A good beet for liquid times

The September sun is shining on Helsinki. People are out and about as if it were August. Some are in shorts, one man is seen in swimming trunks for goodness sake!

The Usual (paid version) runs unusually high-flying but to-the-point stuff on the need for solidity (Helsinki’s new Music Building!). Like the prime minister said, we really do need uncommercialised culture in our flaccid (my word), chaotic (the journalist’s word) and liquid age. The reference to liquid modernity being, of course, from veteran sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

The blogosphere and Face Book are awash with what reads like real debate on the built environment. On the Music Building (are there traces of Lutheranism in how it presents itself? in Finnish here; did our ministers misjudge the situation by skipping its opening ceremony? and such like). But comment is flowing also on the area around the building. It needs some action, upgrading and serious thought.

Hopefully anything then but the robot-inspired/produced vision of a perfectly engineered Finland or so-called future Finlandia Park on the city’s website. You have been warned, the vision isn’t just scary, it’s insulting when you recall all the human-style life and true urban trading that went on in the railway warehouses that we fought to keep. (By the way, according to MTV3, it seems that the drive to take life as well as cars underground might yet mean pulling down what’s left of that socially if not architecturally significant trace of an older Helsinki.)

So meanwhile it was heart-warming to see that despite the best efforts of Helsinki’s bureaucrats and local politicians to kill off anything unofficial, street parties can still bring out the crowds. And the wannabe ballerinas as seen last night at Punavuori’s Punajuuri/Beetroot block party.

Form follows ???

Nordic architecture, like everything else Nordic, has had a generally good reputation. Without the repeated references to the successes of Sweden, Norway and Finland in education, health and general well-being, books like The Spirit Level  and, more recently, David Harvey’s praised and engaging Enigma of Capital, would be a lot thinner.

But before I get sidetracked, let me upload a favourite but gratuitous picture and get back on track!!

Form, said some famous American, follows function. In Scandinavia (and Finland) modern architecture and design through the 20th century were often presented as pure function and technique: clear and simple solutions to genuine problems.

As a kid I thought “Form follows function” was a slogan invented by a Finnish glassware company or something to sell more Finnish stuff.

In those days Finnish ways of doing things (and Finnish tastes) felt naturally obvious and objectively speaking superior. (It helped that the right angles were at 90° and the windows weren’t drafty).

Finnish environments became the very opposite of inherited tradition or older ornamental styles. All of those words belonged to people with “culture” (read: odd rituals and irrational beliefs). We (Finns) had “nature” (read: things as they are) and education.

(Modernism was/is our vernacular). (Excuse slippage between Nordic and Finnish. Hope it’s not too irritating or contrary to your experience, dear reader).

Aaanyway, back to the topic. Actually, the function of most architecture for most of the 20th century was to absorb surplus capital (as D. Harvey argues). The ever intensifying creative destruction of material goods – building and rebuilding – is one aspect of this thoroughly bizarre but taken-for-granted phenomenon.

So some people have started to point out that architectural form follows finance, not function. There’s a book of that name about skyscrapers from 1995, and quite a few critics have peddled the idea too.

Architects help produce the landscapes of really-existing capitalism.

Form-follows-finance is not then a new idea. But perhaps as fear grips the markets and credit-rating agencies mess around with our money supply (“something wrong with the tap, dear”) it would be good to think even more about the links between finance and architecture. Particularly also since the rich have been getting so much richer (and so much more stuff) on the back of foggy financial fictions (especially in Finland).

Hence my repeated plugging on this blog of that Harvey book. Excellent, really was (though hardly perfect).

Though architectural projects these days are HUGE (even in little old Helsinki [surely New Helsinki, ed]) and there are many uncertainties on the way for all involved, once they’re completed, their impacts are HUMONGOUS. Big metal boxes, glass and steel of varying quality, motorways, tunnels, transport hubs, retail “parks”, people piled up in … [stop already! ed.]

But David Harvey insists that the problem isn’t that everywhere is becoming the same. Capitalism/ neoliberalism does not produce homogeneity. In fact it thrives on heterogeneity. Helsinki would, then, do well to sustain its unique selling points [“environmental features” surely? ed].

I read in Urban Design (spring 2008, page 23) that the City of Helsinki is pursuing unconventional urban change. “Rather than the philosophy of grand projects elsewhere in Europe” of pleasing tourists and urban consumers, the City of Helsinki is following “traditional Nordic values” and relying on the spirit of the location.

Apart from the claim being eminently contestable, it also raises the question about what a spirit of a location might be. It is produced how? By culture? Well, partly. By nature? Partly (granite is abundant here). By history?

Absolutely. Guess you could say form follows fashion then.

Politeness Finnish-style

On arrival at Helsinki airport two things soon drew JHJ’s annoyed attention. (But I soon mellowed out. Read on…)

Firstly, we Finns don’t do public apologies very well. In fact, in this case we didn’t do it at all. In Britain announcements about the late arrival of this, that or the other, are always rounded off with apologies for any inconvenience caused – insincere as they may be – but the Finnish airport official just informed us that our outrageously long wait for luggage would soon come to an end.

Secondly, we Finns are rubbish at queuing (well, compared to some).

You might say our social codes are somewhat undeveloped. Rules and regulations exist, but their flexible application so as to oil the wheels of intense social interaction, well, that still needs a bit of practice. It’s as if rules are there to be slavishly applied. Not, as they should be, to make life more pleasant for everyone.

In the architecture world they seem to think that if you don’t have social codes you need architectural codes (or, these days, signs!). Or was that, that if you don’t have architecture you get revolution? Well, those very old arguments are actually much more sophisticated than that and if you’re that interested, go find this book.

Now I love Helsinki and I love most of its buildings, especially the ones in the centre. I think sometimes that in offering me a wonderful world to inhabit, they are a form of politeness handed down to me by generations of architectural foremothers and forefathers.

But some critics think that polite buildings are a bad thing. Does this come from the idea that world is so messed up that the only honest architecture is architecture that repeats that truth? (A messed up time produces messed up buildings. Hmmm).

Well, actually, things aren’t that simple. When people talk about polite architecture they can mean lots of things: buildings that aren’t in-your-face, that blend in and often also echo some notion of architecture as a symbol of European greatness uninterrupted since the Ancient Greeks. Or, a bit less grandiosely, they just mean buildings that look classical or romantic or vernacular. Or buildings that cost a lot of money to design and to build.

Well, good, solid buildings have always cost a lot of money. But when it comes to what they do for us all individually as shelter and collectively as the urban household we all share, I’m glad. I think we’re worth it.

In Töölö, at restaurant Elite (where no doubt generations of Finns have turned into alcoholics) Jees and her true love shared an early July evening that was impeccably polite. It also made you believe that polite buildings just might help produce polite behaviour.

Hey, I’m not really serious, but as we head into a European future that’s, ehrm, really a bit uncertain, it’s lovely to be surrounded by architecture that seems so certain of itself.

Not for real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wonder what did inspire them.

Third time lucky? Soul and acoustics in Helsinki

There are times when just a teeny-weeny bit of life on an increasingly abandoned blog, even written by one with more pressing demands on her time, might be excusable.

Today is one. Jonathan Glancey, an architecture critic so beloved of our editorial staff (me) that he gets more tags on this blog than many a real architect, has graced the pages of Finland’s one and only national paper with his thoughts on Helsinki’s new Music Centre to be opened later this month. Alas, if you don’t actually pay this Finnish quasi-monopoly, instead of Glancey’s observations, you will only get to see others’ responses to a survey about the building.

So what does Glancey think? He’s impressed and not impressed. We hope the text will be found at some point in English, but for now it’s just mentioned in his column inThe Grauniad (which you can still access for free).

The thing that got me – a bit – was this:

Kun pyysin ihmisiä vertaamaan rakennusta johonkin, heille tuli mieleen “konferenssikeskus”, “ostoskeskus” tai “saksalaisen autonvalmistajan toimistorakennus”.

that is:

When I asked people to compare the building to something, they said it brought to mind “conference centre”, “shopping mall” or “a German car manufacturer’s office building”.

Definitely not nice.

Now, having written less than flattering things about the building, not to mention the non-process of planning that’s accompanied its construction, I have gradually begun to change my mind about this addition of calm, unobtrusive, anti-iconic architecture in the heart of my beloved city. Architectural novelties in Helsinki have namely not been particularly uplifting recently. More like down-plonked, as Glancey himself notes, architectural rubbish (my words), thin additions to the city brought here by some gargantuan helicopter (Glancey’s image).

So why have I changed my mind? Because calm and just a little bit disciplined is exactly what this part of Helsinki needed and calm and a little bit disciplined is what it’s got. The sharp but low-profile profile of the music building creates the beginnings of a new horizon where before there was haphazard mess created by the forced marriage of gently curving Kiasma to boring but big Sanomatalo (contemporary corporate clunk put there courtesy of the above-mentioned monopoly, as we noted a long, long time ago on this blog).

Glancey’s text also notes the absence of soul in the building. Yes. He may well be right. But I still live in hope that the incestuously squabbling but delightful music-types in Finland’s successful classical music-scene will, in good time, make up for this. I also hope that Glancey’s little plea to create a really lived city at the end of his article is read and understood by as many Helsinki planners and developers as possible. Over and over. Here a couple of snippets, the first on what Helsinki once managed but appears to have forgotten:

… Helsingin arkkitehtuuri on niin usein onnistunut maagisesti löytämään raikkaita, mutta samalla visuaalisesti ja teknisesti jykeviä ideoita, jotka tuntuvat pikemminkin kasvavan kaupungin peruskalliosta kuin tulleen arasti pudotetuiksi sen pinnalle.

… Helsinki has so often succeeded as if by magic to find fresh but visually and technically robust architectural ideas that seem to grow out of the city’s own bedrock rather than having been timidly dropped on its surface.

Then he goes on to describe what sounds like a pretty perfect city. People, shops, life, trams and all things bright and beautiful right here in the heart of what is still a pocket-sized, harmonious and enjoyable capital city.

Oh, almost forgot. Not the point about our absence from the blogosphere coninciding with the threat of the Basics in Finnish government but the point about the acoustics in the Music Building (I prefer that to Centre and it would be a better translation of the Finnish, just like Basic Finns would be a better translation of Persut than True Finns). Ask Finnish musicians and they’ll tell you that Saint Alvar, for all the good he did for Finland, thoroughly messed up when it came to acoustics. Twice! At the House of Culture and in the Finlandia Hall. This time we’d better get a good sound.

Helsinki ad infinitum

Helsinki seems to be lagging behind in urban problems. But it’s catching up. Many phenomena that are troubling Helsinki now – anti-social behaviour, housing problems, decaying service infrastructure, iconic architecture, child poverty, scared rich people – were common features of many English-speaking places in the 1980s already and plenty of academics/people started to write about them.

Today there’s MASSES of literature on how the modern city fell apart with the arrival of immaterial (supposedly) wealth and WTO-authorized politics (so-called). There’s a SWELLING of text on how brilliantly or disastrously cities have done.  (Which surely means that a latecomer like Helsinki has the benefit of learning from mistakes made elsewhere. Doesn’t it?)

In one book that came out in 1992, a chap called James Donald wrote that cities in general have been turned into texts. As text – statistics, reports and development strategies and what have you – cities can be more easily deciphered and hence controlled. That process already happened way back in the nineteenth century when Helsinki was barely a town. But by the 2000s Helsinki-research certainly was generating a heck of a lot of text.

Some of it is written in a surprised tone, as if those nasty things I listed above weren’t expected to happen to/in such a nice little country. But eventually and with just a little time-lag, the 3 ‘g’s: globalization, gentrification, ghettoization landed in Finland, along with iPhones, people with (really) funny names and increasing spatial inequality.

Besides literature on urban problems, there’s also more and more literature on architecture. Then there’s older stuff on beautiful buildings and architect-geniuses, in both Finnish and foreign (LOADS of it) and recently some pretty interesting stuff on its sociopolitical and cultural significance by folks who aren’t primarily interested in buildings, but more in the impacts of Architecture as Materialized Social Order. (Some names from across this eclectic lot: Eyal Weizman, Lelsie Sklair, Rob Imrie, Teresa Caldeira, James Holston, Michael Herzfeld … And from Finland: Kaarin Taipale, Panu Lehtovuori, Harry Schulman, Hille Koskela…)

Whatever bits you read of this stuff, it makes you “read” what’s around you in new ways. Who knows, it might even make you take notice of your environment before it’s too late, when it falls victim either to a bulldozer or an even less unnatural disaster (think New Orleans).

And so, in between other stuff – like seeking out the sun by the sea at Cafe Ursula – we here at Jees Helsinki Jees can just carry on having fun and adding our teeny weeny bit to:

“this incestuous, intertextual implosion of representations where architecture becomes the subject of film, film the subject of history, history the subject of criticism, criticism the subject of deconstruction, deconstruction the subject of architecture, and so on ad infinitum,” as Anthony D. King put it in this book.)

OK, JHJ isn’t just about architecture, but we do think it pays to pay it attention.

Knowledge City

Recent posts on this blog might suggest that the dominant idea of a Knowledge Economy and the Knowledge City (or Knowledge Village) that goes with it are somewhat dubious concepts. They’ve impoverished the much older concepts of knowledge and science along with innovation and creativity, and it’s highly debatable whether more investment in R&D does anything remotely connected to making the world a better place. Remember, you read it here (first), plenty of people have warned, in detail, that treating knowledge as a good to be traded can mean the end of intellectual progress (oh, how DID I get started on the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons!?)

Let’s get back to buildings. Here. Teaching can make use of technology. Here is some spanning three centuries. The building (on Snellmaninkatu) is now known as Arppeanum. It was built in 1869 to house the university’s chemistry labs. So, we’re back on message!

And architecture more generally? Well, there’s Gehry’s “creation” for a Sydney campus that we mentioned in our last post. But in most cities, including we fear, Helsinki, the prognosis isn’t great.

A quick look at today’s student accommodation doesn’t “wow” one. On first impact it suggests that young people feel entitled to a level of luxury (and energy through-put) to which the planet is unlikely to stretch but, more to the point, which makes us oldies feel really old. Still, student housing is being organized more and more in a way that may look good on the outside but feels bad and looks bad on the inside. Actually, according to Owen Hatherley student halls are no longer even good-looking on the outside.

Let’s ignore the gargantuan campuses of the Far East or the Gulf States. The Americans meanwhile have housed academic life according to the tastes and budgets of a continent and a couple of centuries worth of rich benefactors. So you get a range of architecture, from Jefferson‘s classic campus in Charlottsville, Virginia to even a few Finnish architects done good abroad. Aalto’s Baker House at Harvard seems well loved, and the Saarinens, senior and junior, made an OK imprint on America’s ‘knowledge’ landscape too.

But alas, there is no news, good or otherwise, to report on upcoming campus developments in Finland. The silliness of creative/knowledge/designer city and all that continues to intrigue people with money and power. But since the Music House/Building to be opened later this year, not much in the way of housing human betterment has passed throught the workings of the Helsinki region’s planners, at least not into anything resembling a pipeline.

However! We can enjoy science in old buildings.

Amazing! Yes, for some time now, Helsinki has enjoyed a Night of the Sciences (as part of a biennial event, the Science Forum). As part of it you can get to see the Night Exhibition at the City Museum tomorrow when it’s really dark (like, from 3pm to 10pm) – I recommend. Check out also the art on the walls of the Bank of Finland which will also be letting the public in, etc. etc.

Never been to this event myself, so not sure what it or its ethos is like – but looks interesting and looks like it wasn’t completely put together by (or for) the place-marketing industry. Some of us are actually interested in the kind of stuff on offer.

The programme is mostly in Finnish though.

Cost-effective everything

Starchitecture or “wow” (“wau” in Finnish) architecture may not be as popular as it once was. But then again, here‘s Frank Gehry taking a few liberties with the cityscape – crumpled brown paper bags in his project for Sydney’s new Business School. Or was it Technology School.

Business, technology? What difference does it make, education like everything else exists to make profit – obviously.

The Australians are clearly copying Finland’s very own Aalto University. Here business and technology are being blended into one another in the name of a more hopeful future, even as the designers at what used to be Helsinki’s School of Art and Design (the third leg of the unholy tripod) do what they can to resist.

As yet we have no inkling of where, if anywhere, the Aalto behemoth will build a campus. The economics students don’t want to leave Töölö, the engineers still have the concrete legacy of Alvar Aalto and an epoch of solid and proud craftsmanship to enjoy in Otaniemi, and the design students have their own bohemian-cum-futurist space in Arabia‘s “Art and Design City”.

Since universities these days are being made in the image of businesses, perhaps one of Finland’s favourite corporate building designers, Helin & Co Architects, will be asked to come up with something. Their library attached to Espoo’s Sello shopping mall (for a mall it is, American-style) is rather splendid and well used (right).

Alas, business seems to have a corrosive effect on architecture and hence on our everyday surroundings. Its logic, after all, makes it necessary to be efficient or rather, cost-effective. In practice that means that public and shared buildings should be as cheap as possible. It’s official. After all – what other point is there to competitive tendering? Building cheaply is an international trend that’s not gone unnoticed. It produces pretty shoddy streetscapes that perhaps we deserve, as our British friend Jonathan Glancey wrote recently.

And (for Finnish readers) today’s Vihrea Lanka takes a view on Helin & Co’s contribution to public architecture in Helsinki, the Little Parliament with its Visitors’ Centre (below on the left, picture from 4 years ago). The building, completed in 2004, is falling apart at the seams the paper says. The columnist does, of course, find a silver lining in this sorry tale – the Little Parliament definitely has the effect of boosting employment in the construction sector: as Estonian builders flow to Finland as part of a cost-effective global labour supply, security requirements in the Finnish Parliament mean at least a few jobs are reserved for good patriots. (Or did I misunderstand that last paragraph? This can’t be true. Can it?)

P.S. Just after finishing that I came across this confirmation of the above ideas, from a volume edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Webel called Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. In it, Teresa Hoskyns writes about the problematic field of spatial politics with specific reference to Europe’s parliament building:

“Here politicized public spaces, the common parts of the city that architecture and politics once inhabited, are impoverished in favor of individual society. Public architectural development is a discussion that relates to the common good …”

Actually, Hoskyns is talking about the way spaces is made available for democratic debate (agonism) but still, thought I’d share the reference. JHJ

HYVÄÄ UUTTA VUOTTA (differentiating ourselves)

It’s been said a million times and still it’s not enough: there are no winners in the global competition for the globe’s attention. Every “tallest” building becomes the second and eventually tenth tallest, each “icon” is tomorrow’s ugly weirdness and every “vibrant” usually stagnates at some point.

No tallest here (yet), relatively little of the iconic either. JHJ and associates are working to persuade the Planning Department and the City that the word “vibrant” has become meaningless.

And all that, (er, as well as having grown up here), is one reason I find Helsinki so utterly charming.

“It’s hard to assess”, writes historian Markku Kuisma (my translation) “whose fate is worse, that of the Finland of the 2000s, balancing on what feel like the merciless waves of world capitalism, or the Grand Duchy of 1809, whose existence was predicated on the moods of the autocrat at the helm of a giant empire”.

Well, the autocrat gave us Engel who gave us the human-scale classisism which generations have learned to cherish. (Avoid this place tonight if you want a calm New Year’s Eve.)

As Kuisma’s book (Return of the Robber Barons in literal translation) rehearses, from 1917 Finland developed a peculiar but pragmatic economy made up of capitalist and socialist ways of doing and owning things. A series of laws in the 1910s and 1920s ensured that the peasantry or rural population remained independent if often small land owners, meanwhile the big-wigs teamed up in cartels and other collaborations to enhance their profits. It could be simplifying too much, but my hunch has always been that the best of Finnish architecture is of the kind that supported life lived like that – not perfect, but pretty hopeful and often surprisingly lively. From exuberant self-celebration like the National Museum to just b****y good quality ordinariness in Pihlajamäki, most of us living in Helsinki have been lucky enough to be surrounded by excellent architecture. (Old photos – wouldn’t a bit of blue sky be nice!)

Then, it seems, came the curse of globalisation and the need to differentiate onesself even while trying to outdo everyone else in, er, what everyone else was doing. Architecturally speaking, glass and steel corporate monstrosity barged its way into what had been quite individual and definitely quality yet hardly “iconic” architecture in the centre of Helsinki too and hot on its heels came the still inexplicable planning crime, that Holiday Inn. (Check out this link for the magic made possible by computers imagery).

So let’s go into 2011 with the wise words of Jorma Mukala, editor of Ark/Finnish Architectural Review, in mind. In his editorial for Number 5, 2010 he wrote that Finns might consider staking out new markets for a unique product – their bizarre language, spoken by a mere 5.5 million people. It could serve as a great tool for personalised differentiation (what everyone wants, yes?) but, alas, the production line might end up needing to be shut down altogether for lack of demand.

It is with such absurd reasoning that I tried to find at least something in modern society that cannot be produced, marketed and sold cost-efficiently around the globe – something that is a value in itself.

There are, he notes, still genuine differences in environments that make a genuine difference to everyone. And that matters.

Happy New Year 2011, wherever you are!

 

Ephemeral or solid – architecture and weather

Sunday night’s thunder storm was a spectacular switching-off-of-the-lights-in-the-sky. Many Helsinki residents photographed it, stared at it, got caught in it and were frightened by it. It seemed the Apocalypse rolled into town within just a minute or two. (And beyond town too. English-language info available with “readers’ pictures and videos” all over the net.)

It left me rather pleased that I had one of those eminently thick and solid central Helsinki residential blocks to hide in and take shelter in. Shelter is pretty fundamental to architecture, no? And where nature is “harsh” as it’s said to be in Finland, solid building is pretty important.

The Finnish architectural world is always being lauded for taking nature into account, but often it’s not so much for giving shelter as for symbolising some fragile naturalness of humanity – or was it nature? There’s a lot of hyperbole about the sea and the land embracing each other, the urban and the savage merging into each other, forest and technology in perfect harmony.

British architects and architectural writers (like Jonathan Glancey) seem to detect mostly an unflattering (for them) contrast between the brutalism of British architecture and Britain’s urban space (“brutal” in the way Anna Minton says the UK has become) and the sensitive wisdom of Finland’s subtle, oh-s0-wonderful architecture and its architects, who appreciate the rough and the bodily as well as the fancy. If they don’t invoke Saint Alvar as their authority on this, these days they (like Jonathan Glancey) are likely to refer to Juhani Pallasmaa (who does write beautifully).

An example of the adoration might be the interior-design student Pieta-Linda Auttila’s wooden hotel or rather, the blurbs about it. It was nature meeting sophisticated technology, the ethereal character of a natural material reminding a user of our collective vulnerability… Basically, from the photos (it was a 2009 project), it looks like a gorgeous but totally impractical wood building for temporary enjoyment.

All the stuff about respecting nature through how we design is a good point to make, we guess. A bit of respect for the elements goes a long way when the winds are 25m/s. And it’s not just that a few records have been broken in a place near you recently, climate change is here. Finns have taken note at least at the level of projects and plans and educational events. Meanwhile, chaos reigns in many parts of the country in the wake of recent storms.

So when another big storm comes my way, I must say, old-fashioned and solid is good for me. It doesn’t have to be granite to the n’th degree, as in Kallio’s church by Lars Sonck. But then again …