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

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

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

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

So much for efforts to progress constructive debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Waiting for the dust to settle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.