Did we miss the worst June storm since 2002?

Next weekend the Helsinki Planning Department showcases its new projects for new Helsinki on the banks of the River Thames. Part of the wonderful ramblings of the London Festival of Architecture, the idea is to show Londoners that Helsinki has lots of lovely waterfront real estate waiting to be developed in more commercially interesting ways than those afforded by harbour functions. To use their own words, they will launch a

vivid Urban Pilot project and opens doors to Helsinki World Design Capital in 2012

for the delectation of the tourists and locals (however defined) who now enjoy the South Bank of this big city [get back to Helsinki! ed.]

OK. So last week-end was miserable weather. Despite this, Helsinki celebrated its own special day, hanging out together, going around in scanty clothing and well … more below. Helsinki day on 12th June is said to be a celebration of the city’s founding in 1550. It’s one of those (many) events in Helsinki that defies any sense of consistency between different languages or cultures. Helsinki This Week being a monthly publication, and Helsinki Week the event being shortened on the Finnish-language website to just one single day…

Anyway, meanwhile Kalasatama had a series of events at the shipping containers that have been deposited there for temporary (pop-up?) use, after some not inconsiderable foot-dragging by parties who shall remain unnamed, for the enjoyment of citizens to be organised (for free, for whom?) by a handful of voluntary organisations, including the Finnish Seamen’s Mission, Public School Helsinki and Dodo ry. Well, what else would you do with a former harbour area that’s a pile of rubble with 700 metres of yellow wall waiting to be decorated. Below the walls after Minnamaria Toukola had had a go at it (photo by Pasi Autio).

The containers and the social activity that’s taking place in and around them will be in Kalasatama until the end of September.

Lumpy cultural space

Helsinki will soon have a new live music venue (as even BBC listeners will know). The media are preoccupied meanwhile with the possibility of more new architecture to house the arts on the expanse of land between the Railway station and Töölö Bay. A hodge-podge of attempts at iconic buildings is a real possibility, at least if the letters pages to the usual suspects are to be believed.

Meanwhile it’s not the container but the contents of the art that’s preoccupying Helsinki’s art world. While the Ateneum (built 1887) drew in punters by the coach-load to see Pablo Picasso’s super-famous works, in 2009 it seems almost all other exhibition spaces saw their visitor numbers decline – and massively. Feast or famine …

For instance, Emma, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, which has a disused former industrial space in which to display a permanent collection as well as variously interesting visiting shows, had half the number of visitors in 2009 compared to 2008 (Below the work by sculptor Raimo Utriainen in front its main entrance). Helsingin Sanomat 5.2.2010 reports similar figures for other shows in the capital region.

Surely this can’t be good news. But Helsinki isn’t alone in suffering – we think that’s the correct word – from this kind of spatial lumpiness. Some places are packaged as a must-see cultural experience. If they are successful in their efforts, the momentum of positive feedback – media coverage – will accelerate and reach the whole tourist world in no time. No wonder some places get swamped while others get overlooked. (Interactive media, the communications mode of choice in a do-it-yourself economy, is partly to blame, but let others deal with that!)

Swooping ever so briefly beyond Finland’s borders, not to Bilbao, famous for its great container of art, but to London, famous for, well, art and stuff. Most of which could, for decades, be found north of the Thames (excepting Dulwich Picture Gallery, but that was almost in the country when it was built in 1811.) For historical reasons the South Bank of the Thames was left to industry and poverty. Herzog and de Meuron, the Swiss duo (who so upset some folks in Helsinki) did something quite remarkable there when helped “revitalise” the South Bank of the Thames with the Tate Modern in 2000. It is a beautiful art space and a source of justified pride. The old Bankside power station built there by Giles Gilbert Scott was a great piece of architecture in itself, perfectly situated across from St Pauls. (Let’s be frank, nobody was ever going to allow anything as prosaic as a power station to be constructed there).

But the Tate has been TOO successful. The original redesign by Herzog and de Meuron made brilliant use of the old space with minimal and always respectful changes to the industrial building. Now, as architecture writer Hugh Pearman argues, it’s as if folks want to come to the Tate not to look at the art, but just because everyone else does. Result? An extension is being built, to designs by the same architects, which, JHJ in its rather conservative mood, fears will detract from the thing that made the “original” so appealing – its ingenious and life-embracing reuse of a box-like, calma and a few decades old, but not demolition-ready, piece of great industrial architecture.

Also a former power station, Suvilahti in Helsinki may become another cultural centre to “regerate” post-industrial waste. Though plans are still very much open. The venue is certainly wonderful, even if it is hemmed in by motorway on one side and water on the other.

It does make one think what a weird world we live in, where spaces are either to neglected they’re thought of as wasted, or so vaunted that the only way to enjoy them is as part of a crowd.

Or was the lack of crowds in  Finnish venues besides the Ateneum just a symptom of recession?

What kind of environment would you create? 2nd ed.

Preface:

Our most devoted reader pointed out that this post was a bit challenging. What is it about?  To help clarify, JHJ ventured out into the internet and found … that the thing that inspired it, the administration responsible for environmental services in Helsinki (the spur for the post) is all changing. What for decades was just an office responsible for the city’s streets and parks and paid for by taxes, has now been reorganised and rebranded. As of the beginning of this year it’s part of STARA [STAdin RAkentamispalvelu]. Finnish and Swedish speakers are likely to cringe at this use of old-fashined Helsinki slang, but then again you could say it’s a cute use of a cute adoption/adaptation of the English word ‘star’. Anyway, the changes give us a good excuse to post on the topic of place-branding in a later post. THIS one, really is about the idea of the environment in a city.

Post:

Here’s an image that nicely illustrates an idea that we here at JHJ just can’t get our heads around. This truck – looks like it’s used for street sweeping – is labelled “environmental production” and carries Helsinki’s municipal logo. The environment is produced? By city government? (But then again, to one born when the internet was just another piece of clunky military technology, Kekkonen was a king and Ronald Reagan an actor, the idea of environmental production by anyone is a bit of a challenge.)

It used to be that the environment just was. It was nature – our surroundings, our foundations, the primal stuff that set the conditions for all the other stuff.

Well, then came climate change, we guess, making the idea that anything was stable and beyond human manipulation seem rather old-fashioned.

This year, we are told by trusty informants via the internet (another human-made environment) that Helsinki is enjoying a truly wonderful real winter with proper freezes and white snow. So much better than the dark grey that depresses eveveryone in snowless Helsinki winters, the kind small kids had already got used to.

What makes those dark days bearable for some is the thought of spring to come. (And spring in Finland is a pretty flexible term – seems anything in that interminable stretch from Christmas to the summer holidays in June can qualify).

For us at JHJ what makes a bad winter bearable and a good winter potentially thrilling is the environment. And yes, it includes buildings, most certainly it does.

Which is saying something for generations of Finnish planners, architects and speculative builders. In the early 20th century when the place was engulfed in a frenzy of creative destruction (see Signe Brander, again), nobody had a blueprint of what the city as a whole would look like, but together these built environment experts produced a rather fine and special place, a human town with a mix of old and new, of ordinary and weird, built for the people who would live there.

Can they keep it up?

Trying to find answers there, I think sometimes about the Georgian parts of London (and the early Victorian that pretty much copies its ancestor e.g. around Eaton Square, below). Speculative the lot – no real master plan here, though much co-ordinating, engineering and profiteering, of course. The best of it now selling for astronomical sums but also an enjoyable urban environment for those of us who can’t afford to live in them.

But hey, what use is a historical example anyway, and a foreign one at that.

By comparison – London classes

With Mr P I am currently in London. Though not in our usual London. Here too we are based in a temporary address, expanding our horizons of this great global city, one might say, looking over the rooftops of salubrious Westminster, no less. (Many thanks are due to Mr P’s relatives.)

Along with the unusual view we have also noticed the soundscapes more than we did before our sojourn in Helsinki. There’s the traffic. Speed is noisy. And then there’s the accents. Posh, rounded vowels from young and old alike in this part of town, particularly when we popped into the Royal Academy to catch the latest work of that sculptural wizard, Anish Kapoor. “Mummy, that was the coolest art I’ve ever seen”.

Later I found myself at a bus stop not far from the building below on the Old Kent Road (you know, the cheapest property on the Monopoly board) hearing the sounds of anger expressed as sentences punctuated at short intervals by the f-word.

It’s never gone without saying for me that class and its effects in Britain is noticeable as well as challenging and I’ve always thought it’s because I was brought up Finnish. What strikes me now is that the last decade or two in Finland might have started something like a new division of people into classes. And people do discriminate. Only recently a friend there was talking about how in Helsinki’s eastern parts people speak differently because they’re so likely to use the v-word (the c-word, in English, but pragmatically the exact equivalent of f**k as used in English).

London is now a jigsaw city with extreme poverty and extreme wealth located almost cheek by jowl. Not just upstairs versus downstairs, but increasingly also geographically separated. Posh bits of Chelsea and some bits of Canning Town have long added up to a city based on extremes of wealth and poverty. Charles Booth mapped out poverty in London in Victorian times. Charles Dickens made it meaningful and arguably affected the philanthropic impulses and quite probably the material conditions of his contemporaries in the different classes.

Sure, something similar developed in Helsinki’s geography over time (of which more on this blog later). But in many places, certainly in Töölö’s new housing of the 1910s and 1920s, the city planners and architects were proud that their buildings contained both very large homes for the very rich as well as rather small for the less rich, as well as rooms for the live-in maids. From the outside one wouldn’t be able to tell which was which and that was deliberate. The beautiful streetscape would improve everyone’s life. Disingenous perhaps, but lucky for later generations.