Of imperatives and fantasies

How quaint to think that the idea of a jet set got its glamour from the association with travel and airlines. Today’s office types are all forced into air travel at regular intervals so it’s not like it’s a luxury. More of a drag, really.

But Finavia, the people who manage Helsinki-Vantaa airport, believe that even today’s harangued airline passenger can be dazzled into shopping for luxury perfumes, chocolates and other goodies. Once passengers have been fed through the bottleneck that is security it is but one step into shopping glitz. To the left, the new airport branch of Eat&Joy with its Finnish culinary delights. Ahead, er, stuff. And lots of exhortations to buy it.

So coming home exhausted, it was a treat to sit back and read/watch the news. Interesting storm in a teacup over Voima-magazine’s spoof-advertising or rather adbusting habit. Voima, brash, bright (in many sense of the word) and really annoyingly laid out, has been doing pretty amazing journalism and adbusting for years. They apparently have now published a book of the best spoofs.

We spotted this on tonight’s cultural news, a delightful Finnish quirk that we hope will survive the economic gloom featured in the economics bit of the same programme. They reported that Voima had approached Kiasma contemporary art museum to exhibit some of the best ads. After initial interest Kiasma declined to exhibit them. There was concern that the museum’s sponsors might not like the critique implied (!?) in art that overtly ridicules consumerism, perhaps even their products.

The book’s co-author Klaus Welp did tell the YLE interviewer that only few targets ever complain outright.

Guggenheim-foe Kantokorpi has blogged about this, and singles out Kiasma’s Director, Pirkko Siitari, for special opprobrium. Bye-bye, Art As Critique, he seems to be saying. We share his concern but hope he is wrong. But, his choice of image to illustrate his blog was fabulous. A pile of coins stacked up as a building photoshopped onto an image of “that” site: that bit of Katajanokka where the land meets the water in a commercially interesting kind of way, and where fantasies have been let loose before…

So while JHJ was settling in with the other travelling salespeople in a small town somewhere further dark, Kantokorpi and various others who have taken a critical view on the G. franchise were talking about it at Kiasma. Rumour has it that Kaarin Taipale (whose work we recommended in an earlier post) is writing a pamphlet about the G.

Architectural debate is alive and well in this city!

Closing the door…

… on culture. Well, a cultural approach to cultures at least.

That, unfortunately is what the current governement and contemporary fashions are doing to Helsinki. Cosmopolitan in its own way 100 or so years ago, opening up to more contemporary globalization more recently, Helsinki still has considerable trouble dealing with the reality of a world where borders are porous. People in Helsinki still resist the idea that there might be more than one acceptable way of doing things.  So it’s rather a shame that the one institution that was dedicated to celebrating diversity in culture, is to leave its home of 11 years and return, in much reduced form, to the bosom of the National Museum.

So, farewell then, Helsinki’s Museum of Cultures. You had a name that smacked a little of the Soviet. You had spatious premises where some of us once played tennis in typically Helsinki’ish functionalist surroundings. Yes, you were once A Palace of Tennis (a bit Soviet as a name that too!), and a remarkable architectural feat by one (a Helge Lundstrom according to Wikipedia…). You will, we hope, live on as a palace of entertainment, art and cinema, of pop-corn and unashamedly garish colours (see above). But cultural diversity? Forget it!

You are entered via this vestibule, where winter weather gets shaken off overcoats, where the warm inside fights against the inhospitable outside. From the year 2013 no entry here for visitors to an ethnographic museum, to those interested in other people’s achievements and lifeways.

In today’s The Usual a commentator (a Jukka O. Miettinen) has this to say:

Jotakin on kulttuuripolitiikassamme pahasti vialla

or, more or less,

Something in our politics of culture is badly wrong

From Sibelius to Snow

“A person should live either in a big city or in the middle of the forest”.

So said Jean Sibelius in his unmistakable voice, deep and precise, speaking his old-fashioned Finnish, in an interview that I’ve heard more than once. He went on to specify where he’d written various symphonies (Florence and London, as I recall) and of course he had a home built in the forest by none other than our friend Lars Sonck himself.

As sound, image and associations, Sibelius is deeply grafted onto my experience of life and I doubt I’m alone. When I think of the best of my city of birth he pops up in all kinds of ways, not least in the bourgeois bastions of early twentieth-century neighbourhoods like Eira, Kallio, Punavuori and Töölö, here. But beyond as well, in the forests.

His music, first played to both baffled and enthusiastic audiences over 100 years ago, was the product of a decent education and a musical home, but also of an inexplicable facility with melody, harmony and all the intricate techniques of organisation and sound architecture that goes into producing symphonic music.

You might say (in a moment of patriotic fervour) that Sibelius’ talent was as baffling as the work of many architects who were his peers. Helsinki would not be the city it is were it not for its Jugend architecture. The weirdness of Väinämöisen Linna, for instance, is too everyday to be noticed each time you walk past. (Can’t resist noting that the chemist on the corner, behind the tram, is deemed too everyday in the 21st century for this space – look out for luxury-something here soon).

On the other side of the block, in Hotel Kämp today we have overpriced snobbery (I have it from countless sources) in opulent surroundings. But in the 1890s Sibelius and his chums regularly met there (for a piss-up as my father might say). OK, they were young and Finnish, so obviously alcohol had a role. But their madness also helped foster nationalism in the arts and in politics and eventually independence from Imperial Russia.

A new book, Vesa Siren’s award-winning tome on Finland’s conducting phenomenon, quotes Lilly Kajanus-Blenner, daughter of Robert Kajanus, conductor and close friend of Sibelius thus (my translation, as ever):

Father’s closest friends were Sibelius and Gallen-Kallela. He believed in them and he trusted that they would achieve what they did in fact go on to achieve. About Sibelius he said long, long ago: ‘He isn’t fully understood as a composer yet, but he is among the greatest in the world and one day the world will understand and acknowledge him! If only he might see it for himself’. This sort of thing my father used to say often…” (Siren 2010, p.48).

And the world did get it, and to some extent Sibelius did see, though he did turn into a rather grumpy old man before passing away at a ripe old age in that home built for him by Sonck. Lucky man.

His name lives on in computer software but as I said, on a good day the spirit and the material imprint of the dreams of the late 19th century live on in these parts quite unmediated by gadgetry. Particularly, of course, when it’s sunny, snowy and crisp. That book about conductors is just one aspect of the legacy. The music academy, named after him another. The Sibelius violin competition, currently in full-swing, is another.

I agree with Sibelius that one really should live either in the big (Helsinki-sized) city or the forest, but actually on the basis of experience I’m finding that the formula for suburban life (Espoo) has its redeeming qualities. Wildlife has scurried across the front-garden.

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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Lumpy cultural space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retail-trends, Ullanlinna style, 2

Have you ever stopped to think about the connection between the Finnish for town, kaupunki, and the Finnish for commerce and shops, kauppa? Obviously they’re related. Swedish too has handel, which also covers not just shop, but retail, commerce, trade, exchange, economics etc. So in Helsinki there is the Helsingin Kauppakorkeakoulu = “Helsinki shop high school” (if you were to put it into a translation program for instance). And have you ever stopped to think about the extent to which the state, including planners, directs what can be treated as merchandise, how and where?

At JHJ we barely stop thinking about all this. And we have often stopped to think why it is that our world view puts such a huge chasm between “culture” as things we do for conventional, almost optional reasons, and “economics” as something that’s so obvious you can’t even debate it let alone change it. Christmas is culture, i.e. optional. Economics is apparently the way the world is.

Another question that springs to mind: is there actually a decree saying that Ullanlinna must sell fancy clothes at this intensity?

There’s definitely no law that says shopkeepers must festoon their windows with shiny decorations in red, white, shiny and other traditional Christmas colours. But they do anyway. From these images one can safely conclude that Helsinki has and is cultural conventions and, maybe, that “kauppa” is massively, hugely, unavoidably all about culture.

Vanhanen to Swedish-speaking minority: “Your grievance against the Finnish mainstream isn’t justified”

Sitting on airplanes is a time to catch up on news. Not much on architecture this time or even planning.

Instead there was some concern in Huvfudstadsbladet (Finland’s Swedish-speaking daily, “Capital city paper”) about a sense that the status of Swedish-speakers in this country is under veiled threat. Veiled? Well, perhaps in the polite language of The Usual’s leader from Sunday under the headline “Swedish speakers’ concerns over their rights are totally justified” to which HBL was referring. Well, the prime minister promptly, predictably and sadly judged that these concerns are not justified.

We Finns are all, Vanhanen says, one nation, speaking two languages but united in all other things. Perhaps, I muse, things like our common fight against the onslaught of the seagulls, or equally plausibly our inalienable right to consider our innovativeness somehow unique.

Getting back to the question of the mainstream and the other streams, there are the Sami who live in the Arctic parts of the country whose language is also recognised as a Finnish language [sic] and who are increasingly able to be educated in their own language. One official blurb puts it thus:

Lisäksi laissa on turvattu saamelaisten sekä romaanien ja muiden ryhmien oikeus ylläpitää ja kehittää omaa kieltään ja kulttuuriaan. Saamelaisilla on oikeus lain mukaan käyttää saamen kieltä tietyissä viranomaisissa.

[In addition the law secures the rights of the Sami, Roma and other groups to sustain and develop their own language and culture. Sami also have the legal right to use the Sami language in certain dealings with the authorities.]

This is something people have fought hard for. In Lapland, anecdotally at least (and from online research), bringing back the Sami language has substantially improved the psychological well-being of pupils in Utsjoki, Finland’s most northern municipality. Not that far from there, in Tornio, language politics of another kind once put Finnish-speaking children under severe strain. The moving 2003 film Elina (Invisible Elina, in the Finnish) by director Klaus Häro (with no less of a star than Bibi Andersson playing the harsh school teacher) captures not just the injustices perpetrated by adults against children but those of majority language-speakers against minorities.

It makes me wish more of us were minorities. It seems to me that many minority groups are multilingual and that in many cases this begets both tolerance and lasting contributions to mainstream culture. On which note, I wish I read Swedish well enough to contemplate reading Kjell Westö in the original.

For more on this story, see Svenskfinland’s extensive comment.

On adaptability

About fifteen to twenty years ago some eco-philosopher noted that one of the problems with the looming environmental crisis is that humanity is so flexible and adaptable. After all, human existence is premised on creative solutions to new challenges – you might call it culture. Besides, slow, incremental change in the environment is difficult to perceive.

It seems a similar adaptability applies to buildings. Bit by bit they morph around you and suddenly things you didn’t know you loved are overshadowed by things you’re not sure about, you may even hate. As post-modern architecture and post-industrial social relations have left their mark on landscapes all over the world, no wonder people get nostalgic about industrial sites and maybe even the certainties of the modern welfare state. (Though Finns who wax nostalgic about the days before neo-liberalism are in danger of being ticked off for wanting to go back to the bad old days of Kekkoslovakia…)

Here in Helsinki former industrial sites aren’t often listed (protected from demolition), but some ex-factory buildings have been revamped for use in the newly celebrated culture industries. The old Cable Factory (Nokia as it was then, by the way) is a good example.

The former power-station of Suvilahti designed by Selim Lindqvist is up for grabs planning-wise. Currently in excellent use for various events and a heartwarming reminder that industrial architecture could be stunningly beautiful.

But I’ve got sidetracked again.

The point: buildings that once might have seemed ugly, brutal, overwhelming and to be resisted, can actually turn into places of affection and, that horrible word, nostalgia. Not that this shift is means the same thing for people across the world. The English created a whole Romantic movement (with its famous horror of dark, satanic mills) out of their collective shock over industrialisation in the eighteenth century. Finns, who turned to industrial life in the early 20th century, have been more apt to celebrate industry and the modernism that went with it, as a domestic achievement and as something with a bit of nationalist heroism.

With an architectural profession that gained strong social support as part of pre-independence cultural efforts – which were also political efforts – Finland in the twentieth century actually enjoyed the benefits of debate over architecture and town planning. This wasn’t an area of total consensus, in other words.

And so it was that after the war debate raged over how to rehouse the nation in the wake of its destruction and after the loss of so much densely populated territory to the Soviet Union. For instance Heikki von Hertzen who was influential in Finnish housing policy for decades published a pamphlet called “A Home or a Barracks for our Children”. It warned of the dangers of squeezing too many people into towns. His example of already existing ‘barracks’ housing was none other than the elegantly curving flats that were built in the 1920s around Temppeliaukio!! These, von Hertzen wrote, were more suited to mummies than human beings.

And there we were, thinking that Töölö, particularly the older parts to the south were paragons of architectural virtue! Given the prices now asked for these ‘barracks’ someone certainly adapted to considering them of value. This street, is around the corner from Temppeliaukio and very similar to it. Not everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps, but from today’s perspective rather precious, no?

Then again, it may just be that 50 and more years worth of trees and other vegetation makes even barracks look nice. Here, literally, around the back of the now-vacant barracks designed by  Martta Martikainen and to be turned into luxury flats.