Who Is Esa Ruskeepää and What Does He Teach?

Updated

Esa Ruskeepää is a Helsinki-based architect who teaches building design at Aalto University, with a focus on public architecture. His website, era.fi, is a personal professional site that collects his academic work, competition entries, public talks, and advisory roles. If you are looking for his teaching focus, his current projects, or his public writing and lectures, that site is the primary source.

Professional profile

Dimension Detail
Base Helsinki, Finland
Practice Architecture
Academic role Teaches building design at Aalto University
Teaching focus Public architecture
Site era.fi (personal site, published under his name)

The site itself carries no pricing or service listings, so it functions as a record of work and activity rather than a commercial practice page.

What he teaches

His stated teaching area is building design, with public architecture as the focus. That means the subject matter centers on buildings and spaces intended for public use and civic life, rather than private residential work alone. The site does not publish a course list, syllabus, or admission details, so for specifics on courses, studios, or supervision you would need Aalto University's own programme pages.

Current and recent activity

The site logs dated entries that show how his academic, professional, and public-facing work connect:

  • September 2026 — A talk titled "Your Time Is Being Stolen" at BTCHEL, the Nordic Bitcoin conference, in Helsinki, Finland, on September 25–26, 2026.
  • May 2026 — Presentation of a new paper, "Money's Worth," at the 6th Alvar Aalto Researchers' Network Seminar in Jyväskylä, Finland, on May 6–7, 2026. The paper examines Alvar Aalto's Rautatalo office building in Helsinki (1955) and how inflation has affected construction quality. The paper is available for download via alvaraalto.fi.
  • February 2026 — Supercell, the Finnish game development company, launched a two-stage invited architectural competition for a new headquarters in Helsinki. Ruskeepää is advising Supercell on the competition and serves as secretary of the jury.
  • September 2025 — A proposal for a new museum of architecture and design in Helsinki, with competition boards available for download.
  • August 2025 — A keynote, "How Fiat Ruins Architecture (and Everything Else)," at BTCHEL, described as the first large-scale Bitcoin conference in the Nordics, held in Helsinki on August 15–16, 2025.
  • March 2025 — Commissioned to prepare a study for a zoning plan in Porvoo, Finland, that would enable construction of a major new regional health centre, in collaboration with the City of Porvoo, local healthcare authorities, and Helsinki University Hospital.

How to use the site

If your interest is his thinking rather than his biography, the dated entries are the useful part: they link out to conference pages, downloadable papers, and competition boards. Two items are directly downloadable — the "Money's Worth" paper and the museum competition boards — which makes them the most concrete starting points. For teaching enquiries, the site is not the right channel; Aalto University is.

What the site does not tell you

There is no published information on fees, availability for commissions, course enrolment, or contact preferences. Nothing on the page indicates free access to services, and no pricing signals appear at all. Treat era.fi as a professional record, and route practical questions to the institutions named in the entries.