The New Normal in Finland’s Higher Education

It seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Take knowledge (science) and know-how (engineering/technology) and add a bit of beauty and humanity (art and design) and wrap it up for a profitable sale (“economics”). Et VOILÀ: Aalto University!

Finland no longer lives off the forest (paper and pulp manufacturing has shifted to the Global South even if not everyone in Finland appreciates this – nice pdf on the topic here). “Nokia” was not actually proof that Finland is the pinnacle of evolution, but more an accident (serendipity if you want to be polite). Panic!?

Response: old waffle about the triple-helix of university-government-business and endless creative-economy-babble.  This passes for political rhetoric these days in Finland, not least in Helsinki. The Finnish capital is governed according to an ideology that presses everyone to be entrepreneurial and design-oriented, one that’s fuelled further by the global non-event of Helsinki being design capital of the world 2012. (I mean, had you heard of a design capital before Helsinki?)

Anyway, Aalto University was created, synthesising the ingredients you need to create innovations  i.e. commercial opportunity. A long story, but many were angered as legislation on higher education and university staff was totally overhauled. The critics lost, and the new institution opened for business (I think that’s the right word), at the start of the year. Since then humanities and social research have been identified as good places to make savings in the national budget and are set to atrophy across the country. (Odd – it’s quite cheap to study humanities.)

Alas, not only does it look like it’s hard work for the institutions and their top-dogs to adapt to the new situation, the student unions too are fighting amongst themselves. Over money. Actually, it’s mainly the two institutions who have any, the engineers and the business schoolers or economist-types. It appears that the latter were shrewd enough to transfer some of their abundant wealth into a place where the others couldn’t get a hold of it, and since June many people, including lawyers, have been trying to figure out what happened and whether there is a way out of the impasse. A cynic might note that the “territorial pissing” of the leadership has been well learned by the student body. On the other hand,  The Usual reports that a recent meeting on the topic did hear tired but wise words from one of those involved:

JHJ’s translation:

“We were given a unique opportunity. We got to build a new students union. We failed totally”.

By “us” he means the older engineering and economics students.

And “he” is a Markus Heimonen, former chair of the Student Union of the Helsinki University of Technology [in Espoo, JHJ.]

So it’s no surprise then that the debate about any future campus construction is being postponed. University building has been quite a lucrative business for architects and regenerators in recent years, though as with so much capital-intensive building, it’ll remain to be seen whether the new capacity turns out to be over-capacity. So thank goodness we don’t need to worry, just yet, about how the new beast will shape our shared environment.

Interesting thought that universities might face a property bubble. In Britain, say, not everyone will choose university at £9000 a pop.

And so British students, of course, are vocal about their anger. It was from an article in today’s Guardian on that topic that I found the idea that we’re being asked to live a “new normal”.  Things we recently took to be obscene or scary are not just justified are now offered to us as Good Things. Or at least the least bad option.

Space is event

It’s holiday season, Midsummer came and went, after all!

So chances are Helsinki residents are not in Helsinki at this lovely time of year.

Some of them may even be in London. Might they be savouring a piece of Finland outside Finland? If they wanted to, they’d find it in Rotherhithe, where the Finnish Seamen’s Mission has been saving souls, serving coffee and doing the decent thing, since 1958. These days it’s simply called the Finnish Church. Its detailing and its furniture does, indeed, do a lot to make you feel you’ve been transported to the north-eastern shores where Helsinki lies – and beyond.

It was designed by Cyrill Mardall-Sjöström, in case you’re interested.

Alternatively, our summer holidaying Helsinkian might check out the urban vibe of a big metropolis. They could swing by an urban orchard. It’s a piece of derelict urban land (in which London has so excelled in recent decades) that’s  being resurrected for “community use” by the joint efforts of all kinds of agencies, from so-called Business Improvement Districts to local charities and the occasional inspired individual person and the “urban event” that is the London Festival of Architecture. Some day we’ll blog in earnest about what all this might mean politically but it’s late. Gotta move on.

The Finnish Institute (in London), in any case, has a hand in this orchard. Oddly though, it feels like they are sponsoring the orchard (a place) as an event (a time). But hey, that just underlines that space and time are two dimensions of the same experience. As any holiday-going tourist should know!

The part of the event/space that’s called the Nest is produced by Helsinki’s Wood Program, so it’s allowed on this blog. This is a study course at the newly named Aalto University’s architecture department. Towards the end of the “event” it might have plants entwined around it. As for the unit of the university, they use American spelling, more eco-friendly rhetoric than most people can stand and an over-abundance of upbeatness, but also, we hope you’ll agree, an inspiring and fun addition to what used to be a car park!

In any case, nice to see wood coming into its own in architecture. It used to be confined to saunas, like this one, at Alvar Aalto’s summer retreat, near Jyväskylä.

More on natural born designers

Nice to see someone has taken the trouble to pick up this dummy and hang it up somewhere it might be found again. Do you see the bit of brilliant Finnish design on the clip? Seriously, I wonder what Maija Isola (creator of the poppy graphic for Marimekko) made of the success of her motif (she only died in 2001 so would have witnessed its revival among people who weren’t even born when it was launched in 1964).

Granted that the design is probably not there for the benefit of the baby but is an investment made by the parent or other doting adult, and granted that babies are probably not interested in design, might this kind of early learning possibly still have benefits in terms of nurturing great future designers? (Can’t help noting here that image has trumped function. Surely the clip is there precicely to prevent the dummy from getting lost in the first place).

My personal view, as I argued a couple of posts ago, is that the built environment is probably more important to a child’s developing sense of beauty than a logo or a print or a graphic design.

So it’s nice to read that someone on the pages of the Helsinki 2012 World Design Capital website is daring to voice a critical view of the idea that Finns are “naturally” great designers. Miikka Leinonen (described as the creative director of some group I’d never heard of) writes that he’s among those who’ve always found it somewhat oppressive to operate in the long shadow of Alvar Aalto (a view that’s no longer that unusual). He adds, rather ambivalently I think, some observations about Finnish designers’ tendency towards simplicity and minimalism. It can add up, he notes, to reducing what is truly complex (even chaotic) to a clear and simple core. Implication: there might be a loss in celebrating such clarity as common sense (peasant wisdom = maalaisjärki) or as the pinnacle of functionalism.

Given the very consensus-based and, to be frank, often smug and populist tone of Finnish public debate, we here at JHJ began to wonder whether there is a link between this nostalgic minimalism in industrial design on the one hand and lack of nuanced self-criticism in politics on the other. (However, with the Centre Party continuing its farcical internal wranglings, we can report that criticism aimed at others, both in one’s own party and another, is alive and well).

Anyway, Leinonen goes on to make another important point. What designers need to understand are the very complicated needs and experiences of people. These might, indeed, be getting buried more and more under the imperative to “compete internationally”. Alas, this is the peg on which Leinonen ultimately hangs his otherwise delightful little column. Heck, it’s the new ideology, who could resist?

Masters of Arts

If you have time on your hands before the coming week-end, you could do worse than to pop into the Elephant block, one of the soon-to-be-upgraded elements of the infamous Senate Square refurbishment, to catch the end-0f-year show of the Aalto University of Art and Design’s MA students.

There are over 80 displays in a range of styles and themes, but it’s all about the city, in four categories, “enhanced city”, “emotionally designed”, “second skin” and “slow art”. Don’t let the w***y words put you off, the contents do lift the spirit.

So too does the use of the old building even though its earlier glamour has long gone. It served for decades as an administrative building and its the traces of this – fire doors, peeling paint (Finland has it too) and long corridors mostly – that are most in your face. All of which serves the puprposes of the City quite well. The non-elected “regeneration team” or development company Helsingin Leijona can only benefit from demonstrating how shoddy these buildings are and how surely the bling of 21st-century consumerism beats local government bureucrats’ needs hands down. If I’d stayed a local government bureaucrat I’d not have minded the location, must  be said.

Of course that isn’t where the students normally hang out. They are in Arabia, home of the School of Art and Design, still known as Taik and formerly known as Atski (because it once operated in the buildings of the Ateneum near the Railway Station). Arabia is where a ceramics and glass factory of that name was built by a Swedish entrepreneur in the 1870s, where it now has a museum and factory outlets, and where a new urban-ish  neighbourhood has sprung up in just a little over ten years. (Urban-ish and not urban because it lacks street life because it lacks intelligent retail planning, but I’ll leave that for another post.)

As you can see in the photo, life in the area is suppported, inevitably, by a hole in the ground for cars.

Walking around after the end of the semester the place felt a little empty and forlorn even in the warm sunshine. On top of which the labyrinth of old and new buildings with very little signage left me wondering where I might actually be able to enter the main Taik (Aalto) building, or in fact, which is the main Taik building. Is it the multicultured metal box by Pentti Kareoja / Ark-House Architects? Or the Lume building by the omnipresent Heikkinen-Komonen architects with its long corridor tantalisingly inviting behind the glass and … the locked door?

No matter. The City have worked out that this is an ineresting place for those well-educated tourists with an interest in Finnish Design and Architecture to go for a walk, and so they have produced a guide in English that you can download here.

And anyway, once I did find my way inside, despite having to negotiate more slogans, I found some really helpful folks.

A ? is for ?

Today the Aalto University combining all the learning requirements and research capacities of a successful National Innovation System (art and design, engineering, selling) was inaugurated at Kiasma. Funny, I recall it being inaugurated a few months back. Then again, I don’t see any new buildings for it either. But hey, never accuse us here at JHJ of arguing against a party!

So what did they do? Read all about it here if you weren’t able to follow it on the street where it was on view and clearly audible with the help of innovative (possibly) technology. If you are reading this you are unlikely to have been present yourself – but we’d love to know if you were.

Mannerheim was one of several who seemed to be listening to President Tarja Halonen. Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, last autumn’s regular boy-in-trouble and self-build hero, came on after her but got a somewhat smaller audience.

Before Halonen the screen had, I swear, this on it: A?