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.

Stains on Public Space

The text is just a fragment, but is it a stain on public space? Is its author perhaps achieving something by making us think again about the (missing) text? (more than who…?)

It made us smile at least.

And last summer there was a whole poem of similar texts sprayed on the asphalt paths around Töölö Bay and over the railway to Kallio.

Young author (that’s official) Alexandra Salmela contemplates what really should constitute rubbish in a city centre.

We doubt she has ever stumbled on the diatribes on Kamppi or other rants on this blog. But her short column in today’s paper the pay-to-view version of the Usual  is enough to make one curious about what other intelligent things she might have to say. More books for the pile, alas.

She starts by noting how ugly is the painted white smear on a wall near her home (in Helsinki, presumably). Until recently the wall had a bit of text, graffiti left there by someone. Now silenced by an ugly block of paint.

Salmela then goes on to note that today’s urbanites have an odd sense of perception and an even odder sense of moral indignation.

Kadulla kulkija ei enää edes huomaa rakennuksen kokoista mainosta, mutta pieni kirjoitus harmaassa muurissa tai maalaus sillan alla aiheuttaa hänelle mielipahaa.

which is to say:

Someone walking on the street no longer even registers an ad the size of a building, but a little text on a grey wall or a painting under a bridge causes them upset.

Unfortunately I have no pictures currently to share with you of the communications left out there by subtle poets in knitted wool. Keeping our eyes peeled while we wait for some real cold.

(A few degrees below zero with some sunshine would not go amiss in these dark days. I read a headline that said this “warm” weather is likely to go on into February. Yeuch!)

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.

Guggenheimful of resentment

Helsinki’s leadership has, as The Usual reports, given the team of consultants doing a feasibility study for opening a Guggenheim art museum in Helsinki, free hands. The almost 2 million Euros will be enough for several carbon tons’ and many dollars’ worth of intercontinental flights and some gourmet meals. But it won’t stretch to devising anything like architectural concepts.

Not surprisingly, there’s much grumbling about the whole affair. This is followed by the dismissal of all critique, a situation to which Finnish residents must have become accustomed. There’s Hesari‘s own Saska Saarikoski in self-satisfied mode, for example, translated into some florid English.

While the message is loud and clear that critique is misguided, anyone with an eye on the long-term (and who doesn’t believe in a glorious financial future for our planet) can’t help but wonder about the wisdom here. At least a tiny bit.

Helsinki’s existing (art) museums are doing OK (my excuse for this pic above, taken from Hakasalmi Villa’s front entrance last week). Maybe Kiasma is struggling to get people to like it and come through its doors (and planning mistakes have diluted the building’s positive impact on the city centre) but along with the City’s museums, is a precious resource. A few private collections are also surprisingly vibrant, even though hyped-up blockbusters and their lemming effects make life difficult in Helsinki’s ecosystem of art offerings.

All in all, as a qualitative observation, Helsinki’s cultural offer (excuse jargon) is pretty good. Perhaps it reflects the yearnings of people stuck between geographical marginalisation (airline strikes always a horrible reminder thereof!) and the talent and the spirit/need to create.

There’s never enough money around, of course, but still creative people and arts institutions seem to flourish. Even several small quirky wonderful ones, though subsidies tend (so JHJ has been told) to favour larger, more mainstream establishments.

So it’s no surprise that Hesari has ended up toning down its enthusiasm a little with two articles foregrounding the money issue. Below, my translations in italics.

Teemu Luukka

HELSINGIN SANOMAT 27.01.2011

Guggenheim-museon suunnitteluun käytettävä 2,5 miljoonaa dollaria eli nykykursseilla noin 1,8 miljoonaa euroa on Suomen pienissä taiderahoissa valtava rahasumma. [The 2,5 million dollars or about 1,8 million Euros for planning [translator’s note – actually a feasibility study] is, in the context of Finland’s small arts funding, an enormous amount of money.]

Palkkiolla olisi voinut ostaa kaikki ne teokset, joita Suomen taidemuseot hankkivat kokoelmiinsa vuonna 2009. [The fee would have covered the purchase of all the works acquired by Finland’s art museums for their collections in 2009.]

…

Valtion taidemuseon eli muun muassa Ateneumin ja Kiasman taideostoihin konsulttipalkkio riittäisi yli kaksi vuotta. [The consultancy fee would cover the state’s art acquisitions, including those of Ateneum and Kiasma, for over two years.]

Well, no wonder many experts and quite a few besides are rolling their eyes. Shame this rolling is dismissed with such a jerk of the knee.

A is for Aalto and Aamu

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

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

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

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

Sorry.

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

From Aimo Nissi's website, aimonissi.fi

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

Quoting now,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Unberable lightness

Late May, late night – I should be going to bed, for goodness sake!! Instead it’s light, and so I cracked open a Sandels and sat down to write a blog. Well, I’ve been sitting down some time, catching up on email and the chaos that is the desk of the information worker, even though (or perhaps precicely because) she is freelance. (I have begun to use a new Finnish word: dedis = deadline).

Being Finnish I am not averse to a bit of alcohol now and then. As anyone with a passing familiarity with Finland will know, alcohol has something to do with a lot of what is wrong here – like its culture of shame and its under-developed culture of conversation not to mention its domestic violence. But alcohol is also used as a routine excuse and evasion of responsibility for inadmissible behaviour, as a thoughtful blogger has pointed out.

Alas, nothing excuses the way that The Usual printed another cartoon that made fun of the Nazi Holocaust last week-end having only just been mired in controversy over a previous out-of-order product of the same pen in the same sickening style. This blog took it up a couple of days ago. The hate-mongers (that anyone could reasonably have guessed would leap at this apparent condoning of their embittered hatred) have also taken Fingerpori’s bait and run with it – although I am reluctant to venture into the world-wide-web to seek it lest it upset me again (enough of that already, ed.), so you will find no links here. A blog called Tundra Tabloids claiming to “keep tabs on … islamist hegemony in Scandinavia and … political correctness” has a copy of the original offending cartoon and a discussion on the issue and free speech.

Which brings me to one peculiarity of the situation (since I’m sure many who have stumbled on this blog are interested in this very topic), notably the excuses being made by sensible, loveable and even educated Finns, for Fingerpori’s strips being repeatedly published in the country’s main daily. That is, that Free Speech is currently, it seems, the holy cow. Until a few years after the Kekkoslovakia era ended, around the late 1980s (and no doubt under Russian rule pre 1917) free speech was not something that Finns enjoyed. So now Finnish publics are throwing out ideas and insults as if trying out a new-found facility to wield power with words and symbols. It makes people on all sides of an argument a bit fast and footloose, so I’m told. It reminds me of when we were kids and “Nazi” referred (for my generation) to anything you really didn’t like, not that anyone really understood what Nazi was.

Bizarrely, however, Helsingin Sanomat, which still produces some excellent journalism, has failed to learn this lesson and should, we here at JHJ feel, be educated.

It’s an ambitious idea, we know, but their editorial could do worse than read How Modernity Forgets by Paul Connerton. Because there are so many things that must never, ever, be forgotten, and yet we are under such pressure to do just that. The enforced haste of consumerism, Connerton argues, is forcing us to live in a way that erodes both our memories and our senses of place (which is why JHJ got interested), because nothing, really, stays still long enough for us to pay attention to it. Everything, especially information, is subordinated to an imperative of fast turn0ver, instantaneous consumption, just-in-time frictionlessness and lightness, to the point that we live surrounded by such speed that not only is the past a foreign country, so is the present (see p. 65).

Perhaps that’s why nostalgia does reasonably well. (And it gives us a chance here at JHJ to show that we’re not partial in THAT sense of the word as regards Finnish beer. They all taste the same anyway, don’t they?)

“Comic”

We’re all rootless cosmopolitans now, aren’t we? We’re at home in airports and hotels and coffee bars wherever they be, we seek out global brands in local shops and inhabit fashions we’ve shared via fb and are generally ready to adapt to living no-place in particular. For once arriving at Helsinki-Vantaa didn’t feel so great.

Fingerpori the cartoonist has once more left us totally perplexed. To be honest, it’s Hesari that has, by publishing another anti-semitic strip in yesterday’s paper. Helsingin Sanomat is the only nationwide daily in this country of 5 million, so when it publishes cartoons that ridicule genocide and stigmatisation several times a month, one is hopefully forgiven for assuming that this reflects a widespread notion of what is acceptable. It’s not dismissable as internet-mediated nutty racism.

I’d much rather that these cartoons were the quirks of someone who peddles in a kind of adolescent humour that’s childlike in its cruelty. Such a cartoonist should be published, if anywhere, where those of adolescent humour would find them and leave the rest of us to develop other talents.

Anyway, the man behind Fingerpori will be speaking about his work next weekend as part of the Maailma Kylassa (World Village Festival) event next week-end in Helsinki. Perhaps he will expand on the letter he wrote on 7.5.2010, a couple of days after his previous non-joke. Among other things, he wrote that “For my own part I find it disturbing that citizens who sympathise with the far-right may see my strip as supporting their own distasteful views. It’s possible then that I misfired here, I apologise to those who were upset.”

But it’s hard not to think that Hesari are being ignorant as well as irresponsible. They don’t seem to understand that even in an era of speed and virtual life, of lives lived as if there were no consequences, holocausts are still made through language, images and insults as well as of instruments of terror and death. Or they don’t care.

In anticipation of landing in Helsinki, I was reminded of the recent talk in Finland of a generation of young adults who have, well, not quite grown up. They are the pullamössö generation (so toothless they can only subsist on milky gloup), a product of a materially easy life possibly combined with inattentive parenting. The result, as the wikipedia (!) article about them suggests, is people who display something between helplessness and ineptitude when it comes to everyday needs, who are somewhere between confident and arrogant when it comes to consumer novelties (including the latest technologies), and who are as uninterested in the past as they are ignorant of it. (Later I hope to blog about Paul Connerton’s provocative book on this topic: How Modernity Forgets).

We here at JHJ have a hunch that a person with a developed sense of empathy doesn’t have to be lacking in a sense of humour let alone talent for comic writing or even drawing comics. In fact, the tragedy of the Holocaust itself provided a vehicle which actually gave the whole art form a bit of a boost and some innovation. Art Spiegelman‘s Maus, and the same cartoonist’s work after the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, are proof that the comic is a fabulous medium for expressing empathy, for narrating a story that makes no sense, and for being subversive of convention and for trying to understand the baffling human condition – all at the same time.

Spiegelman incidentally also demonstrated in In The Shadow of No Towers that it is possible to be a rooted cosmopolitan.

Too many Finns just don’t get it

Hello again,

I can’t help returning just to let off steam about something very sad that’s happened in Helsinki while I’ve been away. The Usual (4.5.2010) found it appropriate to publish a cartoon strip by someone calling themselves Fingerpori portraying a shop in Nazi Germany with some peculiar reference to free range Jews. It makes fun (as it were) of a genocide that happened here in Europe within living memory. It wasn’t critical of religiousness, it just seemed to think that millions of dead was somehow humorous. Enough said.

It left us baffled as to what the “joke” or the “critique” implied in the strip might have been. From our insider-outsider perspective on Finland though, the strip is hurtful, shocking and reflects extremely badly on Finnish culture, but it’s also akin to puerile and unreflecting banter of a racist, demeaning and uneducated kind, that’s not that exceptional. Perhaps not having had to learn to be sensitive to the tragedies and losses suffered by victims of genocide (like the folks I bump into all the time in London whose lives are still shaped by those events), even privileged Finns (professors, businessmen, doctors) say racist things that their counterparts in the UK or the USA would never even think of let alone utter out loud. Often, if they are challenged and quite frequently even before, they’ll counter by asking why is it that some groups of people are out of bounds for critique or humour.

Basically, it’s been kind of OK to be a little racist in Finland and maybe it’s been understandable too. But the world changes and the injustices of discrimination in a highly unequal world have become an everyday preoccupation in Finland too. Maybe I’m a bit patronising, but I see a need for education about the wrongness and the hurtfulness of this “humour”. But it’s appalling but unfortunately not entirely surprising that Helsingin Sanomat should be publishing anti-semitism in 2010 while around it and in it are developed forms of bilious resentment shaped by contemporary racism.

Meanwhile there is a Council for Mass Media (Julkisen Sanan Neuvosto) who do put out guidelines:

26. Jokaisen ihmisarvoa on kunnioitettava. Etnistä alkuperää, kansallisuutta, sukupuolta, seksuaalista suuntautumista, vakaumusta tai näihin verrattavaa ominaisuutta ei pidä tuoda esiin asiaankuulumattomasti tai halventavasti.

26. The human dignity of every individual must be respected. The ethnic origin, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, convictions or other similar personal characteristics may not be presented in an inappropriate or disparaging manner.

Meanwhile not all Finns are suffering this deficit of sensitivity or imagination. It was a thoughtful and appropriate gesture of the City of Helsinki to name the square outside Kamppi Narinkka-tori (market market) after the Jewish traders whose place of work it was in until about 100 years ago. And people are interested in ethnicity as a complicated and enriching aspect of human existence. I’m thinking for instance about a fabulous documentary, Daavid (scroll down to find it), by Taru Mäkinen some years ago, about the ways that Finnish Jews (or were they Jewish Finns and did it matter?) complicated matters for the German military by being human beings, allies, and of superior military rank all at the same time, and whom the Finnish political establishment were (mostly) committed to treating as fully Finnish citizens.

At least one person was as shocked and baffled as us as reflected in the letter to the paper’s editor today. If it were a British paper publishing stuff like that, a chief editor even might lose their job.

Architecture, global capital and really big countries

There are different ways one could look at the prospect of a two-tier-Swiss-flag-in-glass popping up on the waterfront by Helsinki’s market square. Here’s one, for example.

The port of Helsinki closed down harbour functions here some while ago and what we have left is largely disused building or car-parking space. So perhaps it is time to move on from the port’s understanding (see website) that this is just some prime-quality SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

Though of course it isn’t, and never was, left over that is.The idea of getting some of that footloose and still relatively abundant global (Norwegian) capital to settle in Helsinki is never, so it would seem, far from the minds of the city’s decision makers. Will Finns soon be meekly going where many others have gone before?

Having expanded at length on the HDHD previously and since the damning views by the international commentators are available online anyway (oh, Mr Holl, Helsinki needs you now!) we’ll move on to other aspsects of the debacle. For instance, waterfront development generally. Here’s what Finnish researchers Rauno Sairinen and Satu Kumpulainen had to say about it before the money wobble:

Today, urban waterfront regeneration takes place in a societal environment of increased capital mobility and inter-urban competition (…). Because cities have to compete for investments and affluent residents, city governments cannot merely manage the development, i.e. focus on the redistribution of resources, but have to actively pursue investments and publicity … Urban governance has expanded to involve not only the government but also a range of private and semi-public actors. This approach … based on public–private partnership, flagship projects, aggressive marketing and consumption-oriented projects such as retail and tourism centres, has been labelled entrepreneurial urban governance (…), and it is often well exemplified by large-scale urban waterfront regeneration projects.

(From ‘Assessing social impacts in urban waterfront regeneration’  in Environmental Impact Assessment Review 26 (2006) 120– 135)

If you left things at that, you’d want to give up on any semblance of critical debate whatsover and of course they don’t. In fact, the authors note that

According to the Land Use and Building Act there should be adequate investigation of
a plan’s potential environmental impacts, including implications for the community
economy, social, cultural and other effects. … environmental impacts are
understood as direct and indirect effects on:
– people’s living conditions and environment;
– plants and animals, water, air and climate;
– flora and fauna, biodiversity and natural resources;
– regional and community structure, community and energy economy and traffic;
– townscape, landscape, cultural heritage and the built environment.

Well, we haven’t seen these yet for the plot in question. Nor can we find anything recent on the City Planning Department’s website (even on its sweetly titled “participate and influence” page). [Updated 24.3] Initially we found no trace of the report on the cultural and architectural values of the area that was promised by Hannu Penttila a month or so ago and cheered us up so but a polite email to the City Planning Department fixed that problem and provided the link (in Finnish).

And why are we bothered? Because Helsingin Sanomat and other media reported that the hotel scheme is back off ice again, to be voted on early next month. The City Board already decided it was in favour of Norwegian money in the shape of a luxury hotel by ueber-starchitects Herzog + de Meuron, even while tons of other folks, including the Katajanokka Seura (local amenity society) are collecting signatures to make the (horrid) thing go away. In the mean time, however, the poor old politicians appear to be more and more worried that if they don’t embrace the thing (which some admit to not liking) they feel bound to go with it just so they get their hands on that money.

Alas, to imagine politicians saving municipal budgets through savvy real estate deals is to indulge in make-believe. And we don’t just mean Helsinki – London’s own spectacular Canary Wharf had to be saved by massive, massive injections of public money and by “legal” bolsterings of private enterprise.

And yet there is a precedent in Helsinki. Not knowing what was up, I photographed these port-a-cabins which signalled the start of something new to me back in September. Another hole in the ground perhaps, for Southern Helsinki’s fecundly reproducing cars, I thought at first. I didn’t find out about that one either on the Planning Department’s media outlets but rather via The Usual. It’s the plot on Neitsytpolku, (maybe Helsink’s answer to Maiden Lane) also known (aptly? ironically?) as the Kätilöopisto (College of Midwifery or Birthing Hospital) site. It was sold off in 1990 by the city to the Soviet Union, whose embassy was next door. Sale price: a paltry 75million granny’s markkas. Over the next few years the decision was bitterly contested as some folks suggested getting the land back, others at least to insist that planning permission be conditional on an architectural competition to include Finnish entrants. Didn’t happen.

In those days the journalists at The Usual looked to typical blunders of the times to inject a tone of criticism. They considered the various embassy buildings that Helsinki had, in moments of lax judgement it suggested, sold off to sovereign foreign states who then blithely ignored architectural context if not always planning regulations. Interestingly, they saved their most venomous language for the Norwegians and how they replaced a jugend villa by Selim Lindqvist with a box of aluminium and glass (perhaps to remind them of back home in Oslo?).

This could all be quite amusing if it weren’t for the way 21st architecture is getting just SOOOO BIIIG which in little Helsinki really doesn’t appeal at all. Mr Holl, if you have any views on Katajanokka or Helsinki still, might you publish somewhere prominent quite soon?