2 funny things about Herzog & de Meuron’s scheme for Helsinki

A few days ago I asked an architect if he knew anyone who had anything positive to say about the hotel scheme by Herzog & de Meuron for Katajanokka. The one that promises all this:

The hovering cross above is rotated to the grid of the historic city, bringing the strong features of the center to the peninsula. The different orientations of the two crosses create a dynamic presence: they anchor the building to its site and, at the same time, detach it from its immediate surroundings, linking it to the city center.

The area around the hotel is transformed by reclaiming back water. The proposed pool continues the necklace of basins where the city center meets the South Harbour. A new pier extends the walk from the Esplanadi deep into the harbour, allowing a spectacular view from the water back to the historic city.’ (from http://www.archicentral.com/helsinki-waterfront-hotel-finland-herzog-de-meuron-10763/)

So anyway, moving on from this gibberish and going back to my encounter earlier this month, this young architect thought for about a nano-second about my question and then said that he vaguely recalled that the person who introduced one of the architects (he no longer remembered if it was Herzog or De Meuron) to the audience when the scheme was announced, was quite polite and enthusiastic about their design.

So today I asked an extremely well-informed architect-planner close to retirement about his thoughts on the plans for the hotel.

He made a hand gesture by rubbing together his midlde and forefingers against his thumb. Money, he said, is everything. And then he fell backwards in the general direction of the table with the drinks on it.

But it’s hard to believe it’s just money, at least, that way life would be very uninteresting. So, you anthropologists out there, help us out: can anything ever be JUST about money?

This astonishing piece of architecture, the library in (the tiny northern town of) Kuhmo, by Nurmela-Raimoranta-Tasa can’t have been “just about money”. Nor this, the Church of the Holy Trinity (by designed by C.L. Engel himself). I mean, by the time your household accounting is not a hand-to-mouth affair presumably you make choices about what to spend on. No?

Constructive uses for courtyard space 1: Adult education

As a child I had a pretty straightforward idea of what a town or city looks and feels like. The Helsinki I knew was, like much of continental Europe’s towns, made up of so-called perimeter blocks or “kortteli” to Finnish speakers and plain old block to Americans. Several storeys high, walls rising out of the pavement (sidewalk) they’re built so that you barely notice one building change into the next as you pass. Across the road there’s often another one, of similar height and similar feel. This perimeter block on the left (“Peura” in Kruunuhaka) faces the sea so some of the buildings are only on one side of the street but it still has a key feature of a block, the middle.

That’s how it was planned – back in the 1870, starting with the barracks on Liisankatu for the use of the short-lived Finnish army that was established then.

Architects have always had to follow rules about heights, distances and other dimensions, which have been carefully calculated to allow light, air, movement (traffic) in sensible proportions. Besides following planning and building regulations, they’ve also had to make sure they design what a client wants. But having said that, even if a client wanted to obsctruct a sea view (for instance) both the municipal authorities and, on would hope, the elected politicians would be against it, however much money or glory the developer has. Still, it’s not exactly unknown for urban development to be mired in corruption.

Back to morphology. A perimeter block creates a semi-public space on the inside of the block. Their uses differ from place to place and time to time, season to season but even today they are important places for the city’s inhabitants. So we at JHJ thought it might be nice to take a peek into some of these and look at how they have been and are being used in Helsinki.

Below, buildings from the 1900s, 1920s and 1960s create a courtyard inside the block but also a potentially awkward change in height. So the “step” is actually made up of a building that houses garages (left) and an adult education classroom (right). Here in use on a late November Sunday.

Helsinki’s got rhythm

Protagonist: One of the things I’ve always loved about Helsinki, and that I missed when I lived in California and England, is umm, umm …

Narrator: Small, independent shops?

P: Of course not. San Francisco and Berkeley both have (at least had) fantastic specialist shops. And London too though it has its problems. No, even if they weren’t being systematically killed off, Helsinki’s shops could never flourish like that.

N: So what does Helsinki have that they don’t?

P: Rhythm.

N: Jazz!?

P: That too, but no I mean a rhythm of life. Autumn is different from winter is different from spring is different from the summer. Week-day is different from Sunday. December has always had a bit of a mad rhythm, party-wise and cooking-wise and shopping-wise, with fairy-lights and Father Christmases everywhere. Still, it kind of gives things a particular tempo this pre-Christmas madness, and let’s face it, there isn’t a place or a time which is more in need of a festival of lights even if it is just Kamppi’s efforts in in Christmas displays! And then January has its own tempo – especially if you’re one of the thousands who try to stay off alcohol for the whole month.

N: I assumed you’d be gutted by the Sunday opening thing but you seem to be saying the Christmas shopping rush is a good thing.

P: Yes and no. I’ve avoided going into town, certainly. All the shopping centres and Aleksanterinkatu have advertised “events” to draw people in this week-end. But if there had to be a month of shopping madness, laced with sickly-sweet drinks and spicy cakes, so be it. But you can’t keep it up all-year-round.

And I do love it when people are critical. Look, here’s a wonderfully to-the-point letter to the editor I found in Helsingin Sanomat on 19.11.

“Suomen kansalaisille on nyt järjestetty ohjelmaa, ettei kovalla työllä hankittu vapaa-aika kulu hukkaan. Nyt suomalaiset voivat viettää vapaa-aikansa kaupassa.”

Marketteihin pääsee vastedes kesät talvet myös sunnuntaisin, ja nimimerkki Eemeli ennustaa HS.fi:ssä, mitä asiasta seuraa.

N: Translation please.

P: “Citizens of Finland will now be offered activities to help them avoid wasting the free time they have earned through their hard work. Now Finns can spend all their free time shopping”

N: And lose the rhythm.

P: Have you noticed it’s not December yet?

Monopolies and wooden sky-scrapers: comments from a small country

Opinions are divided on the City’s plans to build 10 tower blocks in Pasila near where some SLOAP (space left over after planning) currently offers urban farming, petanque and antique railway enthusiasts space to flourish. The towers are said to promote dense and therefore sustainable urban living, Pasila is the right place for la-defense-like towers, Helsinki needs some pizzazz in its architecture – such are the views in favour. But then again such tall buildings won’t work at this latitude, nobody really likes high-rise living, quality of workmanship and building is unlikely to be good enough to keep the area pleasant (contra). Right, renderings from Cino Zucchi Architetti, more here.

Perhaps inspired by the news, one tongue-in-cheek (or not) letter to the editor in The Usual suggests that on Katajanokka instead of the gigantic ice-cube-like hotel designed by Swiss architects, Helsinki should erect a monument to Finland and its modern spirit: a wooden skyscraper. That would convey all the right messages.

Related, or not, to questions of urban form and ideas about concentration (people, power, buildings) elsewhere talk turns to a feature of Finnish society which even many social critics prefer to ignore, namely continuing support for corporatism and monopolies. On 18.11 in HS a Canadian journalist living in Helsinki, Brett Young, writes:

Suomi on pieni maa, jota hallitsevat dynaamiset monopolit. [Finland is a small country dominated by dynamic monopolies.]

and

[... a country that produces high-quality products for global markets and remains internationally competitive despite its small size and the semi-monopolies that force their way everywhere.]

In the same issue author Kjell Westö notes how often it’s commented on in Finland that in a small country power becomes concentrated, this is apparently totally natural. Secretly Finland is perhaps a little smaller than other countries with an equally small population, he muses, since power has the habit of concentrating just that little bit more here.

Does Helsinki’s Sanomat make Helsinki’s Public?

People I know boycott Helsingin Sanomat for all sorts of reasons. But it’s been the mouthpiece of the mainstream for 120 years, even back when Uusi Suomi came out in print and other papers were still going strong. Because it’s big it’s bound to be in the firing line, but its current editorial don’t mind. The flak comes indiscriminately from all directions. But HS certainly has power and one has to approach it with due caution (not least its infuriating habit of gratuitous if apparently well-meaning racial and ethnic stereotyping) but the writing is quality stuff.

Now, the anthropological point: it’s created a public, a Finnish public, or a Finnish-reading public. Benedict Anderson launched this idea in a book published in 1983, The Imagined Community. The argument is more or less that newspapers and novels (literacy) brought people together from widely dispersed areas and made them feel part of a larger whole than had ever previously been possible. By reading, people participated in an imagined or virtual community that went far beyond their village and even beyond the regional baron who taxed them. Writing also standardised the way people spoke and fostered homogeneity across space. Gradually this product of imagination, the nation, became hugely important even though individuals would never, ever be able to meet most of their compatriots. Of course, nations were also made concrete in things like Parliament buildings or National Banks (above right).

But who could deny that HS helped create Finland’s “imagined community” as it still does? Today this (right) popped onto our doormats, with invented headlines such as “Electric Light”, “Narinkka Square’s outlaws: do civic rights extend to Jews?” and other thoughts pertinent to 2009’s readership.

Back then to Helsinki. A homogenous town? Not in 1870 when 1/5 of its population spoke something other than Finnish as their first language.

So who Helsinki’s public might be has changed over the decades. In the 19^th century it included people who spoke Russian, Swedish, German and Yiddish, Roma and Tatar etc. Under Russification policies (late 19th century) Helsinki started to notice language more, and speaking Finnish, and to some extent Swedish, became a way to make a political point. Before and after independence, it seems Helsinki’s residents were comfortable with what today we’d call multiple identities. Speaking one language at work, another in bed, or praising God on a Friday, a Saturday or a Sunday. To be able to continue to do that in Finland, Jewish Finns fought alongside (and in command of) German soldiers in the second world war.

One can’t help thinking that a city’s cemeteries say something about its cosmpolitanism. Here, Russian orthodox graves in Hietaniemi.

But after the war cultural difference gradually became less apparent and less tolerated. Some say Finland became the most ethnically homogenous country in Europe after Albania. And yet, as singer and author M.A. Numminen has written, in the 1960s it went without saying in some Finnish circles that one spoke at least Swedish, English and German. Maybe French and Spanish too.

But undeniably sameness became a virtue in the post-war decades. With the IT revolution, publics fragmented again, geographic and virtual communities regrouped and Helsinki’s 2 Chinese restaurants became hundreds of “ethnic” eateries. Not everyone liked this. By the end of the twentieth century there were those, especially in rural areas, who felt that Helsinki had gone off on its own route, leaving the rest of the country behind. Some people even talked as if Helsinki were literally moving “into Europe”. As this week’s pilot strike demonstrated, it’s still up here on its old co-ordinates.

What could be changing is that tolerance will have to go back on the menu. Cultural difference and racism are routinely debated on the pages of HS. Another change is that the bulk of Helsinki’s population feels thoroughly at home here. In 1900 the city was cosmopolitan but it was tiny, and the group of people whose families went back generations was even tinier. In 2009 “barefoot” (born and raised here) Helsinkians are a bigger proportion of its residents and, I hope, for that more at home with strangers.

Fog – a photographer’s delight

Never have so many people with cameras, including those who really look like photographers, tripods and all, been seen dotted around the city’s watersides. Here, some photos taken around Munkkiniemi looking out onto various inlets of Laajalahti (Bredvik to anyone using Google maps and Broad Bay for anyone wanting literal translations).

Top, tram lines at the end of Laajalahdentie, above former presidential residence, Tamminiemi where Kekkonen once held court. Below a swan seen from the car park by Seurasaari and then the view from Munkkiniemenranta towards Kuusisaari.

Oh heck, just one more. Kalajastajatorppa – once Helsinki’s finest hotel.

Correction to post of 14th: December is shopping-month

Posting on 14.11 we asked “how many shopping days left before you-know-what?” Yesterday Parliament changed the rules as YLE reports. Starting from December, Finland will have all-week-openings now, including Sundays.

Apparently the vote divided all the parties. So being able to shop on Sundays is something that appeals to people of all classes, regions and political parties. Anecdotally speaking, parents of small children and teenagers like the idea of Sunday shopping. Those Sunday-workers, ministers and church wardens, are oddly opposed on the whole. Many are sad to lose the punctuation that a non-working and non-shopping day once a week gives to their humdrum existence. And independent shopkeepers are, not surprisingly, gutted, although they have managed to secure “rights” for owners of small outlets to remain closed on at least one day a week. Not for them the economies of scale that makes the cost of keeping a shop open worth it for the bottom line. Compare and contrast with the supposedly much-maligned large and mega-large retail units (e.g. Jumbo) whose representatives claim this will create a few hundred much needed jobs through the country.

Some numbers again, from the independent shops’ website. Since 1990 the number of small convenience/food shops has dropped from 5000 to about 2300. During the same period the number of hypermarkets has gone from 50 to 106. Sales in small shops (there is some official designation of what that is) have dropped from 41 to 24%.

It all matters for the town-scape though. What does a shop like this (below) do for a city? And what does it cost, and to whom, to run such shops and keep them open on Sunday?

And what do the newly so “popular” hypermarkets pictured below do for a city? For its economies? For the biosphere? Or, for that matter, for people who might like to run a shop but know they’d never be able to “compete” with this lot?

We are not neutral on this point.

The size thing

Is Helsinki cool because

a) it is so far north

b) people here read so much

or

c) it’s a capital city but it’s still “human” sized?

Well, all of the above, of course. And the way you can walk over a little bridge to Uunisaari and turn back to face Merikatu and take pics like this.

Feels like the last century made synomyms of “big” and “cool”. As in LA was cool, tall buildings were cool, gigantic brands were cool. Somehow in spite of that, comparatively little Helsinki gained a bit of a reputation as being cool somewhere around 1999. Retro and techno got a high-ish profile, ditto some freak Finnish quirks like mobile-phone-throwing competitions. No doubt the new consensus on Finland being a knowledge economy or having a National Innovation System (NIS) to rival the best global competitors sounded cool. Though as a “system” the NIS-thing was rather uncool and typically Finnish in a political sense: thoroughly organised, state-sanctioned, virtually monopolistic but with an entrepreneurial and individualistic tone, etc. etc.

Around its edges though, the weirdness and the freakishness flourished, as did the cosmopolitanism. The business-opportunities and jobs (not forgetting the Finnish girlfriends and spouses and occasional boyfriends) brought more non-Finns into the city. Cool! Visitors and residents alike, they agree with older locals, on the whole, that Helsinki’s small size is a fabulous asset. Year after year people comment on the fabulous combination of “small” and “capital”.

P.S. for urban history geeks, films about Helsinki at Bio Rex, Lasipalatsi, this Sunday, 1 euro each.

P.P.S. for planning geeks: as the international fashion for BIG continues, and as the EU’s “spatial planning” policies are put into practice around its capital cities so do the pressures to turn the Helsinki region into something better and bigger. To manage this process we now have a Strategic Spatial Plan (pdf from the link on the right). Er, when will someone really justify the claim that “growth” and “bigger” is actually better?

Stretchy space and brittle labour relations

When visitors arrive in Helsinki these days they’re most likely to arrive by air. They land at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. Very near is Helsingin Pitäjän Kirkonkylä, an idyllic village-scape (sorry about the word, suggestions for alternatives very welcome), with a church so pretty and atmospheric, not to mention old that it’s one of the metropolitan region’s favourite wedding venues. But passengers on their way into Helsinki city centre might see something like this.

(Photo by Esko Lius on flickr).

Or like this.

Perhaps this is why Helsinki’s mayor (Ylipormestari) Jussi Pajunen has, as reported in Monday’s Helsingin Sanomat, been rather forthright in what he thinks of this scene. It’s the shopping centre Jumbo, where he was taken on his tour of Vantaa, the “third” of the municipalities that make up Helsinki’s metropolitan area (Espoo is number 2).

Why? Because there has been a lot of talk of combining Helsinki and Vantaa recently and people are rightly interested in what the movers and shakers of urban politics think. Pajunen does seem to like monumental buildings/architecture when it’s in Helsinki’s city centre, but he definitely doesn’t like Jumbo and HS implies that he doesn’t think much of the rest of Vantaa either. All planned and built for cars, plastic christmas trees and people who enjoy fake swimming places. Yeuch!

Vantaa politicians and many others have rushed to condemn his judgemental and snobbish comments, not to mention his understanding of municipal finance. Millions, he had reportedly said, would be saved by adding Vantaa to Helsinki (as in, unifying Helsinki and Vantaa will really mean H:ki swallowing up Vantaa). Others are unclear as to where, exactly, and how, exactly, these savings would be made. But Pajunen isn’t exactly the first municipal politician to confuse running cities with running a business. On which topic, more later. Maybe.

Down the road from the offending Jumbo Finnair pilots are on strike less over money than over labour conditions or relations. It sounds quite complicated but there seems to be little sympathy for the striking pilots. On his blog Ppusa writes that he would like to see them reach an agreement so the pilots could all go back to work soon. “Sack them all”, screamed an economics professor in Uusi Suomi.

Well, it’s true that Finland and particularly its “economy” are totally dependent these days on air travel. Increasing speed is what made the world small and brought Helsinki “close” to London, after all. And what made that part of Vantaa the eyesore that it is today. And worsened carbon emmissions. It IS all a bit complicated.

In the Pink – from Kiasma

Even in the clutches of approaching winter, the art scene continues to be in rude health. And as we know, international superstars are also welcome in this city. The Picasso show at the late-19th-century Ateneum art gallery seems to keep up a steady influx of visitors. Up the hill in Steven Holl’s late-20th-century Kiasma the Ars Fennica competition is showcasing Finnish angst and the Swiss Pipilotti Rist is offering video-art as elixir.

Her works are life-affirming if sometimes disturbing giant videos projected onto walls and ceilings, a hit with gallery visitors of all ages. The whole is stamped with shades of pink, allowing a rare chance to look out through the gallery windows towards the west to see the Sibelius Academy (built as Konservatorio in 1931, designed by Eino Forsman) with the Parliament to its right (also 1931, Johan Sigfrid Siren), all in PINK.

The sun also shone briefly on the building site of the Music Building, to the north of Kiasma. This photo shows the charred remains of the old railway warehouses which so many Helsinki-residents fought to keep. The story is told in many places, with many inflections. Journalist Kimmo Oksanen published his version having followed events unfold from his work-place, the glass-and-steel building to the east of Kiasma, Sanomatalo (featured previously on this blog).

But back to the aesthetic, leaving the exhibition spaces and heading for the exit (south) through Holl’s chalky atrium treat is a treat in itself.