Skewed priorities in New York and Helsinki

“The child who first experienced public space in the plaza of a Spanish town will have a sense of the public realm as a far more natural part of life than the child who grew up in Los Angeles, for whom public space was little more than a tiny playground often reached by car rather than foot, and for whom the most significant experience of being in public consisted of riding in a closed car along the freeway”.

From Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters.

And the child who experienced it in Helsinki? Quite varied, I’d say. Streets, small parks, bigger parks, sports fields, the almost endless shoreline, the markets, the Senate Square …

On which note Arkadia Books are hosting a talk on its architecture – about its past, that is, the heritage, the shared treasure that the city has given over to Helsingin Leijona to manage. Manage, it seems, in the terms of the new-ish settlement of urban and therefore architectural decision-making, which equals maximising the revenue-raising potential of a piece of land.

Another New York-based critic, Michael Sorkin wrote a couple of decades ago about how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) shaped Manhattan’s Columbus Circle.

“… the MTA’s priorities are drastically skewed. In its Request for Proposals, the MTA set out its criteria for selection which, like those of any other developer, identify the commonweal totally with the bottom line. ‘The Sponsor’, reads the document, ‘intends to sell the Site to the applicant whose proposal most successfully meets the Sponsor’s goals, particularly the goal of realizing the highest financial return from the sale’”.

From Michael Sorkin’s Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings

Applicants in places like the “empire centre” of Helsinki are, of course, not allowed to tear down the old (as New York did), they can only “develop” it. But the sponsors – the city – have obviously worked out the bit about the bottom line and seem to think it’s OK for urban goverment to become a discussion about the best way to make money.

As for the other bit, kids in New York presumably identify public space with whatever’s left between higher and higher skyscrapers or whatever it is the the privately and expensively reproduced offspring of the mega-super-rich think is public space.

And in Helsinki? Will its children soon associate public space overwhelmingly with outdoor-like drinking spaces? We ponder this as we contemplate the mania for putting “terassis” anywhere where people might pass and be encouraged to sit down for a cappuccino, a beer or a glass of bubbly. We say outdoor-like since we expect the world to end before climate change makes outdoor drinking a year-round pastime in any part of Finland.

The first pic below is real – for a few months of the year, on Esplanadi, a site facing almost due south, outdoor drinking is about as pleasant as it gets (if only they could reduce the traffic). The second terassi is, well, useful to smokers. The third is probably a future terassi, part of the territory now handed over to be upgraded by Helsingin Leijona. It could become a small jewel for a small number of people for a small duration in the year. Or it could get covered in glass at a ridiculous cost and/or end up hosting a star*ucks, or something similar. But it will, by some weird calculus of architectural value reckoning combined with the impossibility of ever saying bad things about urban “regeneration”, inevitably be deemed a success.

What’s a city without shops?

The words kauppa (shop, commerce, market) and kaupunki (town, city) are of course related. Towns grew up around commerce. Then they took shape, at least in this part of Europe, very much around their shops, in Finland usually built into the stone foundations of a building, hence known affectionately as kivijalkakauppa (stone-footed shop [we invented that, by the way, hee hee]).

So now they’re in trouble, according to Helsingin Sanomat. And you’d exepct them to be. Not just because of the recession or, as so may writers and decision makers seem to make us want to believe, because we “vote with our feet/wallet” and buy cheaper elsewhere or online. Actually, they’re going because it’s so unbelievably difficult to compete against the darling of the Helsinki decision makers: BIG.

Shopping centres/malls tend to prefer to give “representation” to big brand names rather than support small traders, even if they do make a profit. (Which is an odd way of expressing it, since the word “representation” in connection with urban government used to have something to do with democracy, as in people electing a few well-informed individuals to represent them to the rest. So it goes in our topsy-turvy political world.)

Then there’s the other aspect of this thing. That you (er, the city) help build enornmous amounts of floorspace like in Kamppi, where only the big chains will be able to operate (actually, you probably stitch up a deal before hand, working together, after all, with the “stakeholders”), and you put it, for good measure, where a sizeable proportion of the public HAS to walk past (twice?) every day – the bus station. (“Convenience store” thus defined from the point of view of the commuter, the lynchpin, one supposes, of the innovation economy and who thus has to be managed with care, i.e. offered services that make work-ife easy.)

And if you forget something you were going to get from here – or if you aren’t actually a commuter after all – you might be able to get it somewhere like here. This particular example of shameful greater Helsinki retail architecture is from Mankkaa.

Of course, you can just choose to love the places that, for a short time at least, were “Finland’s/Europe’s/the world’s” largest shopping centre (Itäkeskus, below).

Which wouldn’t be a problem (maybe) for cities if it weren’t for the impact on the street. Hmm, on which note, maybe urban planners and designers should just get rid of the street altogether. As cars recede into history (as they surely won’t. Ed.) and as people retreat into anxious privacy anyway, maybe cities can grow to look like something totally different from what we’ve got used to living in and loving over the last 100 to 200 years.

Funny thing though. In Helsinki, flats located in the old fashioned urban street and particularly the street near the shops, have the biggest price tags – decade after decade (as published in this pdf by City of Helsinki Urban Facts).

“Lockering” – or, difference ain’t what it used to be

Plucked from a lovely book by Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: a vocabulary of modern architecture, here is a quotation from Gottfried Sempe from 1861: it was “the enclosure of space, not the construction of huts, that was the first architectural act”.

And stumbling on this again gave me the excuse I’d been waiting for to use these photos of lockers from various Helsinki libraries for weeks.

What better to symbolise the Finnish word for knee-jerk compartmentalisation, labelling, or prejudicial stereotyping, i.e. “lokeroida” (or, “to locker”)?

Lockers are practical for temporary storage, of bags and coats like here. And Finns are rather self-conscious and proud of their practical streak. The picture of lockers inside a locker (top) was photographed at the Art History Library of Helsinki University.

Taking a broad interpretation of “lockering” it could be taken to refer to all kinds of exercises in classification. For instance, the history of architecture is substantially about recognising styles, classes or categories. It may sound boring or worse, but the impulse to categorise buildings, by style or period, is extremely understandable given the fundamental human need to organise information of any kind.

Classifying buildings or art is not only informative, it’s fun and it makes living amongst the products of architecture so much more interesting.

But people? On the whole my generation (1960s-born), both in Finland and in England, were taught that there was something backward and untoward about classifying people. “Ei ihmisiä saa lokeroida” wasn’t an injunction to stop you from shoving people inside lockers (a possibility that might well have presented itself to me given that Hansel and Gretel had managed to get their grandmother into an oven). It was part of the social ethic of the times. We should not be quick to judge, even if, or particularly if, someone initially seemed “different”.

When I was a kid, we made fun of the idea of “different” youth, not that we were ever really clear about what it meant. Someone was different if they were odd, had unfashionable clothes or didn’t have many friends. In some cases it meant psychologically damaged perhaps, or not straight. 

Today, and particularly when talking of cities, difference makes you think about “foreigners” and “outsiders”. It used to be that globalisation brought with it sameness – coca cola and macdonalds everywhere. Well, it does. But I blame it also for an unhealthy preoccupation with difference.

Labelling people has a long history, and a varied one. Genocidaltendencies like territorial impulses do exist, but that’s not to say they are “human nature”.

I grew up believing that to recognise multiple identities and appreciate the complexity of social life was something to be valued and encouraged, to remember that “insiders” and “outsiders” were always defined in relation to some moving target. But it seems it’s become OK to be lazy about this, and more and more it’s acceptable (it seems) not just to differentiate people but to justify allocating some people poorer resources than others. Whether you call it race, culture or ethnicity, if it’s an excuse to treat someone differently, it jars with the principles I grew up with.

And Sempe? Apparently, in Helsinki those deemed “different” are gradually concentrating in particular places. Sure, cities have long histories of concentrations of particular people in particular neighbourhoods. But what’s it going to be when the separation occurs in this century, in a country that prides itself on homogeneity! Academics like the Helsinki university geographer Harry Schulman, are discussing these matters but on the whole, talking of difference in its 21st-century, global flows-of-people mode, is a very fraught excercise in Finland.

Rather than lockering, Helsinki would seem to need reminding of some facts. Like that only 41% of Helsinki’s population are born here. Or that 100 years ago a substantial majority was multilingual. Or that without “exotic” surnames, Helsinki’s Yellow Pages would be a strong contendor for the shortest book in the world-prize.

The City DOES create the environment: skating is back!

Rarity creates newsworthiness. That might explain why Helsingin Sanomat recently reported something previously unremarkable.

First it reported that school kids ski, and today (26.2) it wrote that there is now skating on natural ice in Helsinki. Well, it might shock those with longish memories, but it’s a change from last year when it was necessary to pay for this fun (right). This year everyone is asking about where to rent or buy winter sports equipment. Sportti-divari the second-hand shop comes to mind.

So what happens/used to happen, to allow Helsinki residents indulge in this delightful pastime?

Well, if it’s on the sea, like it is here in Laajalahti seen from Munkkiniemi, you can create a long (2km) track, particularly designed for tour skating (special skates, but you can easily go on figure or ice-hockey skates too). Here it was in the process of being made.

If you’re talking skating on dry (as it were) land, first the pitch (English for kenttä, anyone?) gets smoothed over.

Then the chaps from the city, those guys who do actually produce the environment (viz. the last post) come with their hoses …

… and wait for nature to do its thing.

Then you go out and enjoy!

What kind of environment would you create? 2nd ed.

Preface:

Our most devoted reader pointed out that this post was a bit challenging. What is it about?  To help clarify, JHJ ventured out into the internet and found … that the thing that inspired it, the administration responsible for environmental services in Helsinki (the spur for the post) is all changing. What for decades was just an office responsible for the city’s streets and parks and paid for by taxes, has now been reorganised and rebranded. As of the beginning of this year it’s part of STARA [STAdin RAkentamispalvelu]. Finnish and Swedish speakers are likely to cringe at this use of old-fashined Helsinki slang, but then again you could say it’s a cute use of a cute adoption/adaptation of the English word ’star’. Anyway, the changes give us a good excuse to post on the topic of place-branding in a later post. THIS one, really is about the idea of the environment in a city.

Post:

Here’s an image that nicely illustrates an idea that we here at JHJ just can’t get our heads around. This truck – looks like it’s used for street sweeping – is labelled “environmental production” and carries Helsinki’s municipal logo. The environment is produced? By city government? (But then again, to one born when the internet was just another piece of clunky military technology, Kekkonen was a king and Ronald Reagan an actor, the idea of environmental production by anyone is a bit of a challenge.)

It used to be that the environment just was. It was nature – our surroundings, our foundations, the primal stuff that set the conditions for all the other stuff.

Well, then came climate change, we guess, making the idea that anything was stable and beyond human manipulation seem rather old-fashioned.

This year, we are told by trusty informants via the internet (another human-made environment) that Helsinki is enjoying a truly wonderful real winter with proper freezes and white snow. So much better than the dark grey that depresses eveveryone in snowless Helsinki winters, the kind small kids had already got used to.

What makes those dark days bearable for some is the thought of spring to come. (And spring in Finland is a pretty flexible term – seems anything in that interminable stretch from Christmas to the summer holidays in June can qualify).

For us at JHJ what makes a bad winter bearable and a good winter potentially thrilling is the environment. And yes, it includes buildings, most certainly it does.

Which is saying something for generations of Finnish planners, architects and speculative builders. In the early 20th century when the place was engulfed in a frenzy of creative destruction (see Signe Brander, again), nobody had a blueprint of what the city as a whole would look like, but together these built environment experts produced a rather fine and special place, a human town with a mix of old and new, of ordinary and weird, built for the people who would live there.

Can they keep it up?

Trying to find answers there, I think sometimes about the Georgian parts of London (and the early Victorian that pretty much copies its ancestor e.g. around Eaton Square, below). Speculative the lot – no real master plan here, though much co-ordinating, engineering and profiteering, of course. The best of it now selling for astronomical sums but also an enjoyable urban environment for those of us who can’t afford to live in them.

But hey, what use is a historical example anyway, and a foreign one at that.

Architects talk funny

Protagonist: Here, listen to this: “Our environment is complex enough. I have always tried to battle against chaos”. That was Dieter Rams, you know, designer on show in London’s Design Museum. But why doesn’t that message get through? There’s enough iconic, blobby buildings already, messing up our skylines and costing the earth.

Narrator: You are more the old “less is more” school I can see that.

P: Well, when what we’re talking about is the size of that monstrous tower in Dubai I certainly am. You know that PoMo mantra, “less is a bore”, I so wish it had never been said.

N: Yeah, that was Venturi.

P: Correct. Still, it’s worth remembering that a lot of architects say wonderful things, all cuddly and humanist and full of social justice, and then they build whatever the highest-paying customer wants anyway. That side of architecture is kind of covered by this other slogan I heard recently: “Mess is the law”.

N: I guess. But is this talking about the mess created by architects? Or is it not really talking about mess at all, just mouthing off ike an architect. As in, that rhymes and sounds vaguely meaningful but it’s probably just pretentious  c**p.

P: OK. A lot of the mess is created by architects and their clients. But actually, it’s got to be true that mess is the law in the world. Nature doesn’t do straight lines, people do.

N: Architecture should be like nature?!

P: No, not at all. But I think there’s something to be said for reminding architects that people and things will spill over their clean, straight lines, that life is inherently messy. Walk into an architect’s home, at least in London, and you’d think they were all anti-colour and anti-child. All white and clean, hygienic to the point of neurosis.

N: And dressed in black. Anyway, you surely didn’t come up with “mess is the law” did you?

P: No, that was Jeremy Till, English architect, academic and well, semi-professional provocateur, currently at the helm of Westminster University’s architects. Actually, in his recemt book Architecture Depends he claims the quip was graffitied on the walls in his former institution, University of Sheffield. The book is a polemic against the excessive rationalism of architects and, I might add, planners. Basically he’s arguing that architects suffer a kind of autism, in that they refuse to recognise that the world is complicated, disorganised and full of surprises. Till doesn’t like hi-tech architecture much either, has a preference for things that go with rather than against the grain of what’s already there.

Which makes me think of what is so interesting about Helsinki’s architecture. Much of it is, or was, quirky and bizarre and creative, but at the same time it never really went against the grain of its environment. Not until recently anyway.

N: To go back to the argument that if people design spaces for outdoor seating in Helsinki they should put it in the sunshine and not as in the New Senate Square plans …

P: Exactly. And that thing that’s become so annoying, architects talking green and waxing lyrical about sustainability all the time, like even when they’re talking about anti-natural unpleasant places like Canary Wharf. They just can’t stop themselves from talking sustainability, it drives me nuts! But well, it sounds less pompous and less like rhetorical claptrap when it’s said by Finnish architects. Maybe it’s because for them it’s natural to work against nature in a natural way by using their natural human creativity.

N: !!!!?

P: I mean, think sanua – it produces 100C in a small room when outside it’s -30C – totally innovative but still weirdly natural.

Dodo – a healthy dose of humanism

Narrator: Did you know that the Finnish Association of Architects or SAFA gave out its annual prize for commendable sustainable architecture today? It didn’t go to architects but to the “small but peppery” (pieni mutta pippurinen and that’s a quote from the press release) environmental organisation, Dodo. Gratifying to see that YLE reported it too.

Protagonist: Dodo? Those the guys who did that urban gueriilla gardening last summer?

N: The very same. The committee commended Dodo for its work

Dodo on tuonut tervehdyttävän humanistisen vireen teknisesti painottuneeseen keskusteluun ja avannut uusia näkymiä kaupunkisuunnitteluun,

or, my loose translation:

Dodo has brought a healthy dose of humanism to a debate that’s often technologially biased and it has opened new perspectives on urban planning.

P: Nice to hear architects can appreciate ordinariness too. Not that guerilla gardening and the energy needed to run an organisation like Dodo are ordinary …. I’m really pleased for Dodo and for Safa.

N: You don’t look so happy though.

P:  I’m pondering what’s going on with Architecture, capital A, in Finland. It used to be that it went with the grain, the environment. But now it’s full of this iconic stuff, being bold, and making a statement, not being content with the ordinary. The latest conversations about this are around the question of how to use up the space in Töölö Bay, where should they put a new library, one to catch the attention of the whole of Europe. Big, eye-catching and expensive, or something else? And if it’s not iconic, it doesn’t care about or recognise specifics, like the fact that Finland is in the north, the seasons are really different, and that if you have restaurant or cafe seating outside you want it in the sunshine, otherwise you need to produce the weather too.

N: Designer sunshine? You’re not talking about the plans for the Senate Square by any chance are you?

P: Among other crimes, yes. They’ll have to use those awful gas heaters at the very least. Yeuch. But hey, that’s a relatively small crime. It’s the expensive, difficult-to-manage massive and eye-catching stuff that Helsinki has so far been blessedly free from that’s the real problem.

N: As you’ve been pointing out on this blog. But hey, isn’t that the standard these days? Isn’t everyone aiming to make a grand statement with buildings now? Architecture IS starchitecture – otherwise it’s just a bicycle shed – or whatever.

P: Maybe. Still, London’s Design Museum has two great exhibitions at the moment that praise the small, respecful and still breathtakingly beautiful. They seem to start from the premise that actually we’re in an age of austerity now and better live with it. One of them is on Dieter Rams, the industrial designer whose Braun electrical goods are on show – and if like me you were a kid in the 1970s, you’ll recognise from your childhood kitchen. Seems to me he could have been a Finn. His approach chimes with what I do think is, or was, a widespread view in Finland, that design is better when it doesn’t shout. And perhaps that architecture is better when it goes about giving pleasure, shelter and form without screaming about it. And when it functions. Less is more…

N: And the other exhibition is about David Chipperfield?

P: Yes. Beautiful stuff.

N: Does it have anything to do with Helsinki?

P: Not really. It just reminded me of the potential of quiet, thoughtful  architecture, David Chipperfield, that is. Quite different from what we’ve had on earlier posts on Designer hotels in the shape of the design of the Swiss flag. More the kind of stuff that would enhance the natural cycles and human pleasures that Helsinki still has to offer. And by the way, it’s cycles and pleasures that Dodo are all about.

Palimpsest: so long as the streets glow with the memory of people

The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say about the word palimpsest:

a Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased. Obs.

and this:

b. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multilayered record.

Finnish author Kjell Westö mesmerised Protagonist, Narrator and, vicariously, the occasional Interlocutor alike, with his novel Missä Kerran Kuljimme or, as it was written, Där vi en gång gott or as it might be in English, Where once we walked or Where we once went. A story spanning the first four decades of the twentieth century, it features on this blog for the way it treats Helsinki itself as a protagonist, the star of its bitter-sweet and sometimes gruesome narrative.

The book also recalls an important reality of Helsinki that goes back to long, long before I was born: the memory of a place that was truly, curiously (as in, inquisitively) cosmopolitan. It also recalls the horrors of the civil war from the unusual point of view of privileged urban Swedish-speakers. It also tells of a hunger for novelty, like jazz and other music that helped make life tolerable again after the war.

Palimpsests of all of the above are there for the seeing in much of Helsinki still and certainly in the street names even if, as in “young” countries self-conscious of their history, street names have a habit of changing. If it sometimes feels like Helsinki is changing too fast too much, the early 20th century must have been a trauma for anyone who had known Helsinki in the late 19th. But in those days there were only a handful of families who could claim they went back several generations as Helsinki-born. And yet when the massive growth came, starting just before the turn of the century, for decades it produced the very stuff that most people agree now is excellent – as urban planning and as architecture, streets, parks, waterfronts, homes and public spaces, even industrial buildings.

One of Westö’s book’s characters lives as a child in Yrjönkatu on Dianan Puisto. He habitually traipses around the city with his father who sets up his camera to document the change and the scenery, particularly when it snows. This character was like the photographer Signe Brander, one imagines, who was actually paid to document a disappearing world. (And perhaps he was like those of us who stop equally compulsively in 2010, to document our surroundings with cameras or phones.)

Such a character might well have photographed these late-nineteenth-century buildings on Yrjönkatu. In the book, it’s his friend who writes something like this – apologies for halting translation – the book is only out in Swedish and in Finnish translation.

Every single place where a person has walked carries a memory of that person. For most people it’s invisible but those who know that person and love them see the image totally clearly as they walk by. So long as those loving people are here, that’s how long the image will remain, even after that person who once walked there has died. That’s why streets they sometimes glow with a warmth when we walk them. … Remember, dear Henriette: so long as someone knows we once walked here and so long as someone remembers us with warmth, the streets will carry our names.

And Dianan Puisto, now renamed – again – Kolmikulma for transport purposes, certainly is photogenic. It’s where Kamppi, Kaartinkaupunki and Punavuori meet.

Here it is from a variety of angles, the traces of historical eras and architectural fashions still visible. The first image, from before the snows, is an 1880s office building by Sebastian Gripenberg which some of us got to know when we went in to buy our first subscription to Helsingin Sanomat. Corner of Ludviginkatu and Erottajankatu. The daily moved into its glass box in 1999 leaving Ludviginkatu to house its museum and other cultural pursuits. On the corner is now a bar serving those for whom image matters, and a bit further down an independent restaurant carrying the same name (Grotesk), that routinely gets good reviews, foreign and domestic.

The rest, well, just buildings until you stop to ask for their stories.

P.s. if only our camera were better, our patience more, well, more early-20th-century, we might have managed a better picture of Tähtitorninmäki (below) as well. Tell you what, if you get a chance, just go for a little walk there yourself some time.

Between documentation and expostulation – we still love Helsinki

The winter-wonderland you folks in Helsinki have been enjoying is a kind of miracle. It makes even brutalist architecture (e.g. Merihaka) look good, as proved by The Usual’s front page photograph today. More conventional scenes of winter beauty can be found online.

The editorial team of JHJ has, you may have noticed, decamped from Helsinki, but only temporarily. This brings sadness to our hearts, but also a different rhythm of and a slightly altered approach to blogging.

So far JHJ has been exactly what a blog sets out to be, an online diary. In this we feel we are part of a crowd. We’ve been pleased to stumble on lots of great bloggage, in English as well as Finnish, around topics of interest (witness the slowly growing blogroll to the right) to do with Helsinki, Finland and the things that drive us (mad).

The urge to document is strong in an age obsessed with audit as well as one where digital cameras are popular and cheap. A document suggests a result has been produced. Maybe, maybe not.

But we remain passionate about Helsinki, even if we’re not there.

As we’re no longer there to notice, take issue with, ask around and read around and to simply expostulate online (and sorry about that outburst on Sunday – must have been the stress of packing getting to us), we’ll use those pictures as excuses to write less frequently but perhaps with more detail about those places and some of the stories that are unfolding in them. We hope you’ll come back to check it out.

In the mean time, wrap up warm and enjoy the season. Go and dance, maybe.

JHJ.

The day quiet dignity got into the news

“Dignity gets lost in the noise” – or words to that effect, headlined yesterday’s Helsingin Sanomat culture section, with a timely critique of the way “petrol station aesthetics” has taken over some of Helsinki’s most beautiful and cherished restaurant spaces. And then there was a quick response in today’s letters, and further comment online by the indispensible critic Arkkivahti alias Tarja Nurmi.

It may be that Helsinki’s architectural menace is … its bad clients. It may be further that these bad clients make the mistakes they make because they think it will bring glory, visibility or some kind of profits. Or maybe they’re just caught up in complicated politics. Or too busy to know what a city really feels like if you engage with it fully rather than from the distance of an executive life-style.

So what were these papers and blogs writing about? Basically about bad taste and poor judgement spoiling once celebrated and always appreciated interiors by such deserved stars as Eliel Saarinen (the cafe at the central railway station – mangled by “youthful” interior design), our old friend Lars Sonck (whose handiwork, to the outrage of critic Paula Holmila, was inexplicably covered over in Jugendsali to create a mediocre cafe – photographic evidence to the right) and Theodor Höjer (who was partly responsible for the grandeur of the building that now hosts Salutorget and that was also previously a bank). Oh this conversation could go on, and on, and on.

And it did amongst friends today in Cafe Engel, where we debated what good is top-down “regeneration” and what do city fathers understand about aesthetics or quality of everyday life and …. We discussed whether or not it was snobbish to worry about and get angry when cherished and precious things like the calmly neo-classical blocks to the south of Helsinki’s Senate Square are (stop to breathe…) when wonderful things like these are altered at MASSIVE cost in the name of improvement to produce results that cheapen us all: supposedly luxury shopping and the kind of wining and dining that only people in denial or mental confusion could consider sustainable. (And Pajunen and co: THE SUN NEVER SHINES HERE. PUT THE CAFE CULTURE WITH ITS TERRACES SOMEWHERE IT DOES!!)

Decisions on the Senate Square are going to be discussed in the city cabinet within a few weeks. In that sense the article in HS and the others it inspired, have been a godsend. Tomorrow JHJ editorial leaves this marvellous, sometimes quirky sometimes quiet, often elegant and always human, city for some time. In the mean time, some pictures.

To start with, Cafe Engel, again, as it was in January 2010. Hey, with the conservation demands, as HS noted, the structure and much of what you see of the interior can’t be altered much.

At Engel the door will hopefully still open the “wrong” way. But will the hallway talk in thick layers of cultural activity? The clock won’t be stopped somewhere before 1. The trams may not trundle past. The square may host commercial tat and Finnish beer culture. The walls will, we hope, still be lined with what customers appreciate – the written word.