Propaganda or magic – what the Guggenheim can do for Helsinki’s South Harbour

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_Hotel,_Helsinki#/media/File:HelsinkiPanorama_rocco.jpg

Today The Usual (Helsingin Sanomat) waxes excited and naive about the power of the Guggenheim Foundation’s winning competition entry for improving [sic] Helsinki’s South Harbour.

Ankeasta satama-alueesta on nyt mahdollisuus loihtia ainutlaatuinen, kuhiseva satama, joka houkuttelee niin kaupunkilaisia kuin turisteja. Siksi Helsingin ja valtion päättäjien kannattaa käydä läpi Guggenheim Helsinki -hankkeen taloudelliset ja kulttuuriset vaikutukset sekä uskaltaa tehdä päätöksiä.

[And our translation] The grim harbour area can now be conjured up into a unique, teeming port that attracts citizens as well as tourists. That is why Helsinki and the state would be well advised to go through the Guggenheim Helsinki’s economic and cultural impacts, as well as to dare make decisions.

Quite.

One big flaw in their argument is that the South Harbour is not broken. (See above or come and see for yourself in case it is soon broken).

The desire to “fix” this wonderful place comes from a well known source. The business-friendly ideology that produces all the rubbish novelty that has already turned our home planet into “pile of filth” (as the Pope put it last week) but calls it progress.

More like urbanicide.

The Eteläranta site temporarily set aside by the city for the Guggenheim currently works as a ferry terminal forecourt. It’s not the waterfront boulevard of which the editorial writers dream. But it is functional. Its adverse impact on traffic is manageable. Its ambiance is that of real life, real people doing real things.

OK, most of it is car park, but compared to the nuisance of the proposed winning design, it is benign in the extreme.

And yet, all we hear from the nation’s biggest newspaper and city leaders is how this all needs to be made better. The improvement rhetoric is overwhelming. It seeks to persuade us that all people want is pretty and safe custom-built spaces for standard-issue, non-stop, surprise-free (and no doubt begger-free) entertainment. For loitering suitable for homo neoliberalis.

The phrase “entertainment-security complex” comes to mind.

Well, the harbour does have a bit of a problem. Europe’s smallest and most pointless waterfront ferris-wheel went up on the Katajanokka site on the other side of the water. But theoretically it can at least be dismantled and something more appropriate built on the site.

Next to the Eteläranta site is also the old Palace hotel. This jewel of modernism was not exactly loved when it went up in 1951 to accommodate Olympics tourists. But since then, Viljo Revell’s and Keijo Petäjä’s sleek lines have housed hotel guests and business leaders not to mention fashion shows and become part of our collective memory. And since then Helsinki residents have also come to breathe easily around its restrained elegance, which adds to, rather than takes away, the richness I call my home town.

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teollisuuskeskus#/media/File:Helsinki_2009_PD_0342.JPG

Sadly and mysteriously hotel operations in the building ceased in 2009.

Even more mysteriously, the editorial in today’s Usual ponders on how fabulous it would be if international hotel chains were to come here in the wake of the Guggenheim.

Perhaps they believe magic is better when it’s imported.

The Guggenheim wants in Helsinki – oh no!

The mood at the editorial office is distraught. Helsinki’s South Harbour, quite a fantastic piece of existing city, is at risk from the unholy alliance of creative city doctrine and international architecture.

See here for some good views on it from wonderful The Next Helsinki team.

Earlier today the winner of the prize for the notional Helsinki Guggenheim Art Museum was unveiled. There has been quite a lot of enthusiasm, even from unexpected quarters.

It’s unlikely that the jury ever concentrated on its task in the manner we Helsinkians deserve, given that there were 1 715 entries (some featured above, more on the G website).

And JHJ is not impressed by the architectural merits of the winning entry, Moreau Kusunoki’s dark tower called Art in the City (but Beacon/Majakka as well).

It looks glum and too tall and totally unsuitable for the waterfront.

Nobody here in the editorial offices here knows anyone who wants this thing – in pretty much any shape or form. (But especially not this Moominvalley wannabe glumness!)

There’s also no money for it. There’s no planning consent. The city already turned the idea down once. Officially. There’s little desire for it among ordinary people and not much among artists.

Those of us who desire the Guggenheim Foundation to eff off, frequently get told that were we more cosmopolitan we would want it.

At one point we all (at least here at JHJ) thought the horrible thing had been sent on its way. But no.

A very strong desire for it is coming from somewhere.

The politics is horrible but then the idea of the Guggenheim interfering [sic] in our art world as well as the cityscape, was always going to be controversial.

Proponents, including the country’s biggest daily newspaper, have spewed endless supportive propaganda for a Guggenheim. A little less outrageously, the G Foundation briefed Miltton Communications Group to do its propaganda locally (so-called public relations and marketing being the way business manipulates public opinion).

Given that the post-industrial economy we live in produces mostly data-fog and commercial entertainment, it’s not surprising that information about the museum is abundant but rather untrustworthy.

For Finnish-speakers, however, I do recommend listening to this YLE radio interview with architect and critic Tarja Nurmi. She covers many, many of the shortcomings of the project in a short space of time. Starts at around 9 mins into the programme.

It’s all so upsetting we can’t possibly pursue this any more.

Helsinki as commons 19 April 2015 – election day

Commons? Urban space? These days? With these election prognoses?

But, to more hopeful things. This afternoon a packed seminar room at Kiasma museum of contemporary art heard three excellent presentations and discussion that exploded many a myth about the benefits of cultural projects like the Guggenheim Foundation’s/franchise’s efforts to woo Helsinki’s leadership and public to let it come here and play. While we, of course, pay.

Michael Sorkin, Andrew Ross, Miguel Robles-Duràn and Mabel O. Wilson had come from New York invited by Checkpoint Helsinki to share with us their experiences and analyses. As they spoke, the idea of a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki benefiting anyone in Helsinki started to sound even crazier than it had previously. Such a project would draw us into an international urban renewal circus in which there are no winners, only exhausted competitors. I’d note that the madness of “titanium-clad-starship-cruiser-museums” (I think that was Andrew Ross) as serious municipal endeavours, hasn’t yet – thankfully – quite engulfed us because we are a little behind in so many policy fashions. It also need not cheapen our city or diminish its charms if, as Juhani Pallasmaa put it, we (or our city managers, whoever they are) learn to be a bit less naive than hitherto.

Alas, Helsinki’s public is not known for its critical sensibilities, at least not when it comes to the kind of free-market, free-world, free-everything rhetoric peddled as standard across (still) wealthy European cities (not to mention elsewhere).

As the speakers all pointed out, if city making in general continues on what is now its “normal” trajectory, the homogenisation even of European cities brimming with heritage and sense of place as they are, will be inevitable. (It’s not that I don’t like Marks & Spencers, I just don’t like a political system based on the big swallowing or shoving aside the small, in this case similarly priced Finnish garment manufacturers and retailers. Star*ucks, now that’s another thing altogether. I like Finnish coffee).

Opening Helsinki up to the Guggenheim would mean that our lives, our streets and our most creative impulses would mingle with the evils [sic] of the global construction industry and its truly appalling discounting of human lives. As we heard today, the Guggenheim is among several institutions blithely ignoring yet massively benefiting from the subhuman conditions in which construction workers (and others) in the United Arab Emirates have to live.

So, no longer is one’s ire just (?) a result of confusing cities with theme parks. It’s about just how entangled one wants to become in the global intensification of a totally crazy and utopian set of values and aspirations that passes for mainstream and wreaks so much destruction, throughout the production chain. And yet which, in shy little Finland, only a few dare question.

And so it was with sadness that I was reminded of how earlier commentators on Helsinki’s urban changes have identified a problem here that goes deeper than arguments over costs and benefits.

In a short film by Marja Heikkilä & Martti Saarikivi about the old picture house, Kino Palatsi (1911-1965), the narrator notes “the city may not be that old, but it is full of memories. People shape their environment and the environment shapes them”.

I was born after Kino Palatsi was torn down, but vicariously its memory has shaped a small part of my life too.

Later in the film, he goes on: “a last-minute public debate failed to yield fruit before the hasty implementation of a demolition order meant that the sounds of debate were drowned out by the noise of machinery. Seeking explanations for this frenzy of tearing down buildings, one usually hears arguments about the economics. The reason lies deeper, however. Our towns are young and most of their inhabitants recent arrivals. That is why we lack urban tradition, and why the majority of people do not feel the kind love for their hometowns that would be expressed by respecting tradition (heritage).”*

Well, I don’t buy that, quite. I don’t believe people are that uncaring, and besides, that documentary was shot in 1968.

Helsinki has grown a lot since then and urbanization around the world keeps accelerating. The throughput of stuff and life and rural land required to service all this urban change has taken on such unfathomable dimensions that er, words fail.

So what I’m getting at is that in a way we are all – at least anyone for instance who might stumble on this blog post – living urban lives. And whether it’s in Helsinki or Hong Kong or Hamburg, surely the chances of good urban futures are better without the cheapening and democracy-weakening antics of global brands and global privatisers of all kinds.

Tomorrow, when we know who will represent the people of Finland for the next four years, there will also be excitement as the public gets to see the results of the Next Helsinki Competition tomorrow.

(And I don’t think the fear and parochialism I read into the election results is unrelated to the embrace of these shiny and placeless vehicles of spectacle captured to serve new urban, though not always civilized, ideals).

http://www.nexthelsinki.org/#about

* Viime hetkessä herännyt julkinen keskustelu ei ehtinyt vielä kantaa hedelmää kun jo purkupäätöksen nopea toimeenpano hukutti virinneen keskustelun kiviporien meluun. Kysyttäessä syytä … purkuvimmaan viitataan yleensä taloustekijöihin. Syy on kuitenkin syvemmällä. Kaupunkimme ovat nuoria ja suurin osa asukkaista on tulokkaita. Siksi meillä ei ole kaupunkitraditioita eikä asukkaiden enemmistö tunne kotipaikkarakkautta, mikä kuvastuisi perinteiden kunnioittamisessa.

Possibly good news

It may be good news, we will post it anyway.

The unseemly rush with which Helsinki’s local elected politicians had been asked to decide on whether or not a Guggenheim franchise should or should not grace the Baltic’s Daughter’s waterfront, has been somewhat calmed. Almost a whole extra month has been granted to our councillors to reassess the proposals, as YLE reports. With any luck this will help them to familiarise themselves with what they are actually deciding on.

Culture(-and-basketball) Minister Paavo Arhinmäki reminds us that no money is forthcoming from the state and tells us that he reckons the Guggenheim brand is not worth what Helsinki is being asked to pay for it. Mr Pajunen does not like all this, but unlike poor JGKS who has to run an art museum in the sweet smell of popcorn in the Tennis Palace, it’s still unclear why Pajunen should be so gung-ho about the scheme in the first place.

But some parallels do suggest themselves.

Doc Point’s documentary film festival is enlightening Helsinki audiences about the bluff and bluster of foreign investors (Trump for one), who offer to develop beautiful environments in the name of progress and er… Apologies, I digress.

More bad news, alas, related to foreign investors and really big money in urban development. A friend reports that there are many self-styled progressives (Greens to be precise) who think it would be right to build a 33-storey hotel (which was initially given planning permission at a measly 16 storeys), a new “landmark” in Jätkäsaari. The location is effectively within the little peninsula that forms the core of our elegant city. There goes our silhouette and, with it, our uniqueness.

Wonder what other dreams there are among Helsinkians other than these dreams of high buildings and, well, whatever it is that the Helsinki Guggenheim represents? A fabulously unique new public library maybe? Or one that looks like it was created on a computer like computer-generated environments everywhere else?

p.s. check out some wonderful and wonderfully subtly titled photographs at learning to see Helsinki.

Waiting for good news

JHJ cannot avoid adding a post-script to yesterday’s post.

Helsinkians are still mired in the good news from the Guggenheim and the City Art Museum (e.g. the foundation’s promises to offer Finnish artists access to international networks) but also the bad (e.g. that Helsinki’s art world risks being smothered in the embrace of a global franchise).

Worse still, we have stumbled upon words on the G that make the stomach churn: resentful commentary laced with the racist bile which, in today’s Finnish political discourse, is always but a few clicks away.

Facts have been one of the casualties of the week’s debate. Is JGKS to go on holiday? Or is he not? Has the announcement about staff restructuring at the Art Museum come as a surprise, or has it come too late? Yesterday the Museum published corrections to recent misinformation on its website.

So today? A suggestion in a letter to an editor somewhere near us, to increase the floorspace to be constructed at Töölönlahti on land owned by the city. This would easily give the city the millions it needs to make a Katajanokka Guggenheim happen.

Heck, there we were thinking someone was suggesting a site for an art museum by Töölönlahti, obviously one that would grow organically out of local ground. Oh well, sometimes these emeritus professors of architecture seem a bit old-fashioned…

… about as progressive as those Helsinki transport administrators looking to revamp parking norms (a pet topic here at JHJ). Gloopy globules of green rhetoric notwithstanding, the city’s proposals are not aimed at reducing overall car densities on our ever more cramped peninsula.

Rather than setting upper limits on parking, Helsinki continues the trend it set in the 1960s of setting a lower limit. Marvellous. (Decisions deferred to the end of this month).

Next time I post it’ll be good news.

In anticipation, here’s a picture of a forest. Remember, Sibelius himself said that a person should live either in a big city or in the forest.

Visual Literacy in Helsinki’s Guggenheim project

The Guggenheim-Helsinki feasibility report and the way that Helsingin Sanomat (which this blog prefers to call The Usual and some just call Pravda) and a few other cronies have been hyping it up in the last few days has also yielded a good amount of laughs.

But presumably the Head of the Helsinki Art Museum, Janne Gallen-Kallela-Siren (JGKS), did not mean to have us all bursting at the sides when he gave yesterday’s interview to Channel 4 TV.

The interviewer asked him how he imagined the future museum. He had not, he said, thought about that.

Instead he had thought about 500 years of Gutenberg’s galaxy [sic].

The spoofs are coming thick and fast. On facebook … [but also commentary on the mainstream debate: “impossible to be critical of the G. without being written off as a pessimist … it’s promoted with the same sickly over-happy hype as innovation and the Aalto University” “is this a sick joke?”]

Many thanks to Creative Block for this visually articulate and verbally supported reaction to JGKS’s baffling show. For this weekend reality was indeed transformed, as his post notes. Apart from Creative Block’s fabulous illustration of the story, he provides a transcript.

”sitä olen ajatellut, että meillä on nyt takanamme noin 500 vuotta ns. Gutenbergin galaksia, galaksia, jossa painettu sana, kirjoitettu sana on ollut hegemoninen vallan väline. Ja me nyt tällä hetkellä seisomme visuaalisen vuosisadan kynnyksellä. Ja tämä vanha, Gutenbergin galaksi horjuu meidän ikään kuin takanamme ja jalkojemme alla … [Nyt] tarvitaan huipputoimijoita, -laitoksia, -instituutioita, -museoita, -taiteilijoita, jotka ikään kuin voivat ottaa tämän keskiön tällaisessa uudenlaisessa maailmassa, jonka me tiedämme olevan jo ympärillä, mutta jota me emme aina välttämättä osaa ikään kuin artikuloida todellisuutena.  … täytyy muistaa, että taktiikalla voitetaan taistelu, strategialla voitetaan sota. Ja strategian taustalla täytyy olla jokin päämäärä. Nyt meillä on ollut taktiikka. Meillä on strategia. Mutta meillä on ihan konkreettinen päämäärä, että jos kaikki menee kohdalleen, Suomeen, Helsinkiin nousee vuosina 2017-2018 museo, joka nousee toivottavasti maailman globaalien museoiden joukkoon.”

Basically, it’s something like that after these 500 years of the hegemony of the printed word, we’re now at the threshold of a new world. This requires new top talent, institutions, museums, artists and so on who can take centre stage in this new situation. He goes on to talk about strategy and tactics and that maybe by 2018, if all goes well, Helsinki will have a museum that will hopefully join the ranks of the globe’s finest.

Reproductions of JGKS’s own visual skills, as demonstrated last week when the report findings were presented, are also attracting a fair amount of comment.

Inspired by this story, I googled for that earlier silly picture. And found it. (Scroll down on this page for those snowball-throwing representatives of new talent.)

But I also found yet another spoof image of that attractive piece of Helsinki close to the water.

Finland’s state broadcaster, YLE, reports that there is something fishy about the way the whole feasibility study was drawn up.

JHJ asks: Should there not be transparency about who sits on what board representing whose interests, and should transparency not reach beyond Helsinki’s deputy mayor Tuula Haatainen reassuring the public that “it’s OK, we knew about it”?

Ripping off YLE’s image, we can safely conclude that in the fight between the Guggenheim and Gutenberg, all tactics are allowed and thus far there appear to be no winners.

That G-report: 200 pages of buzzwords like “deep”

The Guggenheim Foundation’s feasibility study for Helsinki is out. Its 200 pages, unsurprisingly vacuous and expensively produced as they may be, should be of interest to anyone who loves Helsinki. (Yawn – there would be better things to do…)

The G. Foundation and its Helsinki friends want the franchise here. And they have the South Harbour very much in their sights (photo below). So what are the motives, impacts and willingness to take risks (on their own behalf? on ours?) of this international institution? The report (executive summary at least) reads so much like the standard bull***t bingo that’s filled planning and urban governance bumph for 30 years, it’s hard to know.

The report’s producers apparently “worked diligently … to understand how a G Museum could benefit Finland”. There is no “center of gravity” in Helsinki’s art scene, it continues. The G thinks it can help plug this gap by offering to try to attract more tourists and expand the art market.

Ah yes. This is the world that’s been made in the last 30 years: here judgements on urban and art issues are debated in business/financial terms; the needs of tourists trump everyone else’s; luxury cars sell better than ever even as crisis reigns!

In these circumstances, perhaps it’s not that surprising that so many are so willing to sell Helsinki’s family silver (the South Harbour plus the city’s limited art funding). The Usual mostly plays cheer-leader, but the uber-respectable  Suomen Kuvalehti asked about the risks two days ago, noting that the deadline imposed on the city for deciding (February 15th!!) is far too tight. In the same rag the veteran film maker and politician Jörn Donner noted almost a year ago that the scheme is part of an unwise megalomania among decision makers.

More recently then. What are folks saying? A lot. Many are stunned (by the proposed site, the timetable, the risks, the impact on museum staff and, perhaps, visual artists). Waiting for the news to be digested, our friend Arkkivahti confines herself to very few words indeed – arrrrggggggg being the most operative one.

In a clip on YLE, artist Silja Rantanen picks up some important themes from the report. It is problematic from a moral and political point of view, she notes. It means public Finnish money bolstering US-based business.

She also does not like the way Helsinki is represented to the report’s American audience: the text is imperialist, based on a stereotype of Helsinki from the Cold War era. A G “museum” on this basis, she suggested, would turn Finnish art into an ethnographic curiosity. It might provide a set of walls for pretty random travelling artworks when what Finns deserve (our interpretation here) is stewardship, including further development, of something much more precious and locally meaningful. Rantanen sees cultural imperialism also in the way that the G offers its know-how to the Finnish (underpaid, overqualified and variously motivated) museum staff.

Indeed, although the G. report includes the deep word “deep[ly]” about twenty times, it doesn’t offer anything “solid”. Instead it promises consultation, expertise, “new ideas” [sic] …

Without the massive injection of more substantive resources, the so-called Bilbao effect that those finger-pointers above are hoping for, is never going to happen (as I noted earlier here).

Elsewhere? Angry anti-elite postings against the plans, as you’d expect, online. Interestingly, some [not “many”, Ed.] Finnish artists and gallery people (said elite?) seem quite happy with the G. concept. They talk about art as if it were for the art market.

Has neoliberalism’s love of riches sunk into those folks like a hot knife into butter? That old Fifi/Adbusters image is rather suggestive. (Helsinki slang lesson: fyrkka = money).

p.s. I muse on the possibility that living next door to the Soviet Union has left many otherwise intelligent Finns blind to salient features of left and right politics – including the possibility that the community/communism has a lot going for it, and that Finland’s proverbial equality is fast disappearing into a black hole of cosseting the already rich. Provocative thoughts from the USA here.

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!

If it ain’t broke why are they fixing it?

So here’s a question: how much does Helsinki need to change? It’s one of the most beautiful cities in northern Europe. That’s not just us here at JHJ, quite a few architectural writers have waxed lyrical about it.

And here’s another question: how come Helsinki managed to survive the twentieth century so well, so intact?

Britain produced clone towns, America sprawled and many a European capital city ended up looking good from an airplane or from miles away, but feeling cold and alienating at street level. Helsinki kept its low-rise city centre alive – just – and developed a new (not unloved!) type of modernist residential area (lähiö) to cope with post-war needs.

But is this changing? Now “Helsinki” is focussing in. We have Kamppi, we have the building sites of New Helsinki’s waterfront luxury (or not) and above all, we have the ongoing headache of Töölönlahti. For the moment things are OK – the cycling ramp to Mannerheimintie we moaned about earlier has been fixed and the skateboarders are loving the smooth asphalt outside the Music Building.

After the railway warehouses were destroyed the authorities promised to make the area accessible to ordinary folks, to put up a few small-scale pavilions for cafes and such, to expand park-like area and so on.

But they also got excited about the potential rents from the area. And interestingly, they got really excited about building underground. There’s story after fragmentary story about an underground library, an underground campus for a new university, a multi-use something, a motor-vehicle tunnel to expedite east-west travel (perhaps making it easier to folks from Espoo to get to the new underground car park about to be built in Hakaniemi.

All of which is a far cry from the stuff that was being discussed a couple of nights ago at Porthania regarding the Guggenheim foundation’s feasibility study for a franchised art museum here. The society for Housing and Planning had invited an Italian, Davide Ponzini, to open a discussion on the rationales in various cities for so-called culture-led regeneration. It was not encouraging. The only unequivocal winners usually are a handful of architects, a handful of big construction companies and a handful of growth-minded politicians.

That’s a lot of disappointed people and a lot of badly designed space if it goes wrong.

Then again, someone did point out that it’s not surprising the Helsinki Art Museum has tried to think laterally about its space needs. Who’d want to run a museum from a moldy box in Meilahti far away from public transport or in the sweet smell of pop-corn at the Tennis Palace. Point taken.

Anyway, nobody has yet very seriously talked about putting a new art museum in the Töölönlahti area. Maybe that’s cos there’s one there already, Kiasma.

Sooo, why not just turn the area into a park? A real one. With people, trees, pavilions and stuff. You know, like they invented in the 18th century? Or was it centuries earlier?

Past imperfect and future dogmatic

This is not a blog post about Finnish grammar.

Nor is it a post about the Guggenheim feasibility study which is drawing such impassioned commentary in the blogosphere. It is also not a post about the rather ignorable building pictured below. (The photo is from 2009, when the potential costs of archictectural globalization first really got to us here on this blog).

It is a blog post about words and how they are used.

As Arkkivahti notes, there are many people who are sceptical but not against the Guggenheim scheme. JHJ would like to add that though Helsinki has a glorious past it was never perfect – it can always do with some additional beauty!

The odd thing now is that we know very little about the Guggenheim scheme feasibility study. Nevertheless, there are plenty of words in circulation that might make you think that a branch of the Guggenheim’s expanding family of art museums was about to open in Helsinki.

Recently we were surprised to read an article about the feasibility study in The Usual. Baffled, rather. We had, of course, noted that the Foundation have been positive about the idea of gracing Helsinki with their brand. But JHJ had not however been aware that a decision to build had been made. And so it was that this kind of language in the paper sparked a double-take:

Guggenheimin museon voi hyvin rakentaa Katajanokalle

Rakennuksen alle tehdään vesitiivis patoseinä, joka ankkuroidaan peruskallioon 15 metrin syvyyteen. Suurilta lisäkustannuksilta vältytään.

Or, as is customary on this blog, in our own translation:

The Guggenheim museum can easily be built in Katajanokka

A water-tight barrier wall will be constructed below the building and anchored in the rock at 15 metre’s depth. This will avoid substantial extra costs.

We were not aware that a decision had yet been made to bring the G. to Helsinki, that a preferred location had been chosen by the G. and ratified by Helsinki. Nor had we kept abreast of the “debate” of which the peculiar-looking headline was a small part. Hence the raised eyebrow.

But then The Usual frequently reports stories as if they had happened already (in some cases just cutting and pasting the press release as is…). One day it reported that Mayor Jussi Pajunen was confident that the G. would come and would bring megabucks in its wake. Once this had been reported, this reporting itself became news. A careless reader might have suspected that national broadcaster YLE were saying that the G would come and it would be ready in 2018.

This kind of language is not quite the same thing as another interesting feature of contemporary political rhetoric, what Stefan Collini calls the “dogmatic future” tense. His wonderfully fluent, perceptive and empirically supported essay in the London Review of Books Vol.33(16) he considers the prose that makes it appear as if consumerist metrics were the best way to assess everything.

… official discourse has become increasingly colonised by an economistic idiom, which is derived not strictly from economic theory proper, but rahter fromthe language of management schools, business consultants and financial journalism. British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms

Effectively, we end up (and not just in Britain) with a kind of consumerist relativism. What is not, however, relative, is the injunction to imagine everything as part of a ‘market’ transaction.

Collini also mentions the ‘mission-statement present’ as another aspect of this already killing Newspeak. The mission-statement present disguises “implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general truths” (Collini’s words) such as “if you pay for it you value it”, “choice is an obvious good”, “privatising businesses enhances everything” (examples by JHJ).

So back to Finland. Beware, users of the rather lovely but increasingly erratically performing national rail service, VR!

Future dogma = privative, privatise, privatise!

The Usual (not the online version) reports that Tatu Rauhamaki, the conservative politician at the helm of Helsinki’s regional transport, believes that simply privatising the railways would fix the ongoing problems. This, as anyone with a smidgen of critical acumen, is the most elementary form of the future dogmatic. But he backs it up with a bit of comparative pseudo-economese:

Siitä on hyviä kokemuksia esimerkiksi Ruotsista ja Britanniasta: vuorotarjontaa ja sitä mukaa matkustajia on tullut lisää.

or:

For instance Sweden and Britain have had good experiences of this: more choice of routes and with it more passengers.

Er … has he actually used Swedish or British trains recently? Or followed the news about them? Then he’d know that they are extraordinarily expensive to run compared to ones that are state-owned.

Alas, we Finns are terribly susceptible to international fashions. Particularly if they have a whiff of the anti-communist about them.