation heat energy from refrigerators.

Finnish Recair air handling units at Ideapark Seinäjoki come in different sizes: from the size of a small house, 4×10 metre modular machines to smaller compact machines. For building services, the effects of the shopping centre’s life cycle calculations have been considered and the operating costs of the machinery have been optimized. To guarantee undisturbed operation, the dimensioning of the machines aims at solutions where the future maintenance needs are very minor, and they can be anticipated.

To guarantee a good indoor air quality in premises where there are 25 different cafeterias and restaurants besides regular stores, requires some magic tricks.  ETS NORD participated in dimensioning the canopies for Ideapark. – There were all sorts of ventilation challenges. The requirements of a cafeteria are totally different from those of a Chinese restaurant – and you must be able to guarantee a good quality indoor air in both. Additionally, there are Citymarket’s bakery and smokery in the same building.  All premises have their special features depending on the size of the premises, what it is used for and how, says Product Manager Marcus Hintze.

It is clear that ventilation needs to work well. When designing ETS NORD’s canopies, we have also considered the end users, restaurant and cafeteria workers. – The users’ experience is important to us, says Hintze. – They deal with our canopies daily, and therefore it is important that it is easy to breathe at the workplace, and the canopies are easy to clean and maintain. They also look good, says Hintze.

If there would be changes in Ideapark’s restaurant premises, they would be easy to implement thanks to the modular structure of ETS NORD’s canopies. – Even if a cafeteria was replaced by a kebab restaurant, it means adding only one additional module to the canopy, says Hintze.