Naturally great building

“As we all know, around 1900 Finnish architecture became a topic both in the national project of constructing Finnishness and in the international project of defining modern architecture”. So writes the authoritative voice of architectural history, Riitta Nikula, in a chapter called ‘On the Finnishness of Modern Finnish Architecture’, in this book.

Maybe those she is writing for do “all know”, but it’s probably fair to say that she’s addressing a pretty narrow “we”. The “we”, however, of people in Finland who consider architecture and design to be areas where Finland excells and where there is something natural about this presumed excellence, is substantial. Those of us born in the fifties and sixties and probably later, have indeed mostly been brought up in a beautiful built environment, at least if we are from Helsinki, and we have had it drummed into us that Finnish design is brilliant and irreducibly FINNISH, and that its creators are national heroes.

This blog is just a tiny window onto the wonderful things that Finland’s builders have given us as a place to call home. Like the Railway Station by Eliel Saarinen, opened in 1919, which surely deserves most of the praise it gets – though it didn’t deserve to have its main restaurant brutalised by some nonsensical 21st-century interior design better suited to a motorway service station. (Hence no illustration).

(The image above left is from this book).

One of the reasons, according to Nikula, why Finnish architecture developed as rapidly and in as exciting a way as it did in the early part of the last century, was the combination of international travel by architects who spoke many languages and the lack of an old guard. It meant that international innovations were easily accepted and developed further. It helped too that overseas commentators like Sigrfied Giedion and later Kenneth Frampton, were so generous in their praise of Finnish architecture. But as she points out, their view of buildings was always overshadowed by their obsession with the “naturalness” of Finland and Finns. Giedion, she writes, said of Aino Aalto, professional collaborator and first wife of Alvar, that she was “as quiet as the Finnish lakes and forests from which she has sprung, active only in an unobtrusive way, as Nordic women often can be”!! Elsewhere he noted that civilisation was late in arriving here.

Nikula notes that in books on 20th-century Finnish architecture, you almost get more pictures of unhinhabited woods and lakes than of constructions!

What about the rest of us? I think it’s fair to say that most Finns believe, and not unreasonably, that Finnish worksmanship has a solid tradition, and that one of the delights of a Finnish urban environment compared to many others, is that it’s so well built and solid even when it’s human scale. Tourists often believe Finland needs buildings to be solidly constructed because of the cold. Probably true, but it’s also true that for “us” there’s simply something  insulting about haphazard detailing, about right angles that aren’t at 90° (unless you’re talking really, really old, like something in Porvoo, left) about rendering that’s shoddily applied and weathers badly, windows that don’t shut properly, facades that make no sense and all the other hallmarks of cr*p architecture. (The kind that Brits get so much of and that makes so many of them hate modernism!)

Here’s a (Finnish, obviously) detail that makes me go all gooey inside, and not just because it’s probable that it has been gripped by Saint Alvar himself, it is, after all, from his old home on Riihitie.

For fans of Finnish building and architecture, the heroes aren’t just the designers but those who implement it. And so it is sad to read that with the loss of an apprentice system and the arrival of lots of money, shoddy workmanship arrived and flourished here too. Still, YLE blames it squarely on the boom. So things’ll be OK now we’re bust, no?

Dreaming of pi(a)zza

S Stefano di Sessino from flickr by a kruder396

People keep telling me that former mayor Pekka Korpinen is behind the efforts to “enliven” or “regenerate” Helsinki’s street life, urban vibe and architectural blandness [what the f***!]. I do remember his name cropping up over and over again in relation to some architectural scheme or other, usually in the vein of glass-and-steel supposedly transparent corporate mediocrity.

Then again, I can’t remember a single one of those many examples.

So, I wonder whether the new urban myth has any truth to it. What I keep hearing is that both the strenuously un-mediocre ice-hotel by the Swiss Herzog+deMeron (which was a Korpinen initiative and which he defends here) and the still hardly-talked-about crimes-in-the-making along the side of the Senate Square, have their roots in Mr Korpinen’s liking for piazzas. Apparently he got to really like piazza life while living in Rome for a while. (This biographical detail suggests that there is some substance to the story, no?) Though maybe he is inspired by the wise patrons and philosophically inclined architects in some parts of Italy who planned towns and cities in the 1400s. Or maybe he is blithely unconcerned by the short-termist havoc wreaked by many of his 15th-century predecessors in the adminitrations of Italy’s market towns.

How does one say plus ça change in Italian?

Whatever the answers to all these pertinent questions, there are plenty among the elite of today’s governing classes who are hooked on Tuscany at least. Must digress enough to say my heart does go out to the citizens of L’Aquila whose wheelbarrow protest, see a film here, speaks of the planning madnesses of our times (there’s a sad story about exploiting a natural event to exploit a local population there!) Anyway, I like piazza life in Italy and southern France myself. I also like a sunshade when the sun is beating down from almost directly overhead.

I also like to think that the substantial inconvenience of Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption could be a reminder to anyone still lost in a fog of digitally enhanced unreality and blind faith in technological progress, that the world is not ours to mess with endlessly. In fact, I have much sympathy for those who set up the facebook fan-club of the Icelandic volcano. On the other hand, wouldn’t we all prefer video-conferencing to enforced business flying anyway?

I also had considerable sympathy for the chaps at VR (national railways) whose work was a nightmare (I’m speculating) last winter as a result of blind faith in a lean, mean, just-in-time and utterly unresilient railway network operating in a country with a substantial history of substantial snowfall.

So, here’s to old-fashioned nature, the kind that does what it will, sometimes to the rhythm of familiar seasons with the sun shining from really quite predictable angles and sometimes doing less predictable but, for most of us, still not crisis-inducing things. So, while some dream of piazzas, let’s remind ourselves of reality with a few pics of befores and afters.

That’s the bar, Loop, with Aalto’s energy building in the background on the left. Then there’s the future cycle lane, former freight train shaft running down at the bottom of Eteläinen Rautatiekatu, lovely in the snow, less so without.

And then there are the bikes. The mind still boggles as to how all the abandoned ones were recouped and refurbished after that long, cold, lovely winter.

From city bunnies to new business models

Will “nature” get its revenge on “culture” as progress promises to profit creepy crawlies but also furry mammals while enfeebling the populace? In Helsinki the scourge of the punkki, a.k.a. lyme disease-carrying tick, has become accepted, but what about this, a mink in the very heart of the city?!

Yet for all the problems with ice-cream snatching sea-gulls, insistently irritating insects and other creatures, there is occasional news of a win-win situation! Helsinki zoo in Korkeasaari will henceforth do its bit for the recession at the same time as solving an urban fauna problem. It will catch the urban rabbits which have bred like rabbits and feed the catch to the zoo’s carnivore inhabitants. Check out this.

And the link with planning and architecture?

Leijonien ruokahuollosta vastaa tulevaisuudessa Helsingin kaupungin rakentamispalvelu. Se vastaa puistojen ja viheralueidein hoidosta, johon kuuluu nykyisin olennaisesti myös kaninpyynti. (HS.fi 15.09.2009)

Feeding the lions will, in future, be the responsibility of Helsinki City’s Building Service. Its concern is the upkeep of parks and greenspaces, a remit which nowadays obviously includes catching rabbits. (protagonist’s translation)

As one follows the links from stories such as these, one can’t help hopping and skipping around news items, press-releases and corporate websites and bumping into a feast of information. This piece of news brought to our attention the existence of this new unit of city government with its revamped business model and promise to be in the business of creating a better Helsinki. Should this blog have a future or, indeed, should there be any other product from these ruminations on one’s native city, documents about these so-called innovations in governance are bound to contain important clues to help explain more visible and visceral transformations.

P.S. How did researchers manage before the world-wide-web?! [Note to anthropological self: study the documents on how the new unit was justified for probable instances of undoing professional judgement in the name of customer responsiveness.]

What one can’t find, alas, is an English-language name for this new unit. For which we are in fact quite grateful, this suggesting that there are aspects of life around these parts that do not need to be translated into the third domestic. Can’t help wondering why the second domestic isn’t there either, though.