Don’t trust a blogger! Well …

In the knowledge society one should be able to find the information one needs. Alas, only if one has unlimited time. Otherwise, a blogger is liable to succumb to apoplexy and despair with the result that she may write a post based on inaccurate or insufficient information.

Dear reader, that may have happened on 9th June when we wrote about diversions.

Then yesterday came, and the celebration known as Helsinki Day, a carneval on which the weather-gods bestowed the best they have! Many of us did, as the poster promised, indeed party and many were charmed. (Meanwhile Jonathan Glancey’s welcome plea to our city not to “spoil itself” was also published yesterday in The Usual. We here were particularly gratified by his love of the buildings that “grow out of Helsinki’s ground” and his disdain for the parachuted offensiveness that is Eiranranta. So offensive is it, in fact, that we only have ancient photos of it, here).

We digress, as usual. The point of this post was to be that we were (possibly) wrong in our rant of last week, about trams, tourism-directed “regeneration” and the corruption of Helsinki’s Senate Square by 21st century luxury tat. We wrote that the original proposals for turning the old streets, like Katariinankatu, into shopping heavens with big windows, shop doors and massively high rents and making Helsinki’s tram network vulnerable in the process, were going to be pushed through.

As it turns out, well… WE DO NOT KNOW. We tried to find out, without spending hours or phoning anyone up (the internet after all should make that kind of inter-personal contact unnecessary), but we STILL DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE.  Some info in Finnish, here, as in, “Helsinki at last to have a live(ly) old centre”.

What we do know is that the ever-narrowing repertoire of Helsinki’s economy will still be on show and on sale here:

 

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.

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

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 …

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.

Time and Place (or H:ki squeezes into English-language architectural press)

One of the problems with the now scuppered hotel scheme for Helsinki’s Katajanokka, was that the architects (Pierre and Jacques) didn’t demonstrate much local knowledge. Someone with local knowledge of how the area works over time, day to day, season to season, was bound to balk not just at the visual impact of the thing. They were also bound to try to get their heads around how a starchitectural hotel would effect the traffic bottlenecks on the way to what is still an island, and what it would do to the visual arc created by the buildings around the market place, and consider how the market itself would be affected and, of course, they would appreciate the length of shadows in this part of the world.

The area in question is, perhaps, a planner’s nightmare, particularly now that urban space is so definitely, so unutterably commercially, a luxury that a public can only afford, apparently, if it’s provided in partnership with a private “developer”. (I refer you to my short course on entrepreneurial urban governance a while back). In fact, the area is an “urban fragment” according to architecture writer Malcolm Quantrill that even the venerable Alvar Aalto himself struggled with (… my reading of the text finds no trace of irony in this observation by Quantrill …) when he designed the Enso-Gutzeit “palazzo” sticking out of Kanavaranta. That building (the original white [sugar] cube?) has been causing double-takes and not a little disgust at modern architecture  since 1961. Originally Aalto had envisaged – along with many others – something grander, more central to the nation’s collective memory and its future, a parliament building for the site. Alas, what resulted, in the view of many a Helsinkian, was a fragment in the sense of something violently detached from its surrounding, connected whole. In 1993 though, another government building was completed up the street, by Olli Pekka Jokela, which goes some way towards repairing the sense of brokenness (in the pic above the white facade; peeking just above the now-redundant terminal building in the pic below).

Quantrill’s otherwise intriguing text reads as if he didn’t know Helsinki too well either, since he writes that it’s a city which lacks a sense of “downtown”. Either he never made arrangements to meet under the clock at Stockmann (see picture below) or things have changed since the piece was written, one assumes either late 1970s or 1980s. As a native I can guarantee that downtown definitely is there, and it definitely reaches, if not all the way to the Kajatanokka waterfont site, at least to the tram stop at Manta (whose future is, alas, shrowded in the mysteries of the Planning Department’s illogical or at least elusive argumentation).

From his London perspective Jonathan Glancey, on the other hand, has a powerful sense of what is lost if global fashions take over and destroy the times and places that urban (and other) folks dwell in. Writing with his usual forthrightness and wit in Building Design today, he notes that Stockholm is under threat of the “world class city” treatment and adds that Helsinki is too:

This means historic buildings being vandalised to ensure they suit the needs of wilfully vulgar global “brand” shops, the rerouting of trams from the historic centre because these, apparently, aren’t best suited to tourist-oriented “pedestrianisation” schemes and the loss of a culture famous for fighting off invaders and going its own happily modest way. “World class cities” spells architectural bombast, bling and banality.

At least the Vikings look as if they’re sharpening their locally forged swords ready to fight for a true sense of place.
Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=427&storycode=3162340&channel=427&c=1#ixzz0ltZOQ1Re

Well, since it’s arguable whether Finns are Vikings (Fenno-Ugric types is a more common attribution) we hope this doesn’t suggest that Finns are doing something in CONTRAST to Swedes.

Below, the Sokkers clock during that bi-annual (twice a year) bout of madness.

A real city

Though we rather liked the shiny, new harbour in Vuosaari and the coffee roastery next to it that we blogged about earlier, we are still trying to get used to the empty spaces left behind in and near central Helsinki by the former harbour functions. There is, it feels, something missing from the city.

In Vuosaari  birds lost habitats and people in the greater Helsinki region, not to mention the suburb of Vuosaari itself, lost important assets that help improve life. But it’s not a sadness for lost nature that worries us here at JHJ (though perhaps it should). Nor is it the spectre of speculators who might be expected to swoop on any recently vacated urban land, especially waterside real estate. For anywhere where homes are expensive – and in Helsinki they certainly are – they do tend to swoop. Expanses of tarmac (below) are now dotted around the landscape to the west and the east of the peninsula, leaving the Planning Department very busy.

There’ll be new things to see, new homes to buy, new wonders to behold. This kind of gratuitous repetition is mostly in aid of formatting the blog, trying to get these photos to find their correct place. As if photographs could “find their place” any better than birds could “lose a home”.

Or, hang on a minute…

Anyway, the thing that now feels a bit lacking from Helsinki is signs of manufacturing or physical work.

If, like Juhani Pallasmaa, Martin Heidegger, Richard Sennett and (ahem) me, you believe that the West’s separation of head from hand in parallel with social distinctions between head people and hand people (and a host of other reified dualisms) has had all manner of unhappy consequences, then, you might sympathise with me as I mourn the loss of those places in the city where the hand and the body did their work together with the mind. I mourn lansdscapes where work was a collaborative exercise “on the spot” as it were, rather than an isolated affair undertaken on the run, as it feels for more and more of us. I’d almost say that I’m talking about places where the machine was at the heart of work, but really if there’s a divide here to do with machines, it’s about big machines (ship building, power stations, factories, railways) versus small ones. You know the ones I mean –  one like the one that’s probably in your pocket right now, or at least at your work-station, virtually connecting you to Kuala Lumpur more closely than to the man or woman you just almost bumped into in the street/car park elevator. But in fact, it’s not the machinery even that’s the issue. It really is the loss of places where bodies as much as minds (or more than minds) got tired after a day’s work, and where our part in the rest of the metabolism that is the city – like this old grain silo in Munkkisaari – was visible. These things were accessible to the mind as well as the body of the urban dweller in a way that’s perhaps worth pondering a little, reminders of our part in a bigger whole.

Still, it’s nice to know that architecture critic Jonathan Glancey rates Helsinki well in this regard compared to his UK home. There, as ugly as some of it is even after years of efforts at urban renaissance, the service sector really has wiped out most manufacturing and where it hasn’t, the esteem granted to making things isn’t particularly high, unless you’re famous for something else first, that is. What, he asks, referring to the preferences of Britain’s political classes,

is the problem with traditional manufacturing? With making steel, ships and locomotives as well as gadgets? If you walk through Helsinki, one of the world’s most hi-tech cities, you will see huge ships under construction in yards cheek by jowl with the latest art galleries, restaurants and studios of designers and architects at the leading edge of their professions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/21/manufacturing-industry-britain-economic-recovery

Helsinki is not the only place he rates, but it’s nice to know.