Sceneries of Helsinki – Adieu on this snowy Independence Day

If you are interested in how ideals congeal into matter, and if you appreciate that a seven-storey building can be “human-sized”, do come and visit Helsinki.

But whether you’re here or just planning a visit, make sure to enjoy it before it’s too late. The “pressure” to build (particularly on the water) is producing a stunning list of new and attractive opportunities for the building sector. The Planning Department’s webpage contains so much architectural and planning dross it makes me weep.

From redesigning the rural idylls of Östersundom and the fast-growing suburbs to the east, to the bombastic dullness of the other so-called New Helsinki zones, up the high-rise-hotel (a new symbol for Helsinki?!) on the western edge of the peninsula, and down to the wrangle over a helicopter pad in Hernesaari … our enormous Planning Department must be a hive of activity.

Presumably everywhere architecture and construction have sped up through computer-aided technology and politics-to-suit-the-rich. The craze for big and showy in Helsinki is also capitalizing on the genuine problem that Helsinki’s land-use is wasteful by European standards (as even Wikipedia will tell you). So as they turn over more and more of the city to speculative building, the usual suspects (Kokoomus politicians like young Mr Männistö who heads the planning committee, for example) have at their disposal a machine more powerful than ever with which to smother the city with monuments to today’s impatient capitalism, but also a vaguely green-sounding argument for building high.

Can protesters and activists keep up? They are beginning to try. Some have stepped up their campaigns with letters to the planning department and to editors (if you have access to Helsingin Sanomat you can follow an interesting exchange here), and with new websites and blogs.

Perhaps the new little exhibition at the Architecture Museum, Unbuilt Helsinki, is also a kind of protest. Maybe. I’d describe it as difficult art. But it is based on a larger, longer project that might yield some stories yet, about how the choices were once made that created the city we  still love.

Is there any point in trying to resist? Haven’t the rich always shaped the city?

Probably. But I can’t believe the rich have always been this stupid or careless. In this little gem of a city we appear to have rich folks who can’t distinguish a fine skyscraper from an a architectural erectile dysfunction.

And, to give me the excuse to share this bit of silliness (below), Helsinki’s rich presumably also think a good evening’s eating out might have some connection to forest sceneries. I think, Helsinki, we have a massive problem on our hands.

If, dear reader, you have any thoughts on the design of future Helsinki that haven’t been taken up on this blog, or that should be taken in new directions, I’d love to know. The thing is, I’m not going away, but I think this blog should now wind up. It’s time for something more serious.

Thank you so much for reading. JHJ.

Worst Planning Since the 1960s

A slow Saturday has left us with a few moments to spare. This is unusual here at what was once JHJ’s bustling editorial office, but has since been turned over to better remunerated pursuits. But since the Helsinki pipeline seems to have become so full of sewage, though it’s upsetting, we thought we’d use these precious minutes to blog about it.

Pasila. Back in the 1960s this was a hilly, leafy and mainly working-class residential neighbourhood, as the YLE film maker says, “in the heart” of Helsinki. Land in “the heart” of a capital being economically interesting, the whole was creatively destroyed in the early 1970s. The extent of the demolition and the totality of the transformation of “Wood Pasila” into the “West Pasila” that we now now, has taken some getting used to.

As painful as it was, some have become used to the big boxes that we now have, both for going to work and living in. It’s a shame about the anti-human and anti-local traffic “solution” of Hakamäentie, which cuts West Pasila off from any possible links to the north, but the Keskuspuisto (Central park…) to its west is well loved and used.

Across the railway to the east there is Itä Pasila. Unkind voices have dubbed this the Croydon of Helsinki, perhaps because it does look a bit like the bastard offspring of Corbusian planning and 1980s bathroom design (turned inside out, as was the trend). Then again, over the years, the boxes that line its big roads have attracted and built up more interesting life (and activists with designerly habits).

If you look on the googmap of the area you can see that the space left by the gradually abandoned railway is a fabulous opportunity for healing. And there are residents and creative types already in the old low-rise buildings of the railway era, making a better future from the ground up through urban gardening and stuff. For these and zillions of other reasons, Pasila could become the project to stop Helsinki from wasting its effort and shoreline by building into the Baltic.

So what does the Planning Department propose? Driving a highway through it. Oh, and plonking those ten (ugly) high-rises we already knew about, around it whose chances of nurturing vibrancy are zero. No wonder, as rumour has it, the plans currently under consultation were recently described by an overseas visitor as the worst planning he’d come across since the 1960s.

Gugglegum mistaken for ambition

Many who seek respectability in our town are doing their utmost to argue that their views on bringing the Guggenheim or “Guggis” to Helsinki are the result of careful reflection rather than jerkings of knee.

“We aren’t for/against on principle”, people seems to be shouting. “We are bringing a fresh and ambitious perspective to a tired and humble city…” Er, this style of rhetoric usually from supporters of the scheme.

Equating ambition with brashness is not new in political rhetoric, but it still irks. Particularly when it is applied to our fair Helsinki. A hair-raising example was a column published by The Usual  on 25.10.2011. In gooey globules of rhetoric it sang to The Usual’s hymn sheet of utterly, bizarrely sycophantic praises. Of the Guggenheim.

No wonder those of us who some months ago still had time for possibly sensible arguments in favour are increasingly against. Writing on his (Finnish-language) blog, the prolific art critic Otso Kantokorpi has collected an impressive array of online sources (in English). They do not add up to an endorsement of Mr. Gallen-Kallela-Siren’s dreams (soon to be articulated at a second-hand bookshop near you.)

The standard arguments apply. That’s to say, economic ones.

Alas, Helsinki’s city councillors are not reading this avalanche of information, which Kantokorpi keeps updating at breathless speed. (He informs us, for instance, of the architects already in the loop. This bunch make Prince Charles’ and Leon Krier’s New Urbanism look almost gritty!)

If our councillors were keeping up with this story, they would appreciate that the G operates more like a business than a charitable foundation. And they’d realise that Guggenheim Bilbao was but the very visible tip of an  iceberg worth of investments  in the entire region. Alas, rather than the hundreds of millions that were used to create the “Bilbao effect” today we only see the “effect” itself.

Careful critics such as D. Ponzini may talk of archistarships posing as urban policy, of said billions [sic] poured into shore up the McGuggenheim. But not too many are listening in Helsinki.

Helsinki’s political types not even stop to consider why we have never heard of any Guggenheim but the New York and Bilbao’s. Why does nobody know about Guggenheim Berlin or, goodness me, Abu Dhabi? Why they would want Helsinki to join this list of franchised non-entities is unclear?!

And more to the point, how dare The Usual write such drivel about this cheapened brand?!

Do they not realise, as Green politico Tuomas Rantanen said on Yle TV’s Strada, that the Guggenheim brand is not worth the millions being asked for? Shame the councillors aren’t doing their homework.

The really depressing thing isn’t the ample evidence for why we should question this “solution” to the Helsinki Art Museum’s undeniable problems. The really depressing thing is that we’ve seen this before. It seems that small cities like Helsinki are prone – in a serial fashion – to believing the suave, smooth-talking salesmen who tell them that the future is theirs if only they sign on the dotted line for this or that global brand to beautify their town.

Remember Kaarin Taipale’s brilliant analysis, Cities for Sale, of how Helsinki GAVE away money to the multinational JC Decaux, thinking it was dressing itself up in a hipper garb?

Oh, and while I’m on a rant: apparently (and I can’t remember where in the mesh of blogs on this madness I stumbled on it) the current G’s leadership have said they’re interested in some bit of Helsinki that has land and water.

Here’s one bit in Munkkisaari/Hernesaari. Not sure whether the heliport expansion in the pipeline there would enhance or detract from Helsinki’s efforts to suck in international (Russian?!) art lovers with the help of some Gugglegum.

(Oh, and another over-priced, has-been brand, with life-sucking properties for city streets will land near you soon too. Starducks.)

A good beet for liquid times

The September sun is shining on Helsinki. People are out and about as if it were August. Some are in shorts, one man is seen in swimming trunks for goodness sake!

The Usual (paid version) runs unusually high-flying but to-the-point stuff on the need for solidity (Helsinki’s new Music Building!). Like the prime minister said, we really do need uncommercialised culture in our flaccid (my word), chaotic (the journalist’s word) and liquid age. The reference to liquid modernity being, of course, from veteran sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

The blogosphere and Face Book are awash with what reads like real debate on the built environment. On the Music Building (are there traces of Lutheranism in how it presents itself? in Finnish here; did our ministers misjudge the situation by skipping its opening ceremony? and such like). But comment is flowing also on the area around the building. It needs some action, upgrading and serious thought.

Hopefully anything then but the robot-inspired/produced vision of a perfectly engineered Finland or so-called future Finlandia Park on the city’s website. You have been warned, the vision isn’t just scary, it’s insulting when you recall all the human-style life and true urban trading that went on in the railway warehouses that we fought to keep. (By the way, according to MTV3, it seems that the drive to take life as well as cars underground might yet mean pulling down what’s left of that socially if not architecturally significant trace of an older Helsinki.)

So meanwhile it was heart-warming to see that despite the best efforts of Helsinki’s bureaucrats and local politicians to kill off anything unofficial, street parties can still bring out the crowds. And the wannabe ballerinas as seen last night at Punavuori’s Punajuuri/Beetroot block party.

Past imperfect and future dogmatic

This is not a blog post about Finnish grammar.

Nor is it a post about the Guggenheim feasibility study which is drawing such impassioned commentary in the blogosphere. It is also not a post about the rather ignorable building pictured below. (The photo is from 2009, when the potential costs of archictectural globalization first really got to us here on this blog).

It is a blog post about words and how they are used.

As Arkkivahti notes, there are many people who are sceptical but not against the Guggenheim scheme. JHJ would like to add that though Helsinki has a glorious past it was never perfect – it can always do with some additional beauty!

The odd thing now is that we know very little about the Guggenheim scheme feasibility study. Nevertheless, there are plenty of words in circulation that might make you think that a branch of the Guggenheim’s expanding family of art museums was about to open in Helsinki.

Recently we were surprised to read an article about the feasibility study in The Usual. Baffled, rather. We had, of course, noted that the Foundation have been positive about the idea of gracing Helsinki with their brand. But JHJ had not however been aware that a decision to build had been made. And so it was that this kind of language in the paper sparked a double-take:

Guggenheimin museon voi hyvin rakentaa Katajanokalle

Rakennuksen alle tehdään vesitiivis patoseinä, joka ankkuroidaan peruskallioon 15 metrin syvyyteen. Suurilta lisäkustannuksilta vältytään.

Or, as is customary on this blog, in our own translation:

The Guggenheim museum can easily be built in Katajanokka

A water-tight barrier wall will be constructed below the building and anchored in the rock at 15 metre’s depth. This will avoid substantial extra costs.

We were not aware that a decision had yet been made to bring the G. to Helsinki, that a preferred location had been chosen by the G. and ratified by Helsinki. Nor had we kept abreast of the “debate” of which the peculiar-looking headline was a small part. Hence the raised eyebrow.

But then The Usual frequently reports stories as if they had happened already (in some cases just cutting and pasting the press release as is…). One day it reported that Mayor Jussi Pajunen was confident that the G. would come and would bring megabucks in its wake. Once this had been reported, this reporting itself became news. A careless reader might have suspected that national broadcaster YLE were saying that the G would come and it would be ready in 2018.

This kind of language is not quite the same thing as another interesting feature of contemporary political rhetoric, what Stefan Collini calls the “dogmatic future” tense. His wonderfully fluent, perceptive and empirically supported essay in the London Review of Books Vol.33(16) he considers the prose that makes it appear as if consumerist metrics were the best way to assess everything.

… official discourse has become increasingly colonised by an economistic idiom, which is derived not strictly from economic theory proper, but rahter fromthe language of management schools, business consultants and financial journalism. British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms

Effectively, we end up (and not just in Britain) with a kind of consumerist relativism. What is not, however, relative, is the injunction to imagine everything as part of a ‘market’ transaction.

Collini also mentions the ‘mission-statement present’ as another aspect of this already killing Newspeak. The mission-statement present disguises “implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general truths” (Collini’s words) such as “if you pay for it you value it”, “choice is an obvious good”, “privatising businesses enhances everything” (examples by JHJ).

So back to Finland. Beware, users of the rather lovely but increasingly erratically performing national rail service, VR!

Future dogma = privative, privatise, privatise!

The Usual (not the online version) reports that Tatu Rauhamaki, the conservative politician at the helm of Helsinki’s regional transport, believes that simply privatising the railways would fix the ongoing problems. This, as anyone with a smidgen of critical acumen, is the most elementary form of the future dogmatic. But he backs it up with a bit of comparative pseudo-economese:

Siitä on hyviä kokemuksia esimerkiksi Ruotsista ja Britanniasta: vuorotarjontaa ja sitä mukaa matkustajia on tullut lisää.

or:

For instance Sweden and Britain have had good experiences of this: more choice of routes and with it more passengers.

Er … has he actually used Swedish or British trains recently? Or followed the news about them? Then he’d know that they are extraordinarily expensive to run compared to ones that are state-owned.

Alas, we Finns are terribly susceptible to international fashions. Particularly if they have a whiff of the anti-communist about them.

Vive les différances!

For example, isn’t it great that the moment kids are once again handed over from the  weirdness of nuclear, composite or other other contemporary family types to the safe hands of the collective, then the lovely lazy summer turns into absolute dismalness?

It’s a good time to reflect on other differences too. The time-place that is Finnish summer tends to throw up lovely scenes like this:

and this

Kallio or Kuhmo, Kuhmo or Kallio? Tip, you don’t need a vihta at Rytmi bar (but then you don’t need as good a lock in Kuhmo as in Kallio).

Finland also now has many types of beers. True, monopolies and mergers rules are so outrageously flaunted in little Finland (“it’s too small for genuine competition”), that you’d think there was a quasi-official drive to force us all into Hemingways pubs with their offers for loyalty card-holders. But no. We now have genuine variety!

As in a beer in Kallio (from Laitila)

and a beer in a small town somewhere on the Baltic.

(As an editorial note, Finland’s old standard beer bottles, as distinct from what’s inside them, are much loved by us here at JHJ. Apparently each one of those number 3 or 4 beer bottles is reused about 35 times.)

Then there are so many different ways to liven up a slightly tired waterfront. Here’s the temporary cafe in Kalasatama where a notice to staff reminds them to water the plants, do the washing, save the world and take out the rubbish:

 

Then there’s Cafe Tyyni, which was almost stolen from us. Helsinki’s more official but definitely zealous types wanted to close it down because of a hose pipe (as JHJ reported in April) but really because the city thought a higher-end producer might pay it a higher rent. Apart from showcasing some undersung heroes of Finnish design (Felix and Turun Sinappi), they have been offering live music and dance and good cheer of late and all that with hardly a hint (well, maybe a bit – note the English-language ad) of doing it for the tourists.

And then, for our tour de force today, a brand new beach in Eira (photographed on a Nokia phone. Sorry bout that).

Estate agents appear to think that something like this is a significant attraction to bring in new property investors (surely home buyers? ed). At a square metre in the area costing upwards of 6000 Euros, and given that it’s a rare olde worlde kind of urban environment within spitting distance of all the best retail and other services, one might think that the newly created beach isn’t that big a deal.

But what do we know?

Form follows ???

Nordic architecture, like everything else Nordic, has had a generally good reputation. Without the repeated references to the successes of Sweden, Norway and Finland in education, health and general well-being, books like The Spirit Level  and, more recently, David Harvey’s praised and engaging Enigma of Capital, would be a lot thinner.

But before I get sidetracked, let me upload a favourite but gratuitous picture and get back on track!!

Form, said some famous American, follows function. In Scandinavia (and Finland) modern architecture and design through the 20th century were often presented as pure function and technique: clear and simple solutions to genuine problems.

As a kid I thought “Form follows function” was a slogan invented by a Finnish glassware company or something to sell more Finnish stuff.

In those days Finnish ways of doing things (and Finnish tastes) felt naturally obvious and objectively speaking superior. (It helped that the right angles were at 90° and the windows weren’t drafty).

Finnish environments became the very opposite of inherited tradition or older ornamental styles. All of those words belonged to people with “culture” (read: odd rituals and irrational beliefs). We (Finns) had “nature” (read: things as they are) and education.

(Modernism was/is our vernacular). (Excuse slippage between Nordic and Finnish. Hope it’s not too irritating or contrary to your experience, dear reader).

Aaanyway, back to the topic. Actually, the function of most architecture for most of the 20th century was to absorb surplus capital (as D. Harvey argues). The ever intensifying creative destruction of material goods – building and rebuilding – is one aspect of this thoroughly bizarre but taken-for-granted phenomenon.

So some people have started to point out that architectural form follows finance, not function. There’s a book of that name about skyscrapers from 1995, and quite a few critics have peddled the idea too.

Architects help produce the landscapes of really-existing capitalism.

Form-follows-finance is not then a new idea. But perhaps as fear grips the markets and credit-rating agencies mess around with our money supply (“something wrong with the tap, dear”) it would be good to think even more about the links between finance and architecture. Particularly also since the rich have been getting so much richer (and so much more stuff) on the back of foggy financial fictions (especially in Finland).

Hence my repeated plugging on this blog of that Harvey book. Excellent, really was (though hardly perfect).

Though architectural projects these days are HUGE (even in little old Helsinki [surely New Helsinki, ed]) and there are many uncertainties on the way for all involved, once they’re completed, their impacts are HUMONGOUS. Big metal boxes, glass and steel of varying quality, motorways, tunnels, transport hubs, retail “parks”, people piled up in … [stop already! ed.]

But David Harvey insists that the problem isn’t that everywhere is becoming the same. Capitalism/ neoliberalism does not produce homogeneity. In fact it thrives on heterogeneity. Helsinki would, then, do well to sustain its unique selling points ["environmental features" surely? ed].

I read in Urban Design (spring 2008, page 23) that the City of Helsinki is pursuing unconventional urban change. “Rather than the philosophy of grand projects elsewhere in Europe” of pleasing tourists and urban consumers, the City of Helsinki is following “traditional Nordic values” and relying on the spirit of the location.

Apart from the claim being eminently contestable, it also raises the question about what a spirit of a location might be. It is produced how? By culture? Well, partly. By nature? Partly (granite is abundant here). By history?

Absolutely. Guess you could say form follows fashion then.

Cycling conditions

Some people think it says wonderful things about Finns that we have quite a few shared cycle and pedestrian lanes in Helsinki. People get on so well with each other here, they think.

Actually, it can be a real pain to cycle on one of these, particularly in the city centre. Not everyone respects a cyclist and not every cyclist is thoughtful of pedestrians. (Vans should be abolished, of course, from anywhere near cycle/pedestrian space).

Cycling in this city can be particularly challenging in the winter. Besides all that the weather throws at a cyclist, we have to put up with a City administration for whom car parks are more important than anything and certainly more important than silly cyclists.

Still, more of us are doing it than ever. So the lovely people behind Kaupunkifillari (the cycling blog) brought their own spades, ice picks and video camera to make their route safer right where people could see them, at the Main Railway Station. This way they also showed some of that old talkoo-spirit that Finnish culture still has in spades (a bit like the Big Society but without the annoying political rhetoric).

(Look out also for their tweed run, coming up)

But there is good news from the City too. For over a year it has had a dedicated cycling officer, Marek Salerno, whose job is to come up with good ideas for increasing cycling. Helsingin Sanomat did have a fabulous bit of news yesterday. A proper cycle lane is going to be built in Mannerheimintie, just on the stretch where those most annoying snarl-ups with pedestrians and tourists (sometimes they are the same people) tend to occur. Here cyclists will be given the space they need to do their thing safely and without dawdling.

Work will begin in August, not before.

Hietsu pavilion – malign neglect or what?

There are a few good things that still come through one’s letter box in paper form. There is the official organ of the City of Helsinki, the Info (“English supplement on the Web”) which isn’t all bad. And for those of who subscribe, there is the free-of-charge and wonderful Sofia courtesy of the City Museum.

And then there are the local rags. Ours is the paper-only Töölöläinen.

It is tabloid-size and its adverts look the same from decade to decade. It has several really rather informative columns and listings, and like freebies generally, it has lots of those restaurant reviews that were probably written by the owner.

It is also very keen on architecture. Maybe the people who read it really do pay attention to the stuff around them. Each week they have a photo competition where you have to work out the location of some small architectural detail. Something like this, for example.

And they campaign. Recently they have been keen to talk about the fate of the wooden pavilion at the beach in Hietaranta. Shamefully, it has been allowed to fall into a terrible state of direpair. It was designed by Gunnar Taucher , one of Helsinki’s earliest “municipal head architects”. (The chap who designed the wonderful but barely noticeable Töölö health centre, that most people still know as Kivelä hospital.)

As Töölöläinen keeps reminding readers, Taucher’s wooden pavilion by the enduringly (and deservedly) popular beach by Hietaniemi Cemetery is a treasure. (Photograph from October 2009).

It is a rare surviving example of 1930s wooden building in Helsinki. The City Museum’s view has been all along that the building should be restored. Well, “all along”, at least since 2001 when pressures to get more efficient financial returns on city real estate provoked someone into examining the pavilion’s architectural and historical significance as well as physical condition.

On 30.01.2011 Töölöläinen notes – again  – that the city’s leisure department considers the building unfit for purpose. And informs us that a demolition permit was granted in December.

Besides our local paper, a number of City Councillors are also campaigning to save the building. It is, after all, beautiful.  And given what we know of the preferences of the current crop of planning officers and responsible politicians, it is almost certainly a more loveable as well as more democratic building than any that might replace it.

Which takes us to the brou-ha-ha about the spa and hotel (!) plans under the name Taivallahti in the same area. Surely, it was proposed, the best beach in the city deserves better than … er… a loved, structurally sound building which whispers to us of so many  generations of beach-lovers in this city.

A few years back, when the spa and hotel debate was alive (actually, it still is) a councillor (Paavo Arhinmäki) had this to say:

Jos ajattelemme Hietsua, Hietarannan uimarantaa, niin sehän on nimenomaan stadilaisten, helsinkiläisten merellinen paratiisi.

or

Hietsu is precisely our marine paradise.

His point is and was that it’s for us ordinary people, not for the fantasy tourist whose fat wallet will save the city from ruin.

Let’s hope that the fashion for and the belief in building for opulence-hungry visitors will soon fade away. When that’s achieved, construction decisions and a robust schedule for careful management and upkeep will get the room they, and we, deserve.

Guggenheimful of resentment

Helsinki’s leadership has, as The Usual reports, given the team of consultants doing a feasibility study for opening a Guggenheim art museum in Helsinki, free hands. The almost 2 million Euros will be enough for several carbon tons’ and many dollars’ worth of intercontinental flights and some gourmet meals. But it won’t stretch to devising anything like architectural concepts.

Not surprisingly, there’s much grumbling about the whole affair. This is followed by the dismissal of all critique, a situation to which Finnish residents must have become accustomed. There’s Hesari‘s own Saska Saarikoski in self-satisfied mode, for example, translated into some florid English.

While the message is loud and clear that critique is misguided, anyone with an eye on the long-term (and who doesn’t believe in a glorious financial future for our planet) can’t help but wonder about the wisdom here. At least a tiny bit.

Helsinki’s existing (art) museums are doing OK (my excuse for this pic above, taken from Hakasalmi Villa’s front entrance last week). Maybe Kiasma is struggling to get people to like it and come through its doors (and planning mistakes have diluted the building’s positive impact on the city centre) but along with the City’s museums, is a precious resource. A few private collections are also surprisingly vibrant, even though hyped-up blockbusters and their lemming effects make life difficult in Helsinki’s ecosystem of art offerings.

All in all, as a qualitative observation, Helsinki’s cultural offer (excuse jargon) is pretty good. Perhaps it reflects the yearnings of people stuck between geographical marginalisation (airline strikes always a horrible reminder thereof!) and the talent and the spirit/need to create.

There’s never enough money around, of course, but still creative people and arts institutions seem to flourish. Even several small quirky wonderful ones, though subsidies tend (so JHJ has been told) to favour larger, more mainstream establishments.

So it’s no surprise that Hesari has ended up toning down its enthusiasm a little with two articles foregrounding the money issue. Below, my translations in italics.

Teemu Luukka

HELSINGIN SANOMAT 27.01.2011

Guggenheim-museon suunnitteluun käytettävä 2,5 miljoonaa dollaria eli nykykursseilla noin 1,8 miljoonaa euroa on Suomen pienissä taiderahoissa valtava rahasumma. [The 2,5 million dollars or about 1,8 million Euros for planning [translator's note - actually a feasibility study] is, in the context of Finland’s small arts funding, an enormous amount of money.]

Palkkiolla olisi voinut ostaa kaikki ne teokset, joita Suomen taidemuseot hankkivat kokoelmiinsa vuonna 2009. [The fee would have covered the purchase of all the works acquired by Finland's art museums for their collections in 2009.]

…

Valtion taidemuseon eli muun muassa Ateneumin ja Kiasman taideostoihin konsulttipalkkio riittäisi yli kaksi vuotta. [The consultancy fee would cover the state's art acquisitions, including those of Ateneum and Kiasma, for over two years.]

Well, no wonder many experts and quite a few besides are rolling their eyes. Shame this rolling is dismissed with such a jerk of the knee.