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.

Nature itself supports the Helsinki City Planning Department’s Visions

Today, 28.5.2012, is the last day for the public to submit comments regarding the planning proposal for a 33-storey hotel just to the west of the city centre, in Jätkäsaari. Late submissions have been known to have been accepted.

Read and acted upon?

That’s different.

According to a glossy corporate website, the Kämp Tower luxury hotel will open in November 2014.

This statement does fly in the face of the plan currently in force (allowing 16 storeys, itself pretty startling and, for architects, challenging, in the current Helsinki context). Such a prospect is also clearly devastating to many Helsinkians. Others are blissfully unaware of the plan, of course.

Future neighbours and some urban aficianados do know. After a public relations hearing in January, followed by a period of soliciting the public’s views (you know, citizen participation) the Planning Department published a robust rebuttal of the critical views. Called a review of the public consultation, you will find this if you swim around the Department’s haphazardly updated website often enough.

Alternatively, if you’re lucky, you may find it via this link to the minutes of the planning committee’s meeting held 13.3.2012. Liite (enclosure) 9 is a report outlining some of the objections to changing the currently valid development plan so that it could accommodate the 33-storey conference-centre-hotel that our Norwegian investor-friend (yes, he of the Herzog and de Meuron debacle in Katajanokka) wants.

Basically, most of the public sees the plans as inappropriate, bad and threatening Helsinki’s most cherished assets.

The Department pooh-poohs such retrograde opinions. The 33-storey hotel is appropriate to the site. It is a good thing for Helsinki and the surrounding areas. It does not in any way threaten the development of the city.

Not incidentally, the implication is that if one is against these very 33 storeys, one is against progress.

JHJ is not impressed with the way “public participation” is interpreted at the City Planning Department. Why would anyone bother to send any more comments, given that the obvious and pretty substantial comments made so far have been dismissed already?

No wonder so many people in Helsinki comment on the power of the City Planning Department. It is said that it employs well over a hundred people, maybe over 200, and operates behind closed doors. On their contacts page though it looks like it’s barely 50 folks.

Someone somewhere though is churning out one heck of a lot of strong rhetoric, verbal and visual, which appears to be paving the way to a strong change in the cityscape and atmosphere of our lovely pocket-sized capital.

A wooden monument to optimism

This post is effectively a huge thanks to Dan Hill and everyone else at Helsinki Design Lab/Sitra where they are promoting low-carbon urban planning. The freshly pressed visualizations on their blog, of the bizarreness otherwise known as parking norms in Helsinki, should make it harder than before for the peddlers of business-as-usual to argue their case. For, as JHJ has noted before, it should not be an easy case to make. (But then in Helsinki cases aren’t so much made or argued, it’s more a case of taking and sticking to positions. Read on.)

Yesterday’s post on the HDL blog compares new-build in London (the massive Shard skyscraper at London Bridge) and in Helsinki (the massive New Helsinki boom that is transforming what used to be Helsinki’s West Harbour). Note, the Helsinki project is being peddled as exquisitely green. Dan then on the HDL-blog (here’s that link again):

A typical block [in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki] will be designed to have around 7 floors and have to make space for approximately 120 parking spaces. Both cities are well-served by public transport (in fact, Helsinki has previously been voted as having the best public transport in Europe) and Helsinki being a compact city, you could walk to most bits of central Helsinki from Jätkäsaari.

But the visuals, only one of which I’m copying here because it’s worth reading the whole post (there was the link again) are really provocative:

http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/blog/week-165

On the back of this, let us pontificate: for Helsinki to stay as lovely as it is, let alone become even lovelier, its management must get rid this tendency to clog things up either with cars or sclerotic ideas. HDL’s visual will help.

What it will also require, though, is something that is in shockingly short supply here, namely self critique. In fact any kind of critique (not to be confused with dissing or haukkua in Finnish) would be a bonus.

Instead of debate and self-critique, we have something that makes me think of the allegro of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, oddly enough: Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Happy gathering of country folk).

As lovely as Helsinki is, endless self-congratulation is tiresome. The UK’s The Independent newspaper is the latest to pour heaps of dubiously argued (argued?!) praise on the whole country. Sure, it was once a fabulous place, and still is. But it sure is at risk of being messed up by amateurish and selfish decision-making, as any regular readers of our rants must know. Helsinki’s media (social and journalist-produced) is in danger of turning into a wooden monument to (misplaced) optimism. (The phrase borrowed with a twist from that excellent blog post. Did I already give the link?)

Helsinki optimism is really getting to us actually. Perhaps a short trip to smelly London is called for. It’s not as nice as Helsinki, but one knows that it will give one an injection of critical thinking. For instance the politically engaged Planners Network UK who know that now is not the time to foist solutions on others as much as to ask questions (Disorientation-guide pdf). Healthy disorientation in a time of obvious crisis (obvious outside Finland) can also be achieved through urban gardening in London. Looking forward.

Car farce update

It may be due to the efforts of Deputy Mayor Hannu Penttilä. It may be a result of avid blogging and some good use of newspaper inches. But the final result is …

… that the Hem i Stan association who are building a new, green and sociable, type of residential block in Jätkäsaari are in fact allowed to pursue their effort without adding to the city’s still growing menace of motor cars.

As many a blogger and journalist is noting, Helsinki’s planning regulations are totally insane in this regard. When a centrally located development, in an area moreover that’s touted as super-green, wants to save money and the planet by building for people not cars, it gets punished. Almost.

Today, the news is that they have been “allowed” an “exception” to build only 24 parking spaces instead of the 46 that the law (!) requires. And they have to build a few more for passing trade. (And we thought this area was to be brilliant for public transport.)

Now that this controversy has opened some people’s eyes, perhaps those who make the rules will be inspired to change them. And if not, they must stop claiming that Helsinki’s policy is to reduce car use in favour of other transport modes.

Should a voter, politician, official or a generally curious Finnish reader want to know more about how much better and cheaper it would be to build cities around public transport links, they could do worse than to check out the calculations on this fun blog. Seems the pressure to build for cars comes at least partly from the way the state, rather than the city, subsidises road building.

We knew it was complicated.

Helsinki car farce

If anyone can shed light on this weird story, do please let us know.

There have been a few news items recently (here in pay-to-read HS) about a spat in the City Council over parking spaces. Representatives of Kokoomus (whose supporters generally like big cars) are unhappy that representatives of the Greens (whose supporters profess to dislike all cars) appear to be gaining unfair advantage in Jätkäsaari. Bizarrely enough, we know now what cars they all drive (or don’t)!

Jätkäsaari is one of New Helsinki’s building sites now. It used to be a place folks went to swim and hang out. Then it became harbour. Then it became container harbour. Then it became a field of concrete before the builders arrived.

The City is plugging the reasonable idea that Jätkäsaari lends itself to particularly environment-friendly living. One of the buildings will be Sitra’s Low2No project. Another is a communal block being built by the Hem i Stan association for their own needs. As the article in Helsingin Energia’s recent newsletter pdf put it:

Rakentamisen periaatteina ovat yhteisöllisyys, ekologisuus
ja esteettömyys. Yhteisiä tiloja rakennetaan tuplasti sen
verran kuin kerrostaloihin yleensä.
– Kattoterassi ja sauna, pesula, juhlasali ja suurtalouskeittiö
astioineen asukkaiden yhteisiä tai kunkin omia tilaisuuksia
varten, yhteinen olohuone…

or

The principles of the building are community, environmentalism and access. There’ll be twice as many communal spaces as in an ordinary block of flats.

- A roofterrace, sauna, laundry room, banquet room [juhlasali, anyone?] with a large kitchen so residents can organise shared or even private parties, shared living room…

Sounds great! And since these people have taken on board the hype about green Jätkäsaari being near public transport links, they feel they can survive with fewer cars.

And how this pisses others off!! And the others may yet force the builders to add a million Euro to the budget and remove 22 parking spaces worth of scarce resource to meet Helsinki’s building standards. Legally.

What we don’t understand is how this became a party-political thing. Except that, unsurprisingly, some of the folks involved and due to own property here, happen to be Green politicians. Good for them, say we.

Besides, we had always thought that parking standards are about reducing car-dependency, as it puts a strain on shared resources. But it seems in Helsinki parking standards don’t set maximums but minimums.

The only legal or regulatory info we found was  from Finlex, Finnish law. The statutes, from 1958, stipulates that enough (not specified) space must be provided for private vehicles.

Not for real

Helsinki is in a period just like it was 100 years ago. Hmm, that would have been when Helsingfors guys like Bertel Jung and Eliel Saarinen, the architect-planners, and Julius Tallberg, the businessman with visions, were dreaming up ambitious, crazy stuff, and designing slightly less crazy stuff that many of us take for granted today.

Just like then, there’s a lot of future-talk again in Helsinki: we will have so and so many thousand new homes; so and so many square metres of office space; so and so much retail space. Numbers, numbers, numbers…

But of course, we must also have soul, ideas and flamboyant ambition (not forgetting innovation, creativity or design, but then again, how could one?)

But in the 21st century a city plan starts with the public. “The public”, it appears, has to have something “concrete” too. Architectural drawings are too difficult, so that means providing fun in 3D, something you can touch. Here’s an example from Helsinki’s “future new centre”, Jätkäsaari.

Helsinki’s public was once again invited to come and see what Jussi Pajunen (mayor) has in store for it. It was admittedly lovely to see an architectural model (even nicer than the computer-animation on the wall nearby). But you can’t help thinking that these not-quite-legos are not quite what planning is really about.

Just a few days earlier the public’s kids were given building blocks to play with as they took mum and dad out for a Sunday in Helsinki (as in the pic below, from the City Hall on 12.6.2011).

And yet, JHJ wonders whether really great cities have ever been or ever will come out of leg0-games (planning for real, design charrettes and all that).

After all, much of what makes Helsinki the magical place it (still) is, is thanks to the work of Saarinen and Jung and their contemporaries 100 years ago. We mean the stuff they were allowed to build as opposed to the crazy stuff they came up with that they were not allowed to build. Can’t help thinking they had no children’s play-area or even “New Helsinki info-area” to inspire them.

Wonder what did inspire them.

Up and down like a …

Yo-yo? Whore’s drawers? (Though I’ve already once been told off for using that word on this blog I thought I’d share it with you). Anyway, what’s going up and down is Helsinki’s temperature.

Here was the sun trying to come out a few days ago.

When this blog was dreamt up it never, ever would have occurred to me that so much of it would be about weather.

Two very snowy winters, with a hot summer sandwiched between them, have given us plenty to comment on with variously successful efforts at connecting the weather up to the built environment. And of course it’s connected.

Builders, ignore weather and climate at your peril! Trial and error, some learning and a bit of human imagination, one hopes, helped produce thick walls to keep out heat or cold. Finland has plenty of threshold spaces to help make the passage from one extreme to another like Italy has arcades to create shade and so on and so forth.

Today the mercury dipped to well below -10 degrees and we had lovely sunshine that made even newly erected lift-shafts look faintly attractive. (Actually I have a bit of a liking for them, sculptures that remind us of what’s in a building.) I thought here in Jätkäsaari, the former docks, there was going to be an urban area of maximum 7-story residential buildings. I am finding it difficult to get information on what these shafts will serve. A Marriot hotel? No, says an FAQ sheet from a recent public discussion evening? Anyone?

What I had so far not come across in Finland, however, was this (below). Though in a life spent in institutional and other buildings in Britain I am used to the idea that some things might need extra warming.

P.S. this is from the newly opened, well, almost opened Jätkäsaari Information Point. The venue as a whole was quite well heated and generally promising, and not at all like British institutional building – guess they just hadn’t got around to fixing the loo-roll-holder.

Respect the low sun

You have to bear in mind where you are. Here I was, in the centre of Helsinki, way before the dreaded turning forward of the clocks, and already the early afternoon sunshine had put half of the world into a long shadow – along with the 140 United Buddy Bears, due to be packed up on 26.10.

It’s interesting that non-Finnish architects and planners appear to have such a sensitivity to these kinds of factors. In fact, many locals definitely don’t! Probably though, it’s just wishful thinking, you know, hoping against hope (and cosmology) that you could enjoy a latte right here, on the south side of Helsinki’s Senate Square, that the Italian piazza and the New York skyscraper would make Finland so much more interesting.

Engel, who masterplanned the Senate Square 200 years ago was a foreigner too. No doubt he spent weeks and months analysing the site before presenting his plans to the city.

Ditto some of teh international design teams that have been pondering pondered “New Helsinki”, Jätkäsaari in particular. It is set to become Finland’s flagship no-carbon or low-carbon project. Sitra, the innovation people, organised a design competition last year, and slowly a new type of urban entity will start to appear in SW Helsinki.

Peter Rose and partners didn’t win, but their entry is on the Low2No website. We here at JHJ like the name or their entry: Low Carbon-High Urban. Also, it’s wonderful how seriously the architects have taken the problem of how to make best use of the sun, that source of free energy. Here’s what they note about sunshine and street layout:

South facing streets and long, narrow buildings are optimal for maximizing exposure to sunlight at this northern latitude. Maximizing the amount of daylight would not only reduce energy use but also improve people’s sense of well being.

And so this is what they proposed.

It was they who said in the video on the website, “you have to respect the low sun”.

If only more Finnish planners and urbanists would adopt their kind of tone – the self-evident need to get private cars outta here, to make it so people are never more than 2 minutes from a tram stop, to use the opportunities to connect the new neighbourhood to what’s next door and to the suburbs of the entire area.

Ever so politely, the architects Rose and Schuler ticked off Finns for chucking dirty water into the sea and for using so much electricity. Basically it’s too cheap so all you have to do is cut down demand! And they suggest a the use of wood gas as a fuel for an on-site micro electrical and heat generator.

Equally politely, they seemed to be saying, don’t mess up these great opportunitites in Helsinki not-such-wonderful master plans. Think!

Bubblegum wor(l)ds

Just the other day we were writing about the frictionless aspect of contemporary writing on this very blog. Were we not concerned about the way Helsinki’s own little village voice* bandies about language as if the national media were just sharing a bit of ephemeral fluff for clever kids to play with?

Serious architecture writers will, theoretically speaking at least, have their work cut out for them once Helsinki starts to develop its waterside, like Jätkäsaari below.

Architecture critics are not a massive professional group, particularly not in Finland, and many of them don’t earn their daily bread from what they write about buildings and urban design. Someone who apparently does rely on fees for articles researched and written is our old friend Arkkivahti, whose recent blog waxes angry as well as amusing on the injustices of a media system (she starts, unsurprisingly with said village rag*) that allows commercial interest (writing sponsored by construction firms) to trump journalistic values. She even has a go at Jorma Mukala, chief editor of the wonderful Ark-magazine, for admitting in the interview conducted by said village rag*, that it’s actually necessary to take up construction firms’ offers of overseas travel to learn about new architectural sites.

Someone who gets to travel in search of such sites is another old friend Jonathan Glancey. Writing about the Venice Architecture Biennale, his words eerily echo some of the themes we’ve been thinking about over here at Jees Helsinki Jees recently. Here are some fragments of his text in Building Design 18.05.2010.

“incomprehensible or ineffably banal …”  “For one baffled moment, I thought the show was being curated by Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard rather than the Pritzker Prize-winning Sanaa architect Kazuyo Sejima. Asked to explainthe 2010 show, Sejima says: “The idea is to help people relate to architecture, to help architecture torelate to people, and to help people relate to themselves.” Or, as Pollard herself would have put it: “Yeah, but no, but yeah…”

Then there’s the Italian pavilion’s exhibit, called:

“AILATI: Reflections from the Future”. Che? I mean, you what? The name, in case you didn’t get it, is “a play on words, a reversal of the country’s name that opens up a new reading of contemporary architecture in an original and sideways glance at objects, reality and designs.” Va bene! The first section of the show is called “Amnesia”. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten what the other two are.”

Finally, we learn of a bubble-gum factory. A highly recommended read folks.

* Helsingin Sanomat, daily established in 1889 under the name Päivälehti, current circulation about 400 000, readership closer to a million. People boycotting it or annoyed with it, unquantifiable.

A certain scepticism

I have several themes to think about today, and here I’m going to try to stick to just two. I hope it will still make sense. If you’re not interested in my thinking by writing, please scroll down to the first picture and take it from there. That will be about Helsinki rather than yours truly.

Theme 1: scepticism, cynicism and the possibility of pink being blue, of “good” actually being “bad”. In an age of spin and image-mongering, this theme is likely to crop up again and again in relation to the built environment. Today it’s particularly in my face since I’ve had a couple of people tell me that I shouldn’t be so surprised that things are so bad in the world. Just one example, while I am puzzled by the way that Finns don’t seem at all interested in campaigning against their monopolising food retailers, despite both chatter and media coverage of the shortcomings of the food retail system, the locals (indegenes or “kanta-asukkaat”) seem to find no mystery at all in this. “Of course”, they say, “this is how the world is. How naive of you to think otherwise”, I hear the unspoken reprimand. But then my thoughts are drawn to the somewhat surprising contrast of the usually so complacent Brits who have been rising against their tescopolies and sainsburies for decades now, up and down the country. But though Finns I talk to agree with me that urban life is blighted by these monopolies, they will not engage in a discussion about why things are as they are, beyond observing that there’s always been monopolies and that corporatism (also glossed as old-boys networks) is alive and well in this country.

Why is this part of theme 1? Because it’s about asking whose version of reality gets transformed into material things. (Consensus, Finnish readers may not realise, is never neutral. Fortunately, here endeth the lesson.)

Theme 2: Who are cities for? Who is Helsinki for? This, I hope, is self-explanatory. Just in case it’s not, this writer sees more than enough worrying signs even in consensus-loving Finland’s cuddly little capital city, of the city being built as if good things came into the world through the actions of those at the top of the social ladder whilst bad things actually originate at the bottom.

(Does this link to theme 1: who is most likely to suspect the veracity and usefulness of this story? Those at the top? At the bottom? Finns who grew up with the sacredness of consensus?)

Whilst there’s no doubt that the beautiful buildings of Töölö or Eira (that I waxed lyrical about earlier) were built for those who could pay, their construction was accompanied by the arrival of other, more public spirited projects, both before and after Finnish independence in 1917. The patriarchal patronising of the poor wasn’t pretty then either, but its legacy, well, it is. OK, this workers’ housing is from Tampere, but in intent (charity of sorts) and aesthetic (the care lavished on its design and execution) in its context, it is definitely “good” and, to make the point, in no way “anti-social”.

By the turn of the millennium, a rather narrow definition of economics and the economy had ended up equating it with business in ways that benefitted those with money and power, and somehow urban decision making ended up reinforcing the power of those with money and the freedom to travel. The financial classes (let that be my shorthand for now, hope you’ll bear with it) had managed to get the idea rooted in decision making of all kinds that “the market” knows best yet must be propped up at all cost with poor people’s taxes, if necessary. Never mind that in 2008 their innovations with poor people’s money turned out to be disastrous for everyone, the physical legacy of this orthodoxy is with us around the world, from smaller towns no longer able to “attract” inward investment to mega-cities where poverty and super-wealth lay themselves out in a jigsaw of enclaves with more or less sharp boundaries between them.

Sorry, this is getting a bit academic. I hope to make it clear somehow, maybe in later posts. The point is, that Helsinki is not immune to these trends, and its decision makers and many of its people have apparently come to take it for granted that polarisation in income and thus in society is inevitable, and this will be visible in the townscape, however regrettable that is. The new buildings in Eiran Ranta, all for top-of-the-range private buyers and with a definite exclusive atmosphere complete with underground car-parking and a total absence of services or signs of anything as vulgar as economic activity (ironic, no?), were built within this new paradigm. A very rough straw-poll suggests that many are unhappy with them, they symbolise “new” wealth and a brashness that does not, so some say, suit Finns. But these are new times, needing new solutions. And by international comparisons, this is hardly radical. It may obscure the views of some previously privileged folks (well, to live in Eira they must still be pretty lucky) and gives little indication of any sense of being integrated into the rest of the neighbourhood, but, hey, it’s just another luxury development. Shame it’s no prettier, I suppose.

Meanwhile Jätkäsaari is one of the many harbour areas in the city left to developers now that the new harbour in Vuosaari is operational. In late August we heard that the construction of 250 flats for the use of 400 students had been approved by the city, and were shown a series of images of the dense, urban fabric to be built. The dominant national rag, HS, published an article too, with a couple of images, and sparked animated online debate about whether or not the plans were really “high rise” (there was some wrangling over definitions and lack of clarity about whether at 8 stories high, the buildings qualify). Elsewhere I came across praise for the city for actually giving over the waterside location to students and not merely to the traditional super-rich whose habit of hogging water-side developments has wrought so much ugliness not just in Eiran Ranta but also in London (which I know well enough to comment) and around the world. And not that I’m suggesting a competition for the ugliest buildings (plenty of august institutions are keeping up that particular tradition, all-too easily catered to with remarkably ugly waterside-developments in London).

And, to make my day even more confusing, I’m now aware that the city (Helsinki, or someone) has gone some way towards reassuring us more critical readers that not only is the new development to house real people living in real homes reproducing real society (as opposed to developing ever more fiendish schemes to make money grow out of nothing … er, other people’s effort, more like) that is STUDENTS, but it is concerned that the area should have REAL SHOPS TOO. Built into the residential blocks, that is, not down the road in a mall. We have been made aware.