A little open Helsinki

We must all know by now that Helsinki in the run up to World Design Capitaldom  is an OPEN city. Perhaps Finland is even supposed to be an ‘open society’ a la Karl Popper. Though probably not. (What with design hype, openness hype and economy hype, while the foundations of our ‘economy‘ wobble as never before, it’s complicated stuff to cut through the rhetoric and scholarship about social and political things these days. But as Finnish philosopher Ilkka Niiniluoto points out in this pdf of a chapter, probably necessary.)

Anyway – let’s get back on track.

It’s the buildings we should be writing about. And they are open this week. Our chance to enter buildings that aren’t so accessible, Open House Helsinki, is up and running from Thursday to Sunday. Look forward (if you can still get places?!) to getting close up and personal with Saint Alvar’s handles (left) and some very well received (by Arkkivahti and others we know) contemporary architecture. Who says Finland doesn’t look after its children!?

A is for Aalto and Aamu

I wonder if this nifty little trucks was shovelling snow off the streets last winter? Here it is on a summer outing behind/in front of the Finlandia Hall. The entrance to this building is curiously tucked away, hugging the earth, and you don’t even really know which is front, which is back. Which is just as well, since the landscape around may yet alter what we think of as the primary entrance.

Zooming into the photo brings me to the actual topic of the day (of the decade, of the Finnish memory span?): Alvar Aalto himself, the undeniably brilliant architect whose international reputation far eclipses that of any other Finnish architect.

The text reads: “New Wave” (which is a pun on Aalto’s name, aalto = wave). Then it tells you that the  Hall will soon have over 22000 sq metres of new space for exhibitions, conferences and banquetting etc. Due to be opened in 2011.

We can’t avoid being reminded that Helsinki will be celebrating design in 2012 in a big way. Plans are popping up all over the place to develop spaces to devote to celebrating this most Finnish of things. A good number of these plans are riding the same wave.

Sorry.

Yesterday Aalto featured in the editorial of our main newspaper. As much as it distresses one to have to quote Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s peculiar and easy-to-dislike media behemoth, I have no choice. It makes the news as much as reports it. This goes for cultural activities in particular which Hesari, via the critics who write for it, has famously shaped over the decades.

From Aimo Nissi's website, aimonissi.fi

The editorial commented on the charitable foundation named after the arhictect and designer AA, which is proposing to reopen a café in central Helsinki. It was inside Rautatalo, right next to the Academic Bookshop and across the street from Stokmann’s. (That’s the Keskuskatu entrance, so brashly pedestrianised last year.)

Quoting now,

Vuonna 1955 valmistuneen talon ydin on rakennuksen sisään kätketty Marmoripiha, kolme kerrosta korkea avoin tila, johon Aalto hahmotteli kahvilan sekä sitä reunustamaan liike- ja toimistotiloja.

(And my translation:) The core of the building, completed in 1955, is the three-story Marmoripiha (Marble Court) hidden inside, and for which Aalto conceived a café and office and retail space to surround it.

… As so often happens in Central Business Districts, land values offered opportunities that the owners could not resist. They set rents so high that even the poshest café couldn’t pay them.

But, four years ago the building came under the control of four big Finnish cultural Foundations

Rautatalo siirtyi neljä vuotta sitten jälleen sitten uusiin käsiin, kun Wihurin ja Kordelinin säätiöt, Kulttuurirahasto sekä Alkon eläkesäätiö ostivat sen.

The proposal by the Aalto Foundation to return the Marble Court to the good citizens of Helsinki is, according to the editorial, grounded in Helsinki’s imminent design capital role. But the paper notes that such excuses are hardly necessary.

We here at JHJ agree with this sentiment. We also wholeheartedly agree with our blogging friend Arkkivahti who has kept her watch well. Hesari namely already wrote about the café on 4.7. Arkkivahti picked up on the same peculiarity (silliness?) of the article as we did.

“Few in this city remember the stylish…” and so on, the paper wrote. Humbug!!!

Arkkivahti makes it quite clear that in the 1980s this was a space where snobs of all kinds could hang out and feel comfortable – architecture students (we don’t know if Arkkivahti wore black in those days) alongside Swedish-speaking girls in pastel-coloured angora sweaters and pearl necklaces (I knew at least one myself). I can’t remember whether this inside space ever hosted a wino of the more common variety, or whether there was anything approximating a security man or a CCTV. But in my memory it was a remarkable place: an inside space purely for consumption purposes where, despite its commercialism, something approximating a public realm was created day after day, year after year.

Until, of course, the meltdown of the early 1990s.

Memory may serve less well in this regard, but was branding quite such an issue in those days? Could Café Columbia (how could that name have fallen into disuse!?) survive today? It provides an impeccable interior, analysed carefully by architecture students and researchers the world over, it seems. Could it all survive again on good coffee plus quality retail that sells to folks who do style more than fashion (whether black or pastel coloured)?

Well, the idea is to create a design centre there. Somewhat odd, we feel, that the Aalto Foundation has had to brand its project as Aamu, another word game using the first syllable of the Finnish word for designing, “muotoilla”. Aa-Mu…

Or did you stumble on this page because you tagged Aalto thinking it was well known because it’s a trendy wine? And gets to the top of the phone book?

More on natural born designers

Nice to see someone has taken the trouble to pick up this dummy and hang it up somewhere it might be found again. Do you see the bit of brilliant Finnish design on the clip? Seriously, I wonder what Maija Isola (creator of the poppy graphic for Marimekko) made of the success of her motif (she only died in 2001 so would have witnessed its revival among people who weren’t even born when it was launched in 1964).

Granted that the design is probably not there for the benefit of the baby but is an investment made by the parent or other doting adult, and granted that babies are probably not interested in design, might this kind of early learning possibly still have benefits in terms of nurturing great future designers? (Can’t help noting here that image has trumped function. Surely the clip is there precicely to prevent the dummy from getting lost in the first place).

My personal view, as I argued a couple of posts ago, is that the built environment is probably more important to a child’s developing sense of beauty than a logo or a print or a graphic design.

So it’s nice to read that someone on the pages of the Helsinki 2012 World Design Capital website is daring to voice a critical view of the idea that Finns are “naturally” great designers. Miikka Leinonen (described as the creative director of some group I’d never heard of) writes that he’s among those who’ve always found it somewhat oppressive to operate in the long shadow of Alvar Aalto (a view that’s no longer that unusual). He adds, rather ambivalently I think, some observations about Finnish designers’ tendency towards simplicity and minimalism. It can add up, he notes, to reducing what is truly complex (even chaotic) to a clear and simple core. Implication: there might be a loss in celebrating such clarity as common sense (peasant wisdom = maalaisjärki) or as the pinnacle of functionalism.

Given the very consensus-based and, to be frank, often smug and populist tone of Finnish public debate, we here at JHJ began to wonder whether there is a link between this nostalgic minimalism in industrial design on the one hand and lack of nuanced self-criticism in politics on the other. (However, with the Centre Party continuing its farcical internal wranglings, we can report that criticism aimed at others, both in one’s own party and another, is alive and well).

Anyway, Leinonen goes on to make another important point. What designers need to understand are the very complicated needs and experiences of people. These might, indeed, be getting buried more and more under the imperative to “compete internationally”. Alas, this is the peg on which Leinonen ultimately hangs his otherwise delightful little column. Heck, it’s the new ideology, who could resist?

Naturally great building

“As we all know, around 1900 Finnish architecture became a topic both in the national project of constructing Finnishness and in the international project of defining modern architecture”. So writes the authoritative voice of architectural history, Riitta Nikula, in a chapter called ‘On the Finnishness of Modern Finnish Architecture’, in this book.

Maybe those she is writing for do “all know”, but it’s probably fair to say that she’s addressing a pretty narrow “we”. The “we”, however, of people in Finland who consider architecture and design to be areas where Finland excells and where there is something natural about this presumed excellence, is substantial. Those of us born in the fifties and sixties and probably later, have indeed mostly been brought up in a beautiful built environment, at least if we are from Helsinki, and we have had it drummed into us that Finnish design is brilliant and irreducibly FINNISH, and that its creators are national heroes.

This blog is just a tiny window onto the wonderful things that Finland’s builders have given us as a place to call home. Like the Railway Station by Eliel Saarinen, opened in 1919, which surely deserves most of the praise it gets – though it didn’t deserve to have its main restaurant brutalised by some nonsensical 21st-century interior design better suited to a motorway service station. (Hence no illustration).

(The image above left is from this book).

One of the reasons, according to Nikula, why Finnish architecture developed as rapidly and in as exciting a way as it did in the early part of the last century, was the combination of international travel by architects who spoke many languages and the lack of an old guard. It meant that international innovations were easily accepted and developed further. It helped too that overseas commentators like Sigrfied Giedion and later Kenneth Frampton, were so generous in their praise of Finnish architecture. But as she points out, their view of buildings was always overshadowed by their obsession with the “naturalness” of Finland and Finns. Giedion, she writes, said of Aino Aalto, professional collaborator and first wife of Alvar, that she was “as quiet as the Finnish lakes and forests from which she has sprung, active only in an unobtrusive way, as Nordic women often can be”!! Elsewhere he noted that civilisation was late in arriving here.

Nikula notes that in books on 20th-century Finnish architecture, you almost get more pictures of unhinhabited woods and lakes than of constructions!

What about the rest of us? I think it’s fair to say that most Finns believe, and not unreasonably, that Finnish worksmanship has a solid tradition, and that one of the delights of a Finnish urban environment compared to many others, is that it’s so well built and solid even when it’s human scale. Tourists often believe Finland needs buildings to be solidly constructed because of the cold. Probably true, but it’s also true that for “us” there’s simply something  insulting about haphazard detailing, about right angles that aren’t at 90° (unless you’re talking really, really old, like something in Porvoo, left) about rendering that’s shoddily applied and weathers badly, windows that don’t shut properly, facades that make no sense and all the other hallmarks of cr*p architecture. (The kind that Brits get so much of and that makes so many of them hate modernism!)

Here’s a (Finnish, obviously) detail that makes me go all gooey inside, and not just because it’s probable that it has been gripped by Saint Alvar himself, it is, after all, from his old home on Riihitie.

For fans of Finnish building and architecture, the heroes aren’t just the designers but those who implement it. And so it is sad to read that with the loss of an apprentice system and the arrival of lots of money, shoddy workmanship arrived and flourished here too. Still, YLE blames it squarely on the boom. So things’ll be OK now we’re bust, no?

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.

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?

Hypertext versus granite

A friend from a far-away land sent a link to some tilt-shift photos of Helsinki on flickr. Once I got around to clicking on it, the next thing I knew I was universes away from deadlines missed and mistakes made. For about an hour I must have indulged myself browsing the web, only occasionally succumbing to feelings of inferiority regarding my own photos. Here’s one by someone elese that I found with the appropriate copyright restrictions. Lovely, I think.

Tilt-shift image in Helsinki by Suviko

I knew I knew the place. With a hunch that it was in Kamppi (it was) I clicked on the map on Kortttelit.fi for photos and info on the architect. Of course, were I a routine user of flickr I would have taken less time to discover that on her link Suviko had actually added a map of the location. Corner of Annankatu and Uudenmaankatu. So, from korttelit.fi I learn that it was built 1898.

Now I see neo-gothic in it in a way I never used to, not in that part of the world.

But then for a long time buildings like that were to me like water must be to a fish. (Moving to the UK as a kid made me realise that either there was something wrong about English water or that there must be different types of fish). But I did start to look more closely at Helsinki’s buildings after that, and to listen to those who could tell me about why they looked the way they did, how you could tell the age of a house from the shape of its windows and doors, what you might want to and what you might be able to interpret about its past and the people who have lived and worked there. And, if I happened to be with the right (wrong) person on the right (wrong) street, I’d hear the names of people who (or whose husbands, fathers, school-mates or, less often, feminine equivalents of the same) were known to have lived in them.

On which note. On my meander around a tiny set of  paths through virtual reality, I discover that the building in the photo was designed by Usko Nyström, a relatively well known figure in Finnish architecture. So I google further. I discover that my thinking of Helsinki as a bit of a village can also lead astray. Usko Nyström is unrelated to Gustaf Nyström, an older architect, but known for expanding the University Library. On the other hand, he was the teacher of Alvar Aalto, of course, which factoid gets you to a few English-language references to U. Nyström, and you can find out, without even clicking the links, that Aalto designed Nyström’s tomb-stone. And that the State Hotel at Imatra was designed by Nyström in the early 1900s.

With another click you discover another typically Finnish feature about him (or is that just the endogamous nature of the Finnish professional classes?), namely that his brother was the well-known photographer I.K. Inha. Inha is best known for landscape photos of areas now beyond the eastern border in Russia, but he also photographed Helsinki, the fine European capital that his brother was helping to build just a little over 100 years ago. It really does come across in so much of the historical record, text as well as image, as a time when much of the new was better and more uplifting than the old.

So what? Well, have spent an evening on the internet now. It’s enjoyable enough, and perhaps useful, but it’s also left me wondering. First, how is it possible to join a conversation and be polite and constructive, if you keep getting the sense that things aren’t getting better with time, but worse? And second, what will home feel like to those for whom the ‘water’ isn’t the bricks, granite and mortar in which my generation grew up, but the pixelated and unfathomably deep world of the internet?

Having spent some of today reading Tim Jackson’s book, Prosperity Without Growth, and yet another damning critique of the creative classes thesis (enough references on that topic already. ed.) I think to myself: if there are power cuts to cut me off from the net in my lifetime, I will have been warned – in the most eloquent and reasonable of ways – and I will have had a memory etched in my mind, of something solid as granite which will always help to ground me.

Weather and design, design and weather

This is just to remind ourselves that it does get, and stay, cold in Helsinki too. Here’s the link, though we hope by the time you visit the figures will be less spectacular.

There is indeed a lot of weather around, as Americans might say, and not just in Finland but across Europe it seems. But in Helsinki at least there’s less snow [below right], fortunately, as the snow falls of the last few days have been (mostly) lighter than they were at Christmas and as more of these [bottom] have been hard at work.

So far we haven’t dwelt too much on the way Helsinki secured its biggish scoop in the attentionscape by being nominated (or designated or whateverated) World Capital of Design for 2012. So there were our Progagonist, our Narrator and both their loved ones looking forward to being out of the way of spotlights, swarming tourists and unprecedented security measures … we mean not there to experience the 2012 Olympics in London, you see … safe in the relative obscurity but almost always pleasant ordinariness of Helsinki. And then this. And it does seem to be quite a big deal in that the logo and the phrase are routinely cropping up on Finnish websites and advertorials.

Mostly we (here at JHJ) associate design with consumables and the kinds of things that allow prominent product placement (remember that Sex and the City moment when someone crashes through a window with a giant Marimekko poppy in the background? No?) but with innovation and creativity so big an industry, design is now getting a wider airing. It’s architecture, planning, industrial systems, digital technology and probably design of social improvements too (though that’s just a hunch at this point).

And of course design(-ing), as a verb but particularly as a noun, a product, a thing, an object you can appreciate, sometimes touch and often also use for something … er useful, is something that is utterly, boringly, wonderfully everyday for your average Helsinkian. I mean it. I’m not sure that “your average Finn” actually goes in for this stuff with quite the same enthusiasm as rural or northern Finns, but I am sure that the word concept of “household name” was probably coined by a Finglish person.

Arabia, Iittala, Wirkkala, Sarpaneva, Marimekko, Sarvis, Nanso, Fiskars, Buster (er, must go check that one out – they’re boats), Vuokko, Hackman and so many more. Modern Finnish Design is abundantly available in books too, with delicious images. (Wirkkala’s plywood in the flesh – as it were – was so hard not to touch!) It’s hard for young designers to make it in this country with all this baggage. We here at JHJ plead guilty too.

While the hail – yes, ladies and gentlemen, and they say there was thunder in Espoo last night – rattled on the windows last night, we sat there in the kitchen and noticed that we too are afflicted with the Finnish disease: designitis. Tapio Wirkkala vase (a housewarming present so perhaps forgivable), Aino Aalto jug (ditto, ditto), Alvar Aalto circular table and chairs (own snobbish choice, but I do so like them and people appreciate being able to sit without ever bumping their knees on a leg other than when playing footsie) and table mats from Marimekko – our Protagonist’s very own choice – and retro advertising that we are old enough to remember by Erik Bruun. Crickey, even the blimmin’ tulips are from Finland. In December!!!!!!!!!

(They’ve lasted well though…)

Here or there, now or then? Happy New Year anyway

The places I’ve been to and seen today have given plenty to be grateful for: Helsinki in snowy winter sunlight is, like many other places in snowy winter sunlight, a feast for the eyes, the ears and the soul. As those who share my view that the motor car is a blight on humanity in general and urban life in particular will appreciate, the abundant snow also means that the main culprits are being rapidly hidden out of sight. It’s started snowing again (17.20 on 31.1.09) and if it goes on much longer, this spot below will have even more stuff carted onto it. I dream of the road signs disappearing away…

And there’s much else to be happy about too, very much. Not least that the last decade, the stupid noughties, are soon going to be a thing of the past. They weren’t nice, from 2001 onwards, powerful people that I’m supposed to identify with made one stupid decision after another, not least the one of thinking they and people like them are near perfect (from John Gray’s essay). And they went on, and on, and on, about democracy but in many ways made it OK to go back to economic feudalism which we can now see in military-style home defences even in the “West”.

Heck, it wasn’t that fabulous a decade in architecture either. International starchitecture continued its meteoric rise at the expense of good building, respectful planning and even lives (much of it is built, after all, by modern-day slaves) and the process that has made planning into a form of facilitating things for Big Capital was clinched when the UK decided that the best planning experts aren’t those who know about towns and buildings but the bean counters. Sooo, not sad to see that decade go.

As glimmers of hope in the decade, and in Finland too, there was the Alvar Aalto symposium in August 2009, which celebrated architecture from “the edge”, i.e. anything but starchitecture it seems. Sadly I could not participate, but the coverage in Ark is extremely interesting and rather flattering for the organisers, the Alvar Aalto Foundation in Jyväskylä. The tone is captured in Wolfgang Jean Stock’s article: “Whereas other events of this type mostly feature ‘stars’ congratulating themselves, this forum concentrated on the fundamental: a building that is of direct use to people” (Ark 5/2009 p. 28). As for planning in Finland, well, I suppose it’s hard to see what’s under your feet until you move on, but it seems it’s a mix, at least from the point of view of someone interested in places for people rather than, as the saying now goes, for profit.

One area where Finland really has got it wrong, however, is in shopping centres. Too many, too big, too much the wrong thing, not good for lanscapes, people or planet. And that brings me to today’s tragedy in Sello in Espoo, one of the country’s largest malls, and new too, only built in 2005. It does have a fabulous library and a concert hall, so it’s not a complete cathedral to consumption, but having been there once I could safely say that given the option, I’d not revisit except to go to a gig. Of course, as the market researchers know, I’m probably just a statistical anomaly.

I began today in the space-time of privileged central Helsinki, with a smattering of other shoppers and the aforementioned wonderfullly pretty scenery. I also photographed the slowly proceeding unveiling of one of my favourite buildings, the old Postitalo, of which more later, promise.

Later I thought about time and space and emotional space/s. I came home and logged on (to a British website!) only to discover that meanwhile a terrible series of killings had taken place not 15km from where I am. Finland’s gun laws, its culture of violence, its backwoods atavism or the way so many people here have been uprooted and still struggle to fit the new economy, generation after generation … thoughts about these flooded my mind as I read the news. Only on reflection did I remember that violence has had a pretty good run everywhere in the last decade too. And in the previous one.

In 1991 I cancelled my cable-TV subscription after seeing endless footage of US bombs hitting targets during the first Iraq war – in my living room. Could, should I do the same with the internet now? It’s not that I don’t want to know. It’s that there’s a huge challenge in dealing with too much information, a challenge that I’m not yet equipped to cope with. But I know the media is keen to capitalise on it. On which note, I was stunned by the c**p that appeared on the TimesOnline website regarding the shootings, just hours after it had happened. The BBC’s site also reported the Finnish story as its “most popular”. S**t! I thought, that must be one heck of a lot of people all over the world reading about events in a town near me – and that before even the police have had time to figure out what had happened.

But here I am, in Helsinki, just. Online, with all the world at my fingertips. Kind of.

I look forward to an evening with friends. I hope you do too. Or, if that’s not your thing, that you have a good New Year anyway.

Design Hotel back on the menu

Well, it looks like Helsinki is going to get another round of angry debate around the planning of what the city calls a “designer hotel” in a cherished and already much-debated part of town, namely the waterfront to the east of the market, on the island of Katajanokka. This will be familiar to fans of Finland’s “jugend” architecture. Some decades after that went in, Alvar Aalto, still the unquestioned god of Finnish architecture, was allowed to replace a much-loved old building with something, well, that still upsets people. If the current plans, from the Herzog+de Meuron stables, go ahead, Aalto’s “mistake” will probably pale into insignificance.

On Sunday the main newspaper, Helsinging Sanomat, reported that a majority of the city council are probably behind the plans and ends its report with the “observation” that should it not go ahead, it would be a terrible shame as the area is going to be vacated by its current, rather unsightly users, and Helsingin Sanomat believes the only alternative to starchitecture and hotel space is to leave the “waterfront empty”.

If apparent lack of imagination afflicts some (many of those in power) all the signs are that resistance will be strong, and (British readers take note) largely spearheaded by the architectural profession. Harri Hautajärvi, former editor of Ark magazine, was forthright. And published another image from the designers, here. The thumbnail, copyright Herzog and de Meuron, is to the left. Worth chasing up the images then.

For non-Finnish readers, below is a short rendition of the article from 30.08.09:

Helsinki mayor Jussi Pajunen (kok/conservatives) is lobbying hard to enliven the waterfront area near the market. This is why he is behind the private initiative.

Should the plans not go through, because nothing else is being proposed for the site the waterfront would remain empty. Helsinki harbour has already given permission to demolish the current terminal buildings next year.

Other images of H+DM’s plans were published in Helsingin Sanomat in November 2008. Uusi Suomi, the welcome web-based alternative to HS, headlined “Scandal in Katajanokka” already in May 2008.

Much, much to discuss. A Swiss flag in concrete (glass) in Helsinki? Suitable? Lively? For the city’s inhabitants? For the global financial elite and their hopeful hangers on who hope and believe that the economic crisis will go away and leave nothing unchange? The debate rages on the website of Hesari and, no doubt, elsewhere, to be picked up here anon.

Photos of the area to follow. This  is fascinating stuff and brings debates about urban space and the political economy to Helsinki like few other things have done.

P.S. Announcements for high rises on another area vacated by former harbour, in Jätkäsaari, were made in today’s HS as well. Helsinki’s student accommodation organisation to be the first on this empty plot, plans for the Marriot hotel have gone on ice due to recession

Hoas rakennuttaa Jätkäsaaren ensimmäiset talotTaloustaantuma viivästyttää Marriot-hotellin rakentamista