Possibly good news

It may be good news, we will post it anyway.

The unseemly rush with which Helsinki’s local elected politicians had been asked to decide on whether or not a Guggenheim franchise should or should not grace the Baltic’s Daughter’s waterfront, has been somewhat calmed. Almost a whole extra month has been granted to our councillors to reassess the proposals, as YLE reports. With any luck this will help them to familiarise themselves with what they are actually deciding on.

Culture(-and-basketball) Minister Paavo Arhinmäki reminds us that no money is forthcoming from the state and tells us that he reckons the Guggenheim brand is not worth what Helsinki is being asked to pay for it. Mr Pajunen does not like all this, but unlike poor JGKS who has to run an art museum in the sweet smell of popcorn in the Tennis Palace, it’s still unclear why Pajunen should be so gung-ho about the scheme in the first place.

But some parallels do suggest themselves.

Doc Point’s documentary film festival is enlightening Helsinki audiences about the bluff and bluster of foreign investors (Trump for one), who offer to develop beautiful environments in the name of progress and er… Apologies, I digress.

More bad news, alas, related to foreign investors and really big money in urban development. A friend reports that there are many self-styled progressives (Greens to be precise) who think it would be right to build a 33-storey hotel (which was initially given planning permission at a measly 16 storeys), a new “landmark” in Jätkäsaari. The location is effectively within the little peninsula that forms the core of our elegant city. There goes our silhouette and, with it, our uniqueness.

Wonder what other dreams there are among Helsinkians other than these dreams of high buildings and, well, whatever it is that the Helsinki Guggenheim represents? A fabulously unique new public library maybe? Or one that looks like it was created on a computer like computer-generated environments everywhere else?

p.s. check out some wonderful and wonderfully subtly titled photographs at learning to see Helsinki.

Waiting for good news

JHJ cannot avoid adding a post-script to yesterday’s post.

Helsinkians are still mired in the good news from the Guggenheim and the City Art Museum (e.g. the foundation’s promises to offer Finnish artists access to international networks) but also the bad (e.g. that Helsinki’s art world risks being smothered in the embrace of a global franchise).

Worse still, we have stumbled upon words on the G that make the stomach churn: resentful commentary laced with the racist bile which, in today’s Finnish political discourse, is always but a few clicks away.

Facts have been one of the casualties of the week’s debate. Is JGKS to go on holiday? Or is he not? Has the announcement about staff restructuring at the Art Museum come as a surprise, or has it come too late? Yesterday the Museum published corrections to recent misinformation on its website.

So today? A suggestion in a letter to an editor somewhere near us, to increase the floorspace to be constructed at Töölönlahti on land owned by the city. This would easily give the city the millions it needs to make a Katajanokka Guggenheim happen.

Heck, there we were thinking someone was suggesting a site for an art museum by Töölönlahti, obviously one that would grow organically out of local ground. Oh well, sometimes these emeritus professors of architecture seem a bit old-fashioned…

… about as progressive as those Helsinki transport administrators looking to revamp parking norms (a pet topic here at JHJ). Gloopy globules of green rhetoric notwithstanding, the city’s proposals are not aimed at reducing overall car densities on our ever more cramped peninsula.

Rather than setting upper limits on parking, Helsinki continues the trend it set in the 1960s of setting a lower limit. Marvellous. (Decisions deferred to the end of this month).

Next time I post it’ll be good news.

In anticipation, here’s a picture of a forest. Remember, Sibelius himself said that a person should live either in a big city or in the forest.

Visual Literacy in Helsinki’s Guggenheim project

The Guggenheim-Helsinki feasibility report and the way that Helsingin Sanomat (which this blog prefers to call The Usual and some just call Pravda) and a few other cronies have been hyping it up in the last few days has also yielded a good amount of laughs.

But presumably the Head of the Helsinki Art Museum, Janne Gallen-Kallela-Siren (JGKS), did not mean to have us all bursting at the sides when he gave yesterday’s interview to Channel 4 TV.

The interviewer asked him how he imagined the future museum. He had not, he said, thought about that.

Instead he had thought about 500 years of Gutenberg’s galaxy [sic].

The spoofs are coming thick and fast. On facebook … [but also commentary on the mainstream debate: "impossible to be critical of the G. without being written off as a pessimist ... it's promoted with the same sickly over-happy hype as innovation and the Aalto University" "is this a sick joke?"]

Many thanks to Creative Block for this visually articulate and verbally supported reaction to JGKS’s baffling show. For this weekend reality was indeed transformed, as his post notes. Apart from Creative Block’s fabulous illustration of the story, he provides a transcript.

”sitä olen ajatellut, että meillä on nyt takanamme noin 500 vuotta ns. Gutenbergin galaksia, galaksia, jossa painettu sana, kirjoitettu sana on ollut hegemoninen vallan väline. Ja me nyt tällä hetkellä seisomme visuaalisen vuosisadan kynnyksellä. Ja tämä vanha, Gutenbergin galaksi horjuu meidän ikään kuin takanamme ja jalkojemme alla … [Nyt] tarvitaan huipputoimijoita, -laitoksia, -instituutioita, -museoita, -taiteilijoita, jotka ikään kuin voivat ottaa tämän keskiön tällaisessa uudenlaisessa maailmassa, jonka me tiedämme olevan jo ympärillä, mutta jota me emme aina välttämättä osaa ikään kuin artikuloida todellisuutena.  … täytyy muistaa, että taktiikalla voitetaan taistelu, strategialla voitetaan sota. Ja strategian taustalla täytyy olla jokin päämäärä. Nyt meillä on ollut taktiikka. Meillä on strategia. Mutta meillä on ihan konkreettinen päämäärä, että jos kaikki menee kohdalleen, Suomeen, Helsinkiin nousee vuosina 2017-2018 museo, joka nousee toivottavasti maailman globaalien museoiden joukkoon.”

Basically, it’s something like that after these 500 years of the hegemony of the printed word, we’re now at the threshold of a new world. This requires new top talent, institutions, museums, artists and so on who can take centre stage in this new situation. He goes on to talk about strategy and tactics and that maybe by 2018, if all goes well, Helsinki will have a museum that will hopefully join the ranks of the globe’s finest.

Reproductions of JGKS’s own visual skills, as demonstrated last week when the report findings were presented, are also attracting a fair amount of comment.

Inspired by this story, I googled for that earlier silly picture. And found it. (Scroll down on this page for those snowball-throwing representatives of new talent.)

But I also found yet another spoof image of that attractive piece of Helsinki close to the water.

Finland’s state broadcaster, YLE, reports that there is something fishy about the way the whole feasibility study was drawn up.

JHJ asks: Should there not be transparency about who sits on what board representing whose interests, and should transparency not reach beyond Helsinki’s deputy mayor Tuula Haatainen reassuring the public that “it’s OK, we knew about it”?

Ripping off YLE’s image, we can safely conclude that in the fight between the Guggenheim and Gutenberg, all tactics are allowed and thus far there appear to be no winners.

That G-report: 200 pages of buzzwords like “deep”

The Guggenheim Foundation’s feasibility study for Helsinki is out. Its 200 pages, unsurprisingly vacuous and expensively produced as they may be, should be of interest to anyone who loves Helsinki. (Yawn – there would be better things to do…)

The G. Foundation and its Helsinki friends want the franchise here. And they have the South Harbour very much in their sights (photo below). So what are the motives, impacts and willingness to take risks (on their own behalf? on ours?) of this international institution? The report (executive summary at least) reads so much like the standard bull***t bingo that’s filled planning and urban governance bumph for 30 years, it’s hard to know.

The report’s producers apparently “worked diligently … to understand how a G Museum could benefit Finland”. There is no “center of gravity” in Helsinki’s art scene, it continues. The G thinks it can help plug this gap by offering to try to attract more tourists and expand the art market.

Ah yes. This is the world that’s been made in the last 30 years: here judgements on urban and art issues are debated in business/financial terms; the needs of tourists trump everyone else’s; luxury cars sell better than ever even as crisis reigns!

In these circumstances, perhaps it’s not that surprising that so many are so willing to sell Helsinki’s family silver (the South Harbour plus the city’s limited art funding). The Usual mostly plays cheer-leader, but the uber-respectable  Suomen Kuvalehti asked about the risks two days ago, noting that the deadline imposed on the city for deciding (February 15th!!) is far too tight. In the same rag the veteran film maker and politician Jörn Donner noted almost a year ago that the scheme is part of an unwise megalomania among decision makers.

More recently then. What are folks saying? A lot. Many are stunned (by the proposed site, the timetable, the risks, the impact on museum staff and, perhaps, visual artists). Waiting for the news to be digested, our friend Arkkivahti confines herself to very few words indeed – arrrrggggggg being the most operative one.

In a clip on YLE, artist Silja Rantanen picks up some important themes from the report. It is problematic from a moral and political point of view, she notes. It means public Finnish money bolstering US-based business.

She also does not like the way Helsinki is represented to the report’s American audience: the text is imperialist, based on a stereotype of Helsinki from the Cold War era. A G “museum” on this basis, she suggested, would turn Finnish art into an ethnographic curiosity. It might provide a set of walls for pretty random travelling artworks when what Finns deserve (our interpretation here) is stewardship, including further development, of something much more precious and locally meaningful. Rantanen sees cultural imperialism also in the way that the G offers its know-how to the Finnish (underpaid, overqualified and variously motivated) museum staff.

Indeed, although the G. report includes the deep word “deep[ly]” about twenty times, it doesn’t offer anything “solid”. Instead it promises consultation, expertise, “new ideas” [sic] …

Without the massive injection of more substantive resources, the so-called Bilbao effect that those finger-pointers above are hoping for, is never going to happen (as I noted earlier here).

Elsewhere? Angry anti-elite postings against the plans, as you’d expect, online. Interestingly, some [not "many", Ed.] Finnish artists and gallery people (said elite?) seem quite happy with the G. concept. They talk about art as if it were for the art market.

Has neoliberalism’s love of riches sunk into those folks like a hot knife into butter? That old Fifi/Adbusters image is rather suggestive. (Helsinki slang lesson: fyrkka = money).

p.s. I muse on the possibility that living next door to the Soviet Union has left many otherwise intelligent Finns blind to salient features of left and right politics – including the possibility that the community/communism has a lot going for it, and that Finland’s proverbial equality is fast disappearing into a black hole of cosseting the already rich. Provocative thoughts from the USA here.

Of imperatives and fantasies

How quaint to think that the idea of a jet set got its glamour from the association with travel and airlines. Today’s office types are all forced into air travel at regular intervals so it’s not like it’s a luxury. More of a drag, really.

But Finavia, the people who manage Helsinki-Vantaa airport, believe that even today’s harangued airline passenger can be dazzled into shopping for luxury perfumes, chocolates and other goodies. Once passengers have been fed through the bottleneck that is security it is but one step into shopping glitz. To the left, the new airport branch of Eat&Joy with its Finnish culinary delights. Ahead, er, stuff. And lots of exhortations to buy it.

So coming home exhausted, it was a treat to sit back and read/watch the news. Interesting storm in a teacup over Voima-magazine’s spoof-advertising or rather adbusting habit. Voima, brash, bright (in many sense of the word) and really annoyingly laid out, has been doing pretty amazing journalism and adbusting for years. They apparently have now published a book of the best spoofs.

We spotted this on tonight’s cultural news, a delightful Finnish quirk that we hope will survive the economic gloom featured in the economics bit of the same programme. They reported that Voima had approached Kiasma contemporary art museum to exhibit some of the best ads. After initial interest Kiasma declined to exhibit them. There was concern that the museum’s sponsors might not like the critique implied (!?) in art that overtly ridicules consumerism, perhaps even their products.

The book’s co-author Klaus Welp did tell the YLE interviewer that only few targets ever complain outright.

Guggenheim-foe Kantokorpi has blogged about this, and singles out Kiasma’s Director, Pirkko Siitari, for special opprobrium. Bye-bye, Art As Critique, he seems to be saying. We share his concern but hope he is wrong. But, his choice of image to illustrate his blog was fabulous. A pile of coins stacked up as a building photoshopped onto an image of “that” site: that bit of Katajanokka where the land meets the water in a commercially interesting kind of way, and where fantasies have been let loose before…

So while JHJ was settling in with the other travelling salespeople in a small town somewhere further dark, Kantokorpi and various others who have taken a critical view on the G. franchise were talking about it at Kiasma. Rumour has it that Kaarin Taipale (whose work we recommended in an earlier post) is writing a pamphlet about the G.

Architectural debate is alive and well in this city!

If it ain’t broke why are they fixing it?

So here’s a question: how much does Helsinki need to change? It’s one of the most beautiful cities in northern Europe. That’s not just us here at JHJ, quite a few architectural writers have waxed lyrical about it.

And here’s another question: how come Helsinki managed to survive the twentieth century so well, so intact?

Britain produced clone towns, America sprawled and many a European capital city ended up looking good from an airplane or from miles away, but feeling cold and alienating at street level. Helsinki kept its low-rise city centre alive – just – and developed a new (not unloved!) type of modernist residential area (lähiö) to cope with post-war needs.

But is this changing? Now “Helsinki” is focussing in. We have Kamppi, we have the building sites of New Helsinki’s waterfront luxury (or not) and above all, we have the ongoing headache of Töölönlahti. For the moment things are OK – the cycling ramp to Mannerheimintie we moaned about earlier has been fixed and the skateboarders are loving the smooth asphalt outside the Music Building.

After the railway warehouses were destroyed the authorities promised to make the area accessible to ordinary folks, to put up a few small-scale pavilions for cafes and such, to expand park-like area and so on.

But they also got excited about the potential rents from the area. And interestingly, they got really excited about building underground. There’s story after fragmentary story about an underground library, an underground campus for a new university, a multi-use something, a motor-vehicle tunnel to expedite east-west travel (perhaps making it easier to folks from Espoo to get to the new underground car park about to be built in Hakaniemi.

All of which is a far cry from the stuff that was being discussed a couple of nights ago at Porthania regarding the Guggenheim foundation’s feasibility study for a franchised art museum here. The society for Housing and Planning had invited an Italian, Davide Ponzini, to open a discussion on the rationales in various cities for so-called culture-led regeneration. It was not encouraging. The only unequivocal winners usually are a handful of architects, a handful of big construction companies and a handful of growth-minded politicians.

That’s a lot of disappointed people and a lot of badly designed space if it goes wrong.

Then again, someone did point out that it’s not surprising the Helsinki Art Museum has tried to think laterally about its space needs. Who’d want to run a museum from a moldy box in Meilahti far away from public transport or in the sweet smell of pop-corn at the Tennis Palace. Point taken.

Anyway, nobody has yet very seriously talked about putting a new art museum in the Töölönlahti area. Maybe that’s cos there’s one there already, Kiasma.

Sooo, why not just turn the area into a park? A real one. With people, trees, pavilions and stuff. You know, like they invented in the 18th century? Or was it centuries earlier?

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.

Price-quality ratios and other Finnish things

In the absence of any alarming news about impending disaster for us to report, here’s a quick post to remind ourselves that Helsinki remains in the grip of design-mania. Almost every home, let us not forget, continues to have a piece of unsurpassed Finnish design installed. We are referring, of course, to the over 10060-year old tiskikaappi, where one’s washing up drains dry out of sight above the sink (tool of Finnish women’s liberation …?)

Skipping then to a world of somewhat more intense innovating and creativity, over a thousand applications for the money available through WDC (World Design Capital) are now being assessed by a panel of experts. It’s already been an opportunity for the creative labour in this country to practice fund-raising. Eventually it might result in some opportunities for home-grown talent and local concerns to be built into Helsinki’s urban fabric – you know, building projects that serve residents, street design that makes life easier and perhaps greener, the odd environmental art event or project that really brings about happiness…

On the official website under the heading “More design, oh no!” one of Finland’s leading architects, Mikko Heikkinen, ponders the WDC process with just a teeny-weeny bit of a critical edge. Perhaps, he hints, artwork is not all its made out to be. Maybe old design, honed through the decades and centuries (craft skills, like Richard Sennett advocates), has things going for it that newer stuff doesn’t. Like sustainability.

Heikkinen sweetly also writes that he likes the things he buys to have a good “price-quality ratio”, a great phrase much used in this country (hintalaatusuhde). Value for money, in ordinary English.

I hope Heikkinen’s tone will inspire others talking about the WDC status and its promises. I hope they will explore, question, ponder, suggest, be funny. We could certainly do with an improvement on some of the less constructive debate on things urban that we’ve endured recently. (Recall that our main national newspaper made it pretty clear in several pieces on the topic (one here) that they felt anyone with critical views on the Guggenheim issue was being atavistic).

To go a bit rhetorical for a moment, things like locality and history and people-power still matter. So perhaps WDC and its projects will matter as much to Helsinki’s ordinary folks as they do to place marketing types. Local and national governments still need to think carefully about international trends and how they fit their local context. Such things have already been suggested. For instance by the blog Hyperallergic, still talking about the Guggenheim.

Meanwhile some people clearly decide not to adopt the best of design. Some people drain their Finnish-design plates and saucers on the draining board. Could these people be British?

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.

(Guggenheim update) My sister lives in Espoo and doesn’t know Starbucks

Guggenheim’s museums around the world (5?) have so far tended to be driven by architecture as much as by (if not more) art. Without a doubt Frank Lloyd Wright’s original and best Guggenheim art gallery in New York is indeed wonderful as architecture and as a tourist trap. Before it became one of those places that people flock to like witless lemmings it also used to be a pretty good place to take shelter from excess heat and rain.

No pics of New York on JHJ’s computer but I have this. The National Museum in Helsinki was and is a piece of proud, excellent and slightly mad architecture for the purposes of housing cultural treasures. And was designed, in its time, by a bunch of young, innovative, fresh-thinking and highly talented Finnish architects. (Note how all these words have done a lot over so many centuries). Kiasma, the beautiful building that houses the best of contemporary art in Finland, is also a stunning piece of architecture. Alas, witless planning and greedy real estate development has meant that its potential has been lost amidst something that we Finns might call a pickled-herring-salad-approach (think that weird stuff we serve at Christmas: rosolli/sillisalaatti) to developing the most valuable and invaluable area of central Helsinki, Töölö Bay and its surroundings.

Predictably enough, Helsingin Sanomat and a few other mainstream sources are keen on the project and, as with the Herzog and de Meuron hotel scheme a year ago, progressed their view point by saying that anyone who resists is either a principled curmudgeon or insane.

So much for efforts to progress constructive debate.

Meanwhile quite a few people have chipped into the conversation with different ways of saying they don’t think this is a good idea. The reasons? The same that we opened with here at JHJ when this was made public, namely that a Guggenheim museum at this stage in this place is a bit has-been or, using another great Finnish idiom, like last winter’s snow – already evaporated. (“Menneen talven lumia” for you Finnish-learners/speakers). There’s work yet before we get clarity on whether the project would be driven by artistic content or by architecture. Getting either of these things to a standard that would genuinely get people to traipse all this way, would demand an AWFUL lot of work and bucket-loads of good luck.

And the blog called hyperallergic, from an international-sounding perspective, has given the idea a brilliantly argued thumbs down. The link reached us courtesy of Arkkivahti who writes with verve about that pickled herring business and whose later posts link to more international thoughts. Making the point that we don’t need to pay millions for a feasibility study when we know that concerted efforts to copy success of the Bilbao effect haven’t travelled well, a Lee Rosenbaum says sensible things.

The image that sprang to mind when I heard of this scheme was the Hard Rock Cafe.  It now stands for homogenised, contrived cool, although when I was about 14 I was quite keen on it. There actually weren’t that many around when I was 14. But with each new Cafe the the bränd was cheapened, the world lost something (call it “local colour”).

Commentators of the Helsinki-Guggenheim scheme use an even more apt metaphor (as it were), Starbucks.

Oh how delightful I thought it was when my sister, avid tourist though she is, asked me what Starbucks was!