Going high

It’s been a wonderful summer and August is shaping up to be just as happy and as busy as it always is.

You know, in Helsinki the weather matters, the length of the days matter. Life is lived in pulses and rather precise rhythms. For instance the whole country has been on holiday for all of July. Not for Finland the “constant er*ction” that early 21st-century global business expects of its workers, (that naughty phrase is borrowed – from memory – from the shockingly lazy Corinne Maier).

Maybe.

Like so many other Helsinkians in August, JHJ has taken overseas visitors to the top of Torni. As seen from here, a phone mast, an old fire station punctuate the pleasant rhythm of Helsinki’s unique late-summer cityscape.

In Helsinki’s August this year the world design capital machinery is ratcheting up its programme a notch. Many of us are waiting for (or preparing for) the Helsinki Festival. And many, many lovely, quirky, late-summer-happy Helsinkians who like doing things in town (read all about it here) are taking advantage of the still-gorgeous weather to DIWO (do it with others).

JHJ is loving it and the visitors are suitably, slightly, pleasantly awed as they point their cameras to horizons still visible over Helsinki’s rooftops.

But while the thousands of Helsinkians just mentioned are busy “unlocking” shared energies, there are those who are quietly planning to lock up much more. I refer to the craze in the Planning Department for tall buildings. (JHJ wrote an earlier rant here, Lewism wrote sensibly about this last year.)

The grapevine tells JHJ that many, many built environment professionals are aghast at what’s in the pipeline. Similarly, the grapevine tells JHJ that younger built environment professionals in a relatively small job market are afraid to pronounce in public that they too are dubious about the radical – really radical – proposed increase in the height of Helsinki buildings.

In a city where the sun is such a precious thing that an entire month (and countless evenings of terassis before and after) must be devoted to it, what a topsy-turvy idea from the Planning Department to block it out.

Meaningful Design in Helsinki

It’s July. Juhannus a.k.a. midsummer is behind us. This is a complicated time of year. Air and water temperatures will (hopefully) rise a bit over the next few weeks. Meanwhile the days are already getting shorter.

This also means that over one half of the marketing ploy that is Helsinki’s Design Fest 2012 is over. Yet, like the middle of summer, the middle of the WDC-2012-year may be the mathematical middle of this year of design-hype but it’s not the middle in any meaningful way. The season is only just beginning!

We expect hard evidence of Finnish design excellence soon, and not just in a canyon left over by a redundant railway line turned over to cycling.

More in evidence and in the advertising has been the “heart” of Helsinki’s design festival. This is the temporary pavilion behind the Design Museum. A daily programme of events (speakers) there has been trying to enthuse people to learn about design since early May, with varying success.

Apart from the fact that it’s been incredibly cold in the space, perhaps the Helsinki public or the tourists who stray that way simply aren’t interested in being preached at. And it’s worth noting that the Finnish version of the website is a tad more heavy-handed than the English-language page about the great things design can do to make the world a better place. Perhaps the copywriters intuit that Panglossian rhetoric doesn’t sound so good translated from the Finnish into other languages.

But don’t get me wrong. We here at JHJ have admiration for beautiful design. We almost even agree with the myth that says Finnish design has grown organically out of the harsh but beautiful Finnish landscape. (And we recommend the recently published Finnish-language history of Finnish Design edited by Paula Hohti so you get the nuance too).

(We also recommend the design show at Taidehalli which, time permitting, JHJ will cover in a subsequent post, but if not, read the Helsinki Times’ inimitable prose [surely not, Ed.?] on the subject here).

But we do find the Helsinki take on design, er, just a little worthy.

There’s too much of the self-congratulatory about it all. For instance, that design is built into Finns’ lives from birth, when they receive a perfectly designed and perfectly functional maternity package to set them up with the best start in life, materially, technologically, culturally… (this is on show at the Virka gallery). And there’s far too much of design solving this, that and the other global problem.

And as if JHJ needs more grounds for scepticism about design’s (or Finland’s) capacity to fix real problems like, say, the Eurozone crisis, the Baltic or social alienation, today’s Omakaupunki publication tells us that the city can’t even get a simple traffic counter to work properly!

For months the city has been making noises about supporting cycling. To encourage us two-wheelers they have been counting our use of three popular routes.

I never was so clear on why being the two hundred and ninety-seventh cyclist to pass Helsinki Railway Station was supposed to feel encouraging, but it never bothered me either. But it turns out that the machine was so badly designed that it has left a third of us uncounted.

Apparently the counter at the Baana cycle corridor, which goes from Ruoholahti and Helsinki’s future high-rise hotel (see previous post) to the field of asphalt between Kiasma, the Sanoma  and the Music Buildings, does work. And apparently the route has been popular. (Just watch out as you spill out at the eastern end – I foresee accidents to come here.)

Still, design or not, we hope the Baana will get lots of use in the next few weeks before it gets too dark for most cyclists to venture down there.

Price-quality ratios and other Finnish things

In the absence of any alarming news about impending disaster for us to report, here’s a quick post to remind ourselves that Helsinki remains in the grip of design-mania. Almost every home, let us not forget, continues to have a piece of unsurpassed Finnish design installed. We are referring, of course, to the over 10060-year old tiskikaappi, where one’s washing up drains dry out of sight above the sink (tool of Finnish women’s liberation …?)

Skipping then to a world of somewhat more intense innovating and creativity, over a thousand applications for the money available through WDC (World Design Capital) are now being assessed by a panel of experts. It’s already been an opportunity for the creative labour in this country to practice fund-raising. Eventually it might result in some opportunities for home-grown talent and local concerns to be built into Helsinki’s urban fabric – you know, building projects that serve residents, street design that makes life easier and perhaps greener, the odd environmental art event or project that really brings about happiness…

On the official website under the heading “More design, oh no!” one of Finland’s leading architects, Mikko Heikkinen, ponders the WDC process with just a teeny-weeny bit of a critical edge. Perhaps, he hints, artwork is not all its made out to be. Maybe old design, honed through the decades and centuries (craft skills, like Richard Sennett advocates), has things going for it that newer stuff doesn’t. Like sustainability.

Heikkinen sweetly also writes that he likes the things he buys to have a good “price-quality ratio”, a great phrase much used in this country (hintalaatusuhde). Value for money, in ordinary English.

I hope Heikkinen’s tone will inspire others talking about the WDC status and its promises. I hope they will explore, question, ponder, suggest, be funny. We could certainly do with an improvement on some of the less constructive debate on things urban that we’ve endured recently. (Recall that our main national newspaper made it pretty clear in several pieces on the topic (one here) that they felt anyone with critical views on the Guggenheim issue was being atavistic).

To go a bit rhetorical for a moment, things like locality and history and people-power still matter. So perhaps WDC and its projects will matter as much to Helsinki’s ordinary folks as they do to place marketing types. Local and national governments still need to think carefully about international trends and how they fit their local context. Such things have already been suggested. For instance by the blog Hyperallergic, still talking about the Guggenheim.

Meanwhile some people clearly decide not to adopt the best of design. Some people drain their Finnish-design plates and saucers on the draining board. Could these people be British?