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.

The real meaning of “regenerate”

The journey from the tennis club here (left) to the orthpaedic ward here (right) was painful, interesting and mercifully short, but JHJ recommends ample stretching and warm-up before exercise.

So, an Achilles’ tendon snaps on a Sunday afternoon, what do you do? Some friends would and could go to a private hospital.

Thankfully I benefitted from publicly funded health-care. Helsinki has for decades had a concerted policy of securing good quality health-care for its people, much-maligned though these efforts are today. (Though JHJ suspects it’s because there are so many  high-tech and low-return innovations in the health sector, and because the ongoing faith of so many Helsinkians in the magic of markets.  But that is, as ever, probably another post).

For over 100 years the hills of Meilahti have been zoned for hospitals. It may not be architecture at its most architectural, but even the built heritage people have a pdf download on the area. A good few buildings have gone up there in the last decade or two, making it high-tech medical village as well as regional life-saver. It has its own streets, underground transport networks, helipad. The newest arrival opened last year was  Haartman Hospital, where the A&E services of Helsinki have pretty much been concentrated. I snapped (ouch) a photo of it last February.

But back to the other snapping. I had my injury examined, diagnosed and operated on, and I hope the tissue in my foot is regenerating well. And I get all this for the price of a few mega pain-killers and some taxi rides, because of this fantastic heritage of social welfare. Bizarrely though, it seems that Finnish elites are turning their backs on this heritage by going private despite the good quality (medical as well as architectural). Meanwhile health inequalities are on the rise in Finland. Makes no sense from this perspective.

But back to JHJ’s little drama. From Haartman I was sent to get some kit (a sock with a hole at each end, the ‘walker’ boot etc) from another public facility, and by Tuesday morning I was in la-la-Land at Töölö Hospital where the photo top right was taken. My HUGE THANKS to you all – the nurses (you all introduced yourselves but in your almost identical kit and caps I couldn’t possibly have remembered your names), the young docs, the assistant who administered coffee and kiisseli in French and cleaned the bed area next to mine for the next unfortunate, and for the generally positive and friendly atmosphere. I never had the I-want-to-be-a-doctor/nurse condition as a child, but I can see the attraction now.

I also liked the main Töölö Hospital building on Topeliuksenkatu. Its oldest bits designed by Jussi Paatela, it talked to me (I tell you, it spoke to me, but then again I really was listening). It spoke of solidity and it oozed trustworthiness. It has good, reassuring 1950s or 60s detailing (probably not Paatela’s “handwriting”), is spacious and seems to function well (though you’d need to ask a nurse for a reliable view). Iy has views out of the windows of many of the spaces I passed through. Nice ceilings. You see a lot of them on a hospital trolley.

So, I am hugely grateful for my ancestors and everyone else who created this wonderful system where a mishap won’t leave you lame or crippled. Those around you ensure that you will be fixed, your tissue will regenerate itself!

If only the same applied to buildings and cities! I’ve been reading blogs and websites on all the destruction that goes on in the name, still, of “development” and that naively of just out of habit, so many people assume to be a Good Thing. Arkkivahti drew my attention to Owen Hatherley’s new book/an article on how “regeneration” blights Britain. I followed links to struggles over Russia’s exceptional architecture, and stopped when I reached this tag: “catastrophic urban development“.

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!

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.

Suvilahti – free from…

I relied on rather out-of-season photos to share images of the now abandoned former harbour sites I blogged about last. Here’s a more recent one.

It’s taken from Kalasatama metro station looking south-west. I was on my way to Suvilahti power station, a beautiful piece of real city architecture. Selim Lindqvist designed the reinforced concrete frontage of the coal-powered facility – pioneering such construction methods in Finland. This was the rapidly expanding working class/ industrial district of Sörnäinen, or Sörkka, from where power could be transmitted both to local needs and across the city’s electricity grid. It began operations in July 1909, according to Helsinki Energy’s informative website.

Later, even more modern facilities,  (picture further down), were built alongside at Hanasaari. But still, neither the old nor the new could escape the notice of us residents, we had a daily reminder that our lifestyles are linked in with these great, fuel-hungry machines. Then in 1976 operations ceased at Suvilahti and it went for a while not really knowing what it was for.

Then came along post-industrial urban regeneration! Kaapeli, or the Cable Factory, was one of the first places in Finland that followed the trajectory of former industrial or manufacturing site converting into a culture centre.

Which explains why I was on my way to Suvilahti last week – scuppered by the snow on the capacious site where soil remediation is turning routes that were open a month earlier into smelly-looking playgrounds for vicious-looking machines. So little did they look like the kinds of things you’d want to mess with, that I didn’t even photograph them! Well no, that’s not quite the reason. I was in a hurry. So I thought I’d ‘cut through’ behind a building and up around the gasometer and up to the road and in through the advised entrance on Sörnäisen Rantatie. I saw and followed some footprints but way before reaching my destination, I was waist-deep in snow. Back I turned, around I went, briskly enough to allow a shot of how close I’d been to that potential short cut.

But I’m taking you around the houses now when I wanted to make a couple of observations about Suvilahti. It’s owned by the city but Kaapeli has been asked to manage it. It is slowly being transformed into something that feels right, a cultural centre and a place for creative people who aren’t necessarily “creatives” (you can see what I mean from an earlier post on this). Though we’ll see how it all goes, JHJ tries, after all, not to be overly gullible.

The event I went to was part of the British Council’s Future City Game tour, their way of riding the creative cities bandwagon. Joining forces with the environmental organisation Dodo, they hosted a series of events at Suvilahti itself, generating ideas for how it should/could be developed.

As is so often the case with this kind of thing, it’s all got to be fun, hence the “game” as way to get interested parties around the same table to think through real or imagined but often shared problems. There’s a video of a British Council game in Moscow here. Older versions of a probably good but much abused idea include planning-for-real, design charrettes, participatory design …

At Suvilahti the tone was set by guest speaker Paul Bogen, a cultural centre manager now involved in  Trans Europe Halles a network of European cultural centres in regenerated buildings. His opening was refreshingly sceptical. More or less, it went something like this:

we’re obsessed with turning these old factories into parts of the knowledge economy. And what happens? We get creative quarters, clusters, incubators … how does it affect people who live and work there? Then he went on to go through the usual cycle where a run down area gets taken over by arty types, becomes a cultural area and gets gentrified and cool, and thus interesting to property developers. Evenutally the rich people come and they don’t use the cultural centre. Something like that, he said (from my notes).

This, we here at JHJ felt was a particularly useful way to introduce this topic in Helsinki.

The representative from Dodo, Päivi Ravio, then told us some heart-warmin things about what the “games” held earlier in the winter had taught the organisers. It produced something like a “free from” shopping list, only here not free from allergens or toxins, but free from stifling commercialism and branding.

Participants had wanted no blocking the unique identity of the place with brand-name styling (somewhat challenging to translate the new anti-consumerist slang – I’m working on it). Regenerating to death should be avoided but lots of outdoor space and facilities should be made available. People wanted it to become a child-friendly place for adults to hang out, a playground for open, reckless culture that’s far from commercialism. The Flow Festival and other events that take place should be kept low-key enough to avoid being smothered in commercial priorities. New forms of ownership and management need to be created or unearthed. Experimentation and doing stuff is the key – there shouldn’t be an imperative to succeed.

JHJ will keep an eye on this. The politics, the place, the history, are really rather interesting. We hope the power stations, old and new, are never made over to suit designer and design boutiques, but will keep Helsinki how and where it needs to be. Grounded.

p.s. you can see Hanasaari from Kamppi too

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Photoshopping in the blogosphere: part 2

I looked, and I looked again, and I felt something was wrong.

Well, obviously. This is a misconceived urban revitalisation project or at least the architectural equivalent of a fortified luxury bunker when an (old) Abloy key would suffice (oops – horrid metaphors but it’ll have to say, it’s late).

I am, as an occasional reader of this blog might imagine, a little tired of going on about this disaster-in-the-making. Which makes you/me wonder why I do. As a good friend noted recently, the hard-headed types at the Helsinki City Planning Department weren’t swayed by the clear and weighty arguments of a number of experts in architectural heritage, or even the municipal public transport planners, who suggested taking the plans back to the drawing board, so why should I assume that anyone takes notice of anyone anyway? Besides, didn’t the DHDH debacle demonstrate very much the same disregard for expert opinon on this matter, let alone public sentiment? Since so little information is out in the open and no discussion has been had, and since we are in an age that puts its trust in networks and project teams rather than in professional competence, the distressing thought suggests itself, that probably those “responsible” don’t know who’s responsible for what either. When the whole thing fails to live up to the dream, all we’ll have is a huge loss and an empty purse but nobody around to learn from the mistakes.

So what did we discover? The joys of photoshop, again, that’s what. The image above was the one I found (after hours of digging, it felt like) back in November and blogged on then. And now? We have the same image with the tram lines added, to the left of the happy couple walking into the shade. Both these renditions have been downoaded at some point from Helsingin Leijona’s site, this later one in this pdf.

Oh yes, the kink into the middle of the square, reflecting the kink in the … (Enough! ed.)

Just one more bit? “Urban renewal” according to Wikipedia (certainly more trustworthy a guide of what is real, at least in this case, than HS, is usually “non-consultative”. Marvellous word.

Thinking of the prefix ‘re’ in wonderful, beautiful, snowy Helsinki

The snow fall has been spectacular. A slight accident last Sunday involving a camera lens and ice explains why we are having to rely on old photos and therefore cannot bring to you the rows of white mounds to be found along the streets of Töölö this morning. One of last night’s more amusing pastimes was prodding them to find out whether underneath the smooth whiteness might be a car or a motorbike.

And why the accident? Because we went skating in Munkkivuori where the good locals somehow all converged on a small iced rink at the same time and found the tools with which to clear the ten or twenty centimetres of fluffy precipitation (and then the camera fell). The big freeze means we could go to a free venue rather than an organised, paying version, but we also needed to get skates from somewhere. No problem: Sportti Divari in Hermanni to the rescue!

Recycling and reusing are alive and well in this town, with or without the aid of the internet(cycling). So for some folks certainly, the old has its value.

Including old buildings. Here’s another gem from near the Senate Square. In the rear is Arppeanum, built 1869 in a somewhat neo-gothic style reminiscent of many English university facilities of its time, now the home of the University Museum and some delightful interiors as well as a decent place to have lunch (particularly since the loss of our dear Engel across the square). By the architect C.A. Edelfelt, known in Häme province for railway stations and everywhere else for his surname – the far better known Edelfelt, Albert the painter, was his son.

The building on the corner is later, 1887, architect unknown. Decent job. The lights often glowing in its windows suggest office work here too. Perhaps some part of the university has spilled out here, as it has in so much of the rest of Kruunuhaka – the academic ghetto, you might say. And below, a lecture theatre in Arppeanum – a feature of university buildings that some think is bound to disappear, others feel that if it does, one of the university’s most precious assets – live interaction – will have been lost.

But then it’s what’s being lost all over the place, not least due to misplaced urban policies that prefer to serve up nicely packaged heritage instead of supporting everyone’s right to history. Fortunately, critiques of “regeneration” are now abundant even if they’re not heard enough, perhaps because critique itself fell out of fashion some years ago. Mute Magazine in the UK still does critique – we are grateful and suggest a read here. Owen Hatherley writes about the now taken-for-granted principles of urban development, known in the UK as “urban renaissance” or rebirth, renewal, what have you:

In terms of architectural artefacts, the urban renaissance has meant … ‘centres’, entertainment venues and shopping/eating complexes, clustered around disused river-fronts (…); in housing, ‘mixed use’ blocks …, the privatisation of council estates, the reuse of old mills or factories; extensive public art, … usually symbolising an area’s phoenix-like re-emergence; districts become branded ‘quarters’; and, perhaps most curiously, piazzas (or, in the incongruously grandiose planning parlance, ‘public realm’) appear, with attendant coffee concessions, promising to bring European sophistication to [anywhere].

Helsinki even. Except, oops, Finland always had a coffee and a cafe culture – just not the kind that everyone recognised.

Life and death in the city – a slight disagreement

I try to get my head around the idea that people I respect think it’s a good idea to spend millions of euros (with the quoted figure rising by the month, see here, under LIIKENNESUUNNITTELUPAALLIKKO) on rearranging Aleksanterinkatu at the Senate Square.

But I stumble over the vocabulary. What to me is black to others is white. I love the square and feel it just needs a bit of maintenance and necessary repair, for others it is dead and in need of “renewal”.

To me their vision of renewal looks a lot like “killing off”. Moving tram routes so that passengers have to make awkward loops in their travels, and allowing for restaurants to spill out into the open (shady side of the buildings, see photo) on the Senate Square is to kill off something precious, let’s call it ordinary life, and to replace it with something expensive. I’d call that pseudo life or, if you want specifics, high-end commercial ventures even if the hope is that in their wake will come the “opening up” of the area. The assumption underlying that, is that  city-centre office space is somehow wasted space and that working in them is less lively an act than, say, drinking bubbly or beer.

For me the Senate Square in its current evening glow is a marvel. Others think that it is dead. No bars. No shops. No signs of life, apparently. Deceased, a late square, it has ceased to be …

But obviously a square cannot be dead – it is made of stones, metal and memories, rhythms and meanings and importantly, of livelihoods and mundane routine. This square is not even scary let alone dangerous, even in the middle of the night. But because it does not, it seems, cater enough to the consuming classes and because the small shops that have been there for years, seem not to suffice, the whole now needs heavy-handed altering.

Of course commerce is a big part of cities, always has been. But to confuse showy consumption with life is a mistake and also the result of 100 years of extremely consumerist culture. (The recent Worldwatch Report makes the case v. well). It’s also the achievement (fault) of all those who read and believed in the creative-classes (reg. trademark!) thesis embroidered by one Richard Florida. Despite repeated, heavy (this in Finnish), not to say devastating criticism, the banalities he has so successfully packaged and peddled now routinely pass for good political sense. Florida’s thesis is summed up in the idea that the post-industrial new economy needs new behaviours and new places for its elite, the creative class as he calls them. Cities will prosper if these people find them attractive, because then they will move and invest there, and contribute to city coffers by creating wealth.

The old is valued by the creatives too – it’s bohemian and attracts creative talent after all – but it must be adapted to suit the needs of the 21st century, of course, according to the creative city hype.

Creatives work in marketing, product development and the financial services that sustain them, or they design and entertain for a living. They’re hard to please, but they enjoy considerable status, comforts and, undoubtedly, intellectual rewards. They are lucky indeed, cities everywhere have been falling over their own feet seeking to accommodate their imagined needs – cafes and bars, wired and wireless instant connections and trendiness. Enthusiasm for the creative cities thesis has also allowed people to forget that anybody grows older than, say, 35 years old. Enthusiasm for the thesis has also led to the odd belief that using beautiful spaces to house the office workers is somehow a “waste”. Here is a 1970s annex to the City Hall by Aarno Ruusuvuori. When it was built it was much maligned, but it’s hardly an eyesore.

What is an eyesore are the efforts to turn all that is beautiful into a backdrop for consumption or spectacle. You also end up with homogenous places because you just can’t reproduce the bohemian chic of a seattle or a san francicso everywhere. Instead you get blandness and  inauthenticity. The architecture blogger Tarja Nurmi writes about this in Finnish, notes that even in wonderful Italy places that have been “regenerated” to suit expensive tastes are actually rather, well, dead.

The creative class thesis has supported arguments to “regenerate” a lot that never needed regenerating. But as critic after critic has pointed out, the results often diminish the public realm and reduce opportunities for genuine urban encounters. They even risk turning the most intriguing and layered places into theme parks and disney-esque rubbish.

Helsinki’ Senate Square may be less noisy and less showy than what commercial regeneration and spectacle production likes to call “lively” or “vibrant”, but it’s also less exhausting and probably a good bit more sustainable.

Gradually the creative cities missionaries have woken up to the reality that life isn’t just consumption and spectacle – even in a city. Unfortunatly, cities all over the world meanwhile believed that by following the Florida-recipy, they could avoid thinking too hard about economic or sociopolitical realities. As Prospect Magazine reported last month, this is what one town in New York State is now grappling with:

Inspired, Elmira’s newly elected mayor, John Tonello … oversaw the redevelopment of several buildings downtown. “The grand hope was to create retail spaces that would enable people to make money and serve the creative class Florida talks about,” Tonello says. The new market-rate apartments filled up quickly, but the bohemian coffee shops the mayor fantasizes about have yet to materialize.

It would be so much easir and livelier not to stifle real life by plonking down great, big “renewal” schemes in the first place!

The day quiet dignity got into the news

“Dignity gets lost in the noise” – or words to that effect, headlined yesterday’s Helsingin Sanomat culture section, with a timely critique of the way “petrol station aesthetics” has taken over some of Helsinki’s most beautiful and cherished restaurant spaces. And then there was a quick response in today’s letters, and further comment online by the indispensible critic Arkkivahti alias Tarja Nurmi.

It may be that Helsinki’s architectural menace is … its bad clients. It may be further that these bad clients make the mistakes they make because they think it will bring glory, visibility or some kind of profits. Or maybe they’re just caught up in complicated politics. Or too busy to know what a city really feels like if you engage with it fully rather than from the distance of an executive life-style.

So what were these papers and blogs writing about? Basically about bad taste and poor judgement spoiling once celebrated and always appreciated interiors by such deserved stars as Eliel Saarinen (the cafe at the central railway station – mangled by “youthful” interior design), our old friend Lars Sonck (whose handiwork, to the outrage of critic Paula Holmila, was inexplicably covered over in Jugendsali to create a mediocre cafe – photographic evidence to the right) and Theodor Höjer (who was partly responsible for the grandeur of the building that now hosts Salutorget and that was also previously a bank). Oh this conversation could go on, and on, and on.

And it did amongst friends today in Cafe Engel, where we debated what good is top-down “regeneration” and what do city fathers understand about aesthetics or quality of everyday life and …. We discussed whether or not it was snobbish to worry about and get angry when cherished and precious things like the calmly neo-classical blocks to the south of Helsinki’s Senate Square are (stop to breathe…) when wonderful things like these are altered at MASSIVE cost in the name of improvement to produce results that cheapen us all: supposedly luxury shopping and the kind of wining and dining that only people in denial or mental confusion could consider sustainable. (And Pajunen and co: THE SUN NEVER SHINES HERE. PUT THE CAFE CULTURE WITH ITS TERRACES SOMEWHERE IT DOES!!)

Decisions on the Senate Square are going to be discussed in the city cabinet within a few weeks. In that sense the article in HS and the others it inspired, have been a godsend. Tomorrow JHJ editorial leaves this marvellous, sometimes quirky sometimes quiet, often elegant and always human, city for some time. In the mean time, some pictures.

To start with, Cafe Engel, again, as it was in January 2010. Hey, with the conservation demands, as HS noted, the structure and much of what you see of the interior can’t be altered much.

At Engel the door will hopefully still open the “wrong” way. But will the hallway talk in thick layers of cultural activity? The clock won’t be stopped somewhere before 1. The trams may not trundle past. The square may host commercial tat and Finnish beer culture. The walls will, we hope, still be lined with what customers appreciate – the written word.

Wrong kind of vitality? More on Cafe Engel

Someone asked re. the last post – what’s going to happen to Cafe Engel. Below is one, quite powerful (politically speaking!), vision, from a pdf available by following links here.

We’re not sure, but Cafe Engel is going to have to move anyway, by early February. In line with international fashions in urban “regeneration” Helsinki is going to upgrade the whole area, in keeping with its historical significance, obviously. We don’t know if Engel (the cafe) will coming back, certainly if it does it will be a different place entirely. Perhaps we should be grateful that being the handiwork of the original masterplanner, Carl Ludvig Engel himself, the basic structure of the buildings can’t be changed.

Personally I’ll miss the cafe as it is now terribly – the front door that opens the wrong way (can anyone tell us the history behind that?), the layers of posters that greet you and tell you that you’re sharing the city with countless intriguing artists, writers, organisations, whatever. (I’d like to ask the city to archive the layers of posters they remove when they start their upgrading). The city also wants to make the street more pedestrian friendly. We used to think this was about ecological sustainability. We are beginning to suspect it’s more about market opportunities for enterprises and chain stores that can pay high rents for “upgraded” premises. Here’s the plan anyway, copied from those same links. Shopping, shopping, shopping, downed with Stoli and Bolli, at a guess.

From Torikorttelit - kiinteistökehityssuunnitelma

But back to reality. What else will I miss? I’ll miss the trams trundling past – not to mention seeing the cathedral every time I take a 4 or a 3, or coming around that tiny bend on Katariinankatu either on foot or by tram – both can be quite exciting. I’ll miss seeing the cathedral over my espresso – even if Engel do continue purveying a fine eating experience wherever they move to (we wish them luck), and I’ll miss the cafe’s clock that’s permanently stopped at somewhere around 12.56.

We promise to document the about-to-disappear uniqueness after our next trip to Engel. In the mean time, the management company set up to revamp the entire area is well up an running. We could not find what the City Council had decided about this, just the reams and reams of responses and representations and what looked like their summary dismissal by (?) the Council and the Planning Department. Pdfs here, under items 1273 to 1275.