A city gets used to heat

Ice-cold harshness may well be associated with Helsinki in the minds of many an architectural observer. As well as Helsinki’s relatively demanding climate, this impression might have something to do with our Swiss friends Jacques and Pierre. Their proposed hotel scheme for Katajanokka which was debated here last year, was presented in renderings that made this city look hard, gray and steely. To the hardness H+de M added their own contribution.

More frequently architects’ drawings and architectural journalism present the not-yet-built in more attractive terms that easily shade into the unrealistic. Like oasis-like greenery in the American desert, for instance, or (the architectural equivalent of motherhood and apple-pie) ecological sustainability, frequently rewarded these days if less frequently built, it seems.

So, dear reader(s), here is a photo (au naturel) of the past that gives a bit of a sense of how things have been around these parts. It was taken on the evening of Tuesday 27th July 2010. It shows Kaivokatu, one of Helsinki’s oldest streets. And it was taken from the rooftop terrace (=outdoor drinkery) of the Vaakuna Hotel/ Sokos department store/ 10th floor or Ravintola Loiste. Helsinki’s streets are filled with tanned people, lots of relaxed cyclists and a good smattering of happy faces. Oh, and tons of tourists.

JHJ and co went up to the terrace on the day before the warmest day on record in Helsinki (said one free paper). Part of a heat-wave that’s sat on this part of the world for a few weeks now.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised given the adaptability of the human animal, but it seems that most people in Helsinki have become quite used to it being hot and humid.

For the record. Today, Thursday 29th July 2010, it began to rain in the centre of Helsinki at 21.24 local time.

P.S. 21.51 and the rain has ceased.

Unlock! Liberate! Regenerate that shoreline!

Architecture, some folks say, is the biggest star of urban politics now. There’s some truth to this. Wherever you look, it seems, there are either thrusting cranes or brash advertising slogans proclaiming the recently-constructed, soon-to-be-opened or newly-regenerated urban experience.

Even the never-likely-to-be-built but still eye-catching schemes of computer-aided and latte-fuelled architects’ studios are also getting more and more media coverage. In Helsinki also. Who knows, Herzog and de Meuron’s ice-cube hotel might yet make a return, or ideas for a wooden skyscraper in Katajanokka…

So it is sort of refreshing (if not lacking in elements of scariness) to see the Helsinki City Planning Department start from the ground up in a new exhibition about the future of the city. This future vision is currently on display at Laituri but also in a touring version at the London Festival of Architecture and will do a stint at Helsinki Design Week at Kaapeli in late August too.

The vision in question is, of course, the waterfronts of Helsinki vacated when cargo shipping and other harbour functions were moved to the edge of town to Vuosaari. Readers of JHJ will know that many of us think this is a city of elegant and human-scale buildings that has tended to shun flamboyance yet has achieved occasional architectural brilliance. It has also long been referred to as the the Daughter of the Baltic – cue images of Engel’s masterful Senate Square with the Cathedral shining in the sun…

In 2010 though that language and those images feel old, too old. So the Planning Department uses a newer language in its new product, Tailwind: Helsinki Horizon 2030 and tells us:

Helsinki is faced with changes on a magnitude that the city has not experienced for more than a century. Vast harbour and industrial areas have been liberated in the city centre and will be developed over the coming decades into three new urban districts.

The little touring exhibition is built into a shipping container. Its packaging, if nothing else, thus recalls some uses for waterfronts that aren’t about luxury housing development. We mean waterfronts before they were “liberated” as the Planning Department has it.

At which point the cynics in JHJ’s editorial offices wish we could have in writing a promise that all waterfronts in Helsinki in 2030 really will be open to the public and not (as in much of London) locked up behind gates, security guards and offensively ugly buildings put there simply to make profit.

While it’s in London, Helsinki’s exhibition container has been set up behind the Oxo Tower, a commercially successful and iconic  success of waterfont development along the River Thames. It’s not too ugly either, though we do want to stress that the process of removing docks from London has produced some truly, horribly dynamitable architecture. The waterfront is also where you’ll find lots of the thoroughly objectionable urban design of the kind we just mentioned. We really, really want to underline the offensiveness of the locks, gates and more subtle privatisations that this regeneration or “liberation” of the waterfront brought with it in London.

But back to the promises for the future being offered by Helsinki. The container was opened by Hannu Penttila (below), one of the mayors of Helsinki and it’s going to be on show there until July 4th.

Helsinki is embarking on the process of reorganising this “liberated” land some 40-50 years later than the famous centres of colonial commodity trading like London or the former rustbelt towns like Pittsburgh.

Helsinki can benefit from hindsight then. So there is at least a theoretical chance that it will learn from the mistakes of these precursors. And since we gather Copenhagen’s waterfront is quite nice though we haven’t seen it, we expect great things. We are watching!

Time and Place (or H:ki squeezes into English-language architectural press)

One of the problems with the now scuppered hotel scheme for Helsinki’s Katajanokka, was that the architects (Pierre and Jacques) didn’t demonstrate much local knowledge. Someone with local knowledge of how the area works over time, day to day, season to season, was bound to balk not just at the visual impact of the thing. They were also bound to try to get their heads around how a starchitectural hotel would effect the traffic bottlenecks on the way to what is still an island, and what it would do to the visual arc created by the buildings around the market place, and consider how the market itself would be affected and, of course, they would appreciate the length of shadows in this part of the world.

The area in question is, perhaps, a planner’s nightmare, particularly now that urban space is so definitely, so unutterably commercially, a luxury that a public can only afford, apparently, if it’s provided in partnership with a private “developer”. (I refer you to my short course on entrepreneurial urban governance a while back). In fact, the area is an “urban fragment” according to architecture writer Malcolm Quantrill that even the venerable Alvar Aalto himself struggled with (… my reading of the text finds no trace of irony in this observation by Quantrill …) when he designed the Enso-Gutzeit “palazzo” sticking out of Kanavaranta. That building (the original white [sugar] cube?) has been causing double-takes and not a little disgust at modern architecture  since 1961. Originally Aalto had envisaged – along with many others – something grander, more central to the nation’s collective memory and its future, a parliament building for the site. Alas, what resulted, in the view of many a Helsinkian, was a fragment in the sense of something violently detached from its surrounding, connected whole. In 1993 though, another government building was completed up the street, by Olli Pekka Jokela, which goes some way towards repairing the sense of brokenness (in the pic above the white facade; peeking just above the now-redundant terminal building in the pic below).

Quantrill’s otherwise intriguing text reads as if he didn’t know Helsinki too well either, since he writes that it’s a city which lacks a sense of “downtown”. Either he never made arrangements to meet under the clock at Stockmann (see picture below) or things have changed since the piece was written, one assumes either late 1970s or 1980s. As a native I can guarantee that downtown definitely is there, and it definitely reaches, if not all the way to the Kajatanokka waterfont site, at least to the tram stop at Manta (whose future is, alas, shrowded in the mysteries of the Planning Department’s illogical or at least elusive argumentation).

From his London perspective Jonathan Glancey, on the other hand, has a powerful sense of what is lost if global fashions take over and destroy the times and places that urban (and other) folks dwell in. Writing with his usual forthrightness and wit in Building Design today, he notes that Stockholm is under threat of the “world class city” treatment and adds that Helsinki is too:

This means historic buildings being vandalised to ensure they suit the needs of wilfully vulgar global “brand” shops, the rerouting of trams from the historic centre because these, apparently, aren’t best suited to tourist-oriented “pedestrianisation” schemes and the loss of a culture famous for fighting off invaders and going its own happily modest way. “World class cities” spells architectural bombast, bling and banality.

At least the Vikings look as if they’re sharpening their locally forged swords ready to fight for a true sense of place.
Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=427&storycode=3162340&channel=427&c=1#ixzz0ltZOQ1Re

Well, since it’s arguable whether Finns are Vikings (Fenno-Ugric types is a more common attribution) we hope this doesn’t suggest that Finns are doing something in CONTRAST to Swedes.

Below, the Sokkers clock during that bi-annual (twice a year) bout of madness.

Dreaming of pi(a)zza

S Stefano di Sessino from flickr by a kruder396

People keep telling me that former mayor Pekka Korpinen is behind the efforts to “enliven” or “regenerate” Helsinki’s street life, urban vibe and architectural blandness [what the f***!]. I do remember his name cropping up over and over again in relation to some architectural scheme or other, usually in the vein of glass-and-steel supposedly transparent corporate mediocrity.

Then again, I can’t remember a single one of those many examples.

So, I wonder whether the new urban myth has any truth to it. What I keep hearing is that both the strenuously un-mediocre ice-hotel by the Swiss Herzog+deMeron (which was a Korpinen initiative and which he defends here) and the still hardly-talked-about crimes-in-the-making along the side of the Senate Square, have their roots in Mr Korpinen’s liking for piazzas. Apparently he got to really like piazza life while living in Rome for a while. (This biographical detail suggests that there is some substance to the story, no?) Though maybe he is inspired by the wise patrons and philosophically inclined architects in some parts of Italy who planned towns and cities in the 1400s. Or maybe he is blithely unconcerned by the short-termist havoc wreaked by many of his 15th-century predecessors in the adminitrations of Italy’s market towns.

How does one say plus ça change in Italian?

Whatever the answers to all these pertinent questions, there are plenty among the elite of today’s governing classes who are hooked on Tuscany at least. Must digress enough to say my heart does go out to the citizens of L’Aquila whose wheelbarrow protest, see a film here, speaks of the planning madnesses of our times (there’s a sad story about exploiting a natural event to exploit a local population there!) Anyway, I like piazza life in Italy and southern France myself. I also like a sunshade when the sun is beating down from almost directly overhead.

I also like to think that the substantial inconvenience of Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption could be a reminder to anyone still lost in a fog of digitally enhanced unreality and blind faith in technological progress, that the world is not ours to mess with endlessly. In fact, I have much sympathy for those who set up the facebook fan-club of the Icelandic volcano. On the other hand, wouldn’t we all prefer video-conferencing to enforced business flying anyway?

I also had considerable sympathy for the chaps at VR (national railways) whose work was a nightmare (I’m speculating) last winter as a result of blind faith in a lean, mean, just-in-time and utterly unresilient railway network operating in a country with a substantial history of substantial snowfall.

So, here’s to old-fashioned nature, the kind that does what it will, sometimes to the rhythm of familiar seasons with the sun shining from really quite predictable angles and sometimes doing less predictable but, for most of us, still not crisis-inducing things. So, while some dream of piazzas, let’s remind ourselves of reality with a few pics of befores and afters.

That’s the bar, Loop, with Aalto’s energy building in the background on the left. Then there’s the future cycle lane, former freight train shaft running down at the bottom of Eteläinen Rautatiekatu, lovely in the snow, less so without.

And then there are the bikes. The mind still boggles as to how all the abandoned ones were recouped and refurbished after that long, cold, lovely winter.

Waiting for the dust to settle

While Iceland comes to terms with its latest volcanic eruption and, according to the gentleman on YLE YKSI with impending floods as it melts the glacier around it, the online media’s attention is almost exclusively fixed on the dust that’s stopped air travel.

Dust, in spring, in Finland? Everywhere where those men with hoses and brushes or, more modernly, little street-sweeper trucks haven’t managed to clear away the winter’s grit.

In the background there is Katajanokka, from the other side, not the side that the tourists or even most of the angry commentators would think about. One suspects that if Herzog+deMeuron’s ice cube had been given permission, it would actually be extremely visible from quite a lot of angles – but not this one.

It seems there is a lot of dust yet to settle on this debacle, but then its dynamics were quite spectacular in running roughshod over any semblance of democractic process in urban planning, including public debate and maybe even consultation and certainly including bending an ear to the experts. Now local papers and online forums as well as face-to-face encounters, are going over what went wrong. An item in Töölöläinen, a local paper that seems to be doing regular features on architecture, headlined “Häirikkörakentamiselle piste”, or “Full Stop to ASBO Construction” (as it were). Still, the usual suspects are suggesting that nothing should prevent Norwegian inward investment from coming to the rescue of municipal finances, but perhaps they’re the same folks who’d a) sell their grandmother as well as the family jewels to stay globally competitive and b) who see the Senate Square as just a pile of old stones that aren’t being exploited to their full commercial potential.

People are saying, “never again”. Alas, it’s likely with all this waterfront land and all these non-critics of commercially driven urban development in charge of the whole thing, that we’ll be seeing loads more of this sort of thing. Already, the fact that they, experts that is (including highly respected international architects who are intimate with Helsinki), were consulted and then summarily ignored to the huge extent that they were, is possibly a new departure in Finnish political culture where, thus far, trust in the experts and the authorities has been almost moving (naive?) and ubiquitous.

Perhaps a decade and a half inside the European Union has brought Finns into line with others across the continent who are less respecting of authorities, or maybe the silliness around parliamentary expenses in recent months has raised levels of mistrust. Or, shock, horror!! Have Finnish decision makers, whether politicians, bankrollers or municipal officers, always had a tendency, as architecture writer Paula Holmila observes, to flex their muscles when they feel those around them need to be reminded who’s in charge…?

Of course, experts of various sorts have protested eloquently and loudly since the hotel scheme was first made public. And they did so again in anticipation of the vote earlier this month. Let’s just remind ourselves of one of the reasons for why the scheme had to be turned down, that is, it’s visual impact.

Relief in absentia – waterfront potential (again)

Well, we’ve been rather concentrated on other matters, other event-spaces than Helsinki. Thus the date we had once dreaded came and went without notice. Until, that is, Arkkivahti‘s feed reminded us of the issue of the month: the icy waterfront hotel scheme.

Well, on the seventh of April 2010 Herzog & deMeuron’s icy cross was turned down by the City Council. The local media – based on a v. quick internet search, i.e. Hesari and one or two others – seems to be engaged in some quasi-critical reflection in which it is suggested that the ‘antis’ were (as is usually the case in fast-capitalism), well, if not wrong, at least populist and thus discreditable. We hope there will be more sophisticated and design-savvy commentary elsewhere in time to come, as there was in November for instance, as reported via this blog.

But hey, maybe after six months, a year, three – depending on where you were in the networks of government and construction partnerships, or how keen you were to keep politicians accountable for public space – an outporing of one sort or another was to be expected.

So now, dear friends, with the demise of this bit of silliness (for that it was, however grand a design this seemed) Helsinki’s decision makers (who do, yes, still make the odd decision) have unblocked the development potential of an important and highly valued site. Put another way, just think what a sterile pursuit it is for a city in the boreal zone (cold and coniferous) to plug its waterfront with accommodation for tourists!

Eyes peeled then in months to come for Taivallahti.  Not for tourists, but not for many others either, there’s also the eastern edge of Lauttasaari (below X 3  last November, interestingly YIT the construction firm gets far more coverage than the architects). Whatever else next…

Architecture, global capital and really big countries

There are different ways one could look at the prospect of a two-tier-Swiss-flag-in-glass popping up on the waterfront by Helsinki’s market square. Here’s one, for example.

The port of Helsinki closed down harbour functions here some while ago and what we have left is largely disused building or car-parking space. So perhaps it is time to move on from the port’s understanding (see website) that this is just some prime-quality SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

Though of course it isn’t, and never was, left over that is.The idea of getting some of that footloose and still relatively abundant global (Norwegian) capital to settle in Helsinki is never, so it would seem, far from the minds of the city’s decision makers. Will Finns soon be meekly going where many others have gone before?

Having expanded at length on the HDHD previously and since the damning views by the international commentators are available online anyway (oh, Mr Holl, Helsinki needs you now!) we’ll move on to other aspsects of the debacle. For instance, waterfront development generally. Here’s what Finnish researchers Rauno Sairinen and Satu Kumpulainen had to say about it before the money wobble:

Today, urban waterfront regeneration takes place in a societal environment of increased capital mobility and inter-urban competition (…). Because cities have to compete for investments and affluent residents, city governments cannot merely manage the development, i.e. focus on the redistribution of resources, but have to actively pursue investments and publicity … Urban governance has expanded to involve not only the government but also a range of private and semi-public actors. This approach … based on public–private partnership, flagship projects, aggressive marketing and consumption-oriented projects such as retail and tourism centres, has been labelled entrepreneurial urban governance (…), and it is often well exemplified by large-scale urban waterfront regeneration projects.

(From ‘Assessing social impacts in urban waterfront regeneration’  in Environmental Impact Assessment Review 26 (2006) 120– 135)

If you left things at that, you’d want to give up on any semblance of critical debate whatsover and of course they don’t. In fact, the authors note that

According to the Land Use and Building Act there should be adequate investigation of
a plan’s potential environmental impacts, including implications for the community
economy, social, cultural and other effects. … environmental impacts are
understood as direct and indirect effects on:
– people’s living conditions and environment;
– plants and animals, water, air and climate;
– flora and fauna, biodiversity and natural resources;
– regional and community structure, community and energy economy and traffic;
– townscape, landscape, cultural heritage and the built environment.

Well, we haven’t seen these yet for the plot in question. Nor can we find anything recent on the City Planning Department’s website (even on its sweetly titled “participate and influence” page). [Updated 24.3] Initially we found no trace of the report on the cultural and architectural values of the area that was promised by Hannu Penttila a month or so ago and cheered us up so but a polite email to the City Planning Department fixed that problem and provided the link (in Finnish).

And why are we bothered? Because Helsingin Sanomat and other media reported that the hotel scheme is back off ice again, to be voted on early next month. The City Board already decided it was in favour of Norwegian money in the shape of a luxury hotel by ueber-starchitects Herzog + de Meuron, even while tons of other folks, including the Katajanokka Seura (local amenity society) are collecting signatures to make the (horrid) thing go away. In the mean time, however, the poor old politicians appear to be more and more worried that if they don’t embrace the thing (which some admit to not liking) they feel bound to go with it just so they get their hands on that money.

Alas, to imagine politicians saving municipal budgets through savvy real estate deals is to indulge in make-believe. And we don’t just mean Helsinki – London’s own spectacular Canary Wharf had to be saved by massive, massive injections of public money and by “legal” bolsterings of private enterprise.

And yet there is a precedent in Helsinki. Not knowing what was up, I photographed these port-a-cabins which signalled the start of something new to me back in September. Another hole in the ground perhaps, for Southern Helsinki’s fecundly reproducing cars, I thought at first. I didn’t find out about that one either on the Planning Department’s media outlets but rather via The Usual. It’s the plot on Neitsytpolku, (maybe Helsink’s answer to Maiden Lane) also known (aptly? ironically?) as the Kätilöopisto (College of Midwifery or Birthing Hospital) site. It was sold off in 1990 by the city to the Soviet Union, whose embassy was next door. Sale price: a paltry 75million granny’s markkas. Over the next few years the decision was bitterly contested as some folks suggested getting the land back, others at least to insist that planning permission be conditional on an architectural competition to include Finnish entrants. Didn’t happen.

In those days the journalists at The Usual looked to typical blunders of the times to inject a tone of criticism. They considered the various embassy buildings that Helsinki had, in moments of lax judgement it suggested, sold off to sovereign foreign states who then blithely ignored architectural context if not always planning regulations. Interestingly, they saved their most venomous language for the Norwegians and how they replaced a jugend villa by Selim Lindqvist with a box of aluminium and glass (perhaps to remind them of back home in Oslo?).

This could all be quite amusing if it weren’t for the way 21st architecture is getting just SOOOO BIIIG which in little Helsinki really doesn’t appeal at all. Mr Holl, if you have any views on Katajanokka or Helsinki still, might you publish somewhere prominent quite soon?

Swiss duo’s icy hotel scheme goes on ice

It’s snowy and icy in Helsinki this winter. Four seasons, four reasons used to be the Finnish tourist board’s main slogan about the country, but in recent years winter got rather shortened and washed out. Maybe that’s why the city fathers thought fit to push through the designer hotel scheme by architects Herzog and de Meuron (followed closely on this blog earlier) despite the massive criticisms, just so that the icy hotel’s visual impact would remind Helsinkians that this was once a city of guaranteed ice for at least a few months a year.

Here, a small reminder of what it was to look like… and there are more icy images still on the city’s website.

If winter has tended to be washed out in recent years, this year is certainly snowy and icy. And there was more snow fall this morning.

Another thing that happened this morning was that YLE broadcast the FABULOUS news that the city is finally convinced – through the continuing avalanche of reasoned as well as irate critique – that the harbour area where the hotel was due to be plonked is too valuable, nationally and internationally, in terms that cannot presumably be reduced to a monetary value, to be sacrificed to thoughtless development. A study of the whole area as a cultural historical area is to be commissioned. Spearheading the critique have been local amenity organisations Helsinki Seura and Katajanokka Seura who petitioned and made use of facebook – once again – to make their voice heard. Though on this one, it must be said that even oldies who care nought for facebook and don’t know how to use the internet, have been voicing their disgust in print and, er, in voice for months.

One of the Helsinki mayors, Hannu Penttilä, is interviewed in a clip on YLE. He mentions that an architecture competition for the entire harbour area is to be announced. He also admits that it’s a bit shameful that the research (mapping the cultural and historic values of the area, as they say) wasn’t done earlier.

Leaving us here at JHJ to muse on what passes for “evidence” in contemporary decision making. Pretty mysterious, it would seem, ditto the role of expert representations, all of which made it clear as clear can be (icy clear?) months ago already, that putting the hotel in this place was a BAD idea.

Meanwhile jobs for the (other) boys as excess ice needs to be cleared away …

Lumpy cultural space

Helsinki will soon have a new live music venue (as even BBC listeners will know). The media are preoccupied meanwhile with the possibility of more new architecture to house the arts on the expanse of land between the Railway station and Töölö Bay. A hodge-podge of attempts at iconic buildings is a real possibility, at least if the letters pages to the usual suspects are to be believed.

Meanwhile it’s not the container but the contents of the art that’s preoccupying Helsinki’s art world. While the Ateneum (built 1887) drew in punters by the coach-load to see Pablo Picasso’s super-famous works, in 2009 it seems almost all other exhibition spaces saw their visitor numbers decline – and massively. Feast or famine …

For instance, Emma, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, which has a disused former industrial space in which to display a permanent collection as well as variously interesting visiting shows, had half the number of visitors in 2009 compared to 2008 (Below the work by sculptor Raimo Utriainen in front its main entrance). Helsingin Sanomat 5.2.2010 reports similar figures for other shows in the capital region.

Surely this can’t be good news. But Helsinki isn’t alone in suffering – we think that’s the correct word – from this kind of spatial lumpiness. Some places are packaged as a must-see cultural experience. If they are successful in their efforts, the momentum of positive feedback – media coverage – will accelerate and reach the whole tourist world in no time. No wonder some places get swamped while others get overlooked. (Interactive media, the communications mode of choice in a do-it-yourself economy, is partly to blame, but let others deal with that!)

Swooping ever so briefly beyond Finland’s borders, not to Bilbao, famous for its great container of art, but to London, famous for, well, art and stuff. Most of which could, for decades, be found north of the Thames (excepting Dulwich Picture Gallery, but that was almost in the country when it was built in 1811.) For historical reasons the South Bank of the Thames was left to industry and poverty. Herzog and de Meuron, the Swiss duo (who so upset some folks in Helsinki) did something quite remarkable there when helped “revitalise” the South Bank of the Thames with the Tate Modern in 2000. It is a beautiful art space and a source of justified pride. The old Bankside power station built there by Giles Gilbert Scott was a great piece of architecture in itself, perfectly situated across from St Pauls. (Let’s be frank, nobody was ever going to allow anything as prosaic as a power station to be constructed there).

But the Tate has been TOO successful. The original redesign by Herzog and de Meuron made brilliant use of the old space with minimal and always respectful changes to the industrial building. Now, as architecture writer Hugh Pearman argues, it’s as if folks want to come to the Tate not to look at the art, but just because everyone else does. Result? An extension is being built, to designs by the same architects, which, JHJ in its rather conservative mood, fears will detract from the thing that made the “original” so appealing – its ingenious and life-embracing reuse of a box-like, calma and a few decades old, but not demolition-ready, piece of great industrial architecture.

Also a former power station, Suvilahti in Helsinki may become another cultural centre to “regerate” post-industrial waste. Though plans are still very much open. The venue is certainly wonderful, even if it is hemmed in by motorway on one side and water on the other.

It does make one think what a weird world we live in, where spaces are either to neglected they’re thought of as wasted, or so vaunted that the only way to enjoy them is as part of a crowd.

Or was the lack of crowds in  Finnish venues besides the Ateneum just a symptom of recession?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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