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.

The Guggenheim wants in Helsinki – oh no!

The mood at the editorial office is distraught. Helsinki’s South Harbour, quite a fantastic piece of existing city, is at risk from the unholy alliance of creative city doctrine and international architecture.

See here for some good views on it from wonderful The Next Helsinki team.

Earlier today the winner of the prize for the notional Helsinki Guggenheim Art Museum was unveiled. There has been quite a lot of enthusiasm, even from unexpected quarters.

It’s unlikely that the jury ever concentrated on its task in the manner we Helsinkians deserve, given that there were 1 715 entries (some featured above, more on the G website).

And JHJ is not impressed by the architectural merits of the winning entry, Moreau Kusunoki’s dark tower called Art in the City (but Beacon/Majakka as well).

It looks glum and too tall and totally unsuitable for the waterfront.

Nobody here in the editorial offices here knows anyone who wants this thing – in pretty much any shape or form. (But especially not this Moominvalley wannabe glumness!)

There’s also no money for it. There’s no planning consent. The city already turned the idea down once. Officially. There’s little desire for it among ordinary people and not much among artists.

Those of us who desire the Guggenheim Foundation to eff off, frequently get told that were we more cosmopolitan we would want it.

At one point we all (at least here at JHJ) thought the horrible thing had been sent on its way. But no.

A very strong desire for it is coming from somewhere.

The politics is horrible but then the idea of the Guggenheim interfering [sic] in our art world as well as the cityscape, was always going to be controversial.

Proponents, including the country’s biggest daily newspaper, have spewed endless supportive propaganda for a Guggenheim. A little less outrageously, the G Foundation briefed Miltton Communications Group to do its propaganda locally (so-called public relations and marketing being the way business manipulates public opinion).

Given that the post-industrial economy we live in produces mostly data-fog and commercial entertainment, it’s not surprising that information about the museum is abundant but rather untrustworthy.

For Finnish-speakers, however, I do recommend listening to this YLE radio interview with architect and critic Tarja Nurmi. She covers many, many of the shortcomings of the project in a short space of time. Starts at around 9 mins into the programme.

It’s all so upsetting we can’t possibly pursue this any more.

Bits of Helsinki awaiting development

Over 80 hectares of prime real estate awaiting improvement by a construction-friendly urban administration somewhere near us. JHJ feels it needs saving from such improvement.

Meanwhile in Lapinlahti (below), where architectural and natural beauty helped generations of Finns find meaning in their lives again, one wonders what the administration has in mind.

Designed by C. L. Engel (of Senate Square fame) and opened in 1841, in 2006 its remarkable therapeutic environment was abandoned. Like empty buildings usually, this one has also started to feel alienating and problematic. Yet its beauty is such that even after a decade of neglect, its charms are definitely still there.

The city’s website suggests that finances and ideas for bringing Lapinlahti back into use of any kind may require selling part of the land (owned by the city) to a developer. They are apparently the creatures that make enough money that some might be siphoned off for breathing new life into our shared legacy.

Active citizens are campaigning for the old mental hospital to be turned into a beacon of forward-looking care.

And administrative documents (a source of jobs for a number of us, so I won’t knock them) describe the area as a unique site of cultural heritage with special architectural, landscape, recreational and botanical values.

Shame about the noise! The motorway going West to Espoo starts just across the water.

 

Sceneries of Helsinki – Adieu on this snowy Independence Day

If you are interested in how ideals congeal into matter, and if you appreciate that a seven-storey building can be “human-sized”, do come and visit Helsinki.

But whether you’re here or just planning a visit, make sure to enjoy it before it’s too late. The “pressure” to build (particularly on the water) is producing a stunning list of new and attractive opportunities for the building sector. The Planning Department’s webpage contains so much architectural and planning dross it makes me weep.

From redesigning the rural idylls of Östersundom and the fast-growing suburbs to the east, to the bombastic dullness of the other so-called New Helsinki zones, up the high-rise-hotel (a new symbol for Helsinki?!) on the western edge of the peninsula, and down to the wrangle over a helicopter pad in Hernesaari … our enormous Planning Department must be a hive of activity.

Presumably everywhere architecture and construction have sped up through computer-aided technology and politics-to-suit-the-rich. The craze for big and showy in Helsinki is also capitalizing on the genuine problem that Helsinki’s land-use is wasteful by European standards (as even Wikipedia will tell you). So as they turn over more and more of the city to speculative building, the usual suspects (Kokoomus politicians like young Mr Männistö who heads the planning committee, for example) have at their disposal a machine more powerful than ever with which to smother the city with monuments to today’s impatient capitalism, but also a vaguely green-sounding argument for building high.

Can protesters and activists keep up? They are beginning to try. Some have stepped up their campaigns with letters to the planning department and to editors (if you have access to Helsingin Sanomat you can follow an interesting exchange here), and with new websites and blogs.

Perhaps the new little exhibition at the Architecture Museum, Unbuilt Helsinki, is also a kind of protest. Maybe. I’d describe it as difficult art. But it is based on a larger, longer project that might yield some stories yet, about how the choices were once made that created the city we  still love.

Is there any point in trying to resist? Haven’t the rich always shaped the city?

Probably. But I can’t believe the rich have always been this stupid or careless. In this little gem of a city we appear to have rich folks who can’t distinguish a fine skyscraper from an a architectural erectile dysfunction.

And, to give me the excuse to share this bit of silliness (below), Helsinki’s rich presumably also think a good evening’s eating out might have some connection to forest sceneries. I think, Helsinki, we have a massive problem on our hands.

If, dear reader, you have any thoughts on the design of future Helsinki that haven’t been taken up on this blog, or that should be taken in new directions, I’d love to know. The thing is, I’m not going away, but I think this blog should now wind up. It’s time for something more serious.

Thank you so much for reading. JHJ.

The usual formula for Helsinki’s South Harbour

We are decamped to where birdsong dominates. Here the Baltic Sea still looks lovely even as the battle against using it as a dump falters.

Meanwhile, like every Midsummer, Helsinki has apparently been given over to the tourists and the seagulls.

Looking at the results of the City Planning Department’s South Harbour Ideas Competition, it’s clear that the summer and the tourist (not least the Baltic Sea cruise passengers) are very much to the fore in the city managers’ thoughts.

For me the images highlight the gulf between my dreams and the dreams (?) of those who manage the city. Once again they have followed the usual and deadening formula: rhetoric of vitality + Computer Aided Design = winning entry.

I love the South Harbour, iconic view and image, and still as real as the pain in my toe. What, I wonder, do the tourists make of the market square and its surroundings?

If they are arriving cruise passengers, what do they perceive? An interesting city scape? Or other cruise ships six times the size of the largest edifices anchored on dry land?

JHJ had the pleasure of arriving by ship just last week. Beautiful. Interesting. People doing stuff.

The Harbour, at least from a distance, looked like a hive of real activity.

It made me think of a recent essay by that unbelievably prolific anthropologist David Graeber, called ‘Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit’. What, the essay ponders, are we all so busy with?

In Helsinki it wasn’t so long ago that office workers, university people and perhaps some local housewives (and at least one -husband I know of) frequented the market, the market-hall and the area around, for shopping, meeting, taking boats to islands and passing through on their way to somewhere else. And a good few people used to work here.

Some still do.

Not that there is that much work for dockworkers. Plenty of work for cleaners though. A startling proportion of those we saw appear to be darker skinned than most Finns.

Back to Graeber. I understood him to be saying that capitalism + computing has managed to reduce us all to administrators of our own and others’ lives. Creative doing is as hard as creativity-talk is necessary. All creatives do is try to sell.

The Planning Department and the City are selling Helsinki. As JHJ noted in an earlier post, this involves lots of image-making. And endless power-points accompanied by linguistic novelties like the “future dogmatic” or “future positive”, supposed to make us gaze misty-eyed into the lovely future and forget about the mess we continue to produce (my thoughts returning once more to the poor old Baltic).

The South Harbour Jury Report (available on this page), though not quite completely information-free, is pretty much in this vein of vacuous rhetoric. (But was the only thing they were looking for a way to get a decent cycling facility to get through the bottleneck of the market?)

P.S. Only one of the 4 winning entries, Meren Syleily, mentions work that’s not related to entertainment. Shame the prose is so complicated.

Keeping working
Just as importantly none of the proposals run counter to the essential requirements of the shipping terminals, ensuring that the activities of the port can continue unaffected, unconstrained by the imposition either of new obligations or overlapping functions.

Nature itself supports the Helsinki City Planning Department’s Visions

Today, 28.5.2012, is the last day for the public to submit comments regarding the planning proposal for a 33-storey hotel just to the west of the city centre, in Jätkäsaari. Late submissions have been known to have been accepted.

Read and acted upon?

That’s different.

According to a glossy corporate website, the Kämp Tower luxury hotel will open in November 2014.

This statement does fly in the face of the plan currently in force (allowing 16 storeys, itself pretty startling and, for architects, challenging, in the current Helsinki context). Such a prospect is also clearly devastating to many Helsinkians. Others are blissfully unaware of the plan, of course.

Future neighbours and some urban aficianados do know. After a public relations hearing in January, followed by a period of soliciting the public’s views (you know, citizen participation) the Planning Department published a robust rebuttal of the critical views. Called a review of the public consultation, you will find this if you swim around the Department’s haphazardly updated website often enough.

Alternatively, if you’re lucky, you may find it via this link to the minutes of the planning committee’s meeting held 13.3.2012. Liite (enclosure) 9 is a report outlining some of the objections to changing the currently valid development plan so that it could accommodate the 33-storey conference-centre-hotel that our Norwegian investor-friend (yes, he of the Herzog and de Meuron debacle in Katajanokka) wants.

Basically, most of the public sees the plans as inappropriate, bad and threatening Helsinki’s most cherished assets.

The Department pooh-poohs such retrograde opinions. The 33-storey hotel is appropriate to the site. It is a good thing for Helsinki and the surrounding areas. It does not in any way threaten the development of the city.

Not incidentally, the implication is that if one is against these very 33 storeys, one is against progress.

JHJ is not impressed with the way “public participation” is interpreted at the City Planning Department. Why would anyone bother to send any more comments, given that the obvious and pretty substantial comments made so far have been dismissed already?

No wonder so many people in Helsinki comment on the power of the City Planning Department. It is said that it employs well over a hundred people, maybe over 200, and operates behind closed doors. On their contacts page though it looks like it’s barely 50 folks.

Someone somewhere though is churning out one heck of a lot of strong rhetoric, verbal and visual, which appears to be paving the way to a strong change in the cityscape and atmosphere of our lovely pocket-sized capital.

A wooden monument to optimism

This post is effectively a huge thanks to Dan Hill and everyone else at Helsinki Design Lab/Sitra where they are promoting low-carbon urban planning. The freshly pressed visualizations on their blog, of the bizarreness otherwise known as parking norms in Helsinki, should make it harder than before for the peddlers of business-as-usual to argue their case. For, as JHJ has noted before, it should not be an easy case to make. (But then in Helsinki cases aren’t so much made or argued, it’s more a case of taking and sticking to positions. Read on.)

Yesterday’s post on the HDL blog compares new-build in London (the massive Shard skyscraper at London Bridge) and in Helsinki (the massive New Helsinki boom that is transforming what used to be Helsinki’s West Harbour). Note, the Helsinki project is being peddled as exquisitely green. Dan then on the HDL-blog (here’s that link again):

A typical block [in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki] will be designed to have around 7 floors and have to make space for approximately 120 parking spaces. Both cities are well-served by public transport (in fact, Helsinki has previously been voted as having the best public transport in Europe) and Helsinki being a compact city, you could walk to most bits of central Helsinki from Jätkäsaari.

But the visuals, only one of which I’m copying here because it’s worth reading the whole post (there was the link again) are really provocative:

http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/blog/week-165

On the back of this, let us pontificate: for Helsinki to stay as lovely as it is, let alone become even lovelier, its management must get rid this tendency to clog things up either with cars or sclerotic ideas. HDL’s visual will help.

What it will also require, though, is something that is in shockingly short supply here, namely self critique. In fact any kind of critique (not to be confused with dissing or haukkua in Finnish) would be a bonus.

Instead of debate and self-critique, we have something that makes me think of the allegro of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, oddly enough: Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Happy gathering of country folk).

As lovely as Helsinki is, endless self-congratulation is tiresome. The UK’s The Independent newspaper is the latest to pour heaps of dubiously argued (argued?!) praise on the whole country. Sure, it was once a fabulous place, and still is. But it sure is at risk of being messed up by amateurish and selfish decision-making, as any regular readers of our rants must know. Helsinki’s media (social and journalist-produced) is in danger of turning into a wooden monument to (misplaced) optimism. (The phrase borrowed with a twist from that excellent blog post. Did I already give the link?)

Helsinki optimism is really getting to us actually. Perhaps a short trip to smelly London is called for. It’s not as nice as Helsinki, but one knows that it will give one an injection of critical thinking. For instance the politically engaged Planners Network UK who know that now is not the time to foist solutions on others as much as to ask questions (Disorientation-guide pdf). Healthy disorientation in a time of obvious crisis (obvious outside Finland) can also be achieved through urban gardening in London. Looking forward.

Possibly good news

It may be good news, we will post it anyway.

The unseemly rush with which Helsinki’s local elected politicians had been asked to decide on whether or not a Guggenheim franchise should or should not grace the Baltic’s Daughter’s waterfront, has been somewhat calmed. Almost a whole extra month has been granted to our councillors to reassess the proposals, as YLE reports. With any luck this will help them to familiarise themselves with what they are actually deciding on.

Culture(-and-basketball) Minister Paavo Arhinmäki reminds us that no money is forthcoming from the state and tells us that he reckons the Guggenheim brand is not worth what Helsinki is being asked to pay for it. Mr Pajunen does not like all this, but unlike poor JGKS who has to run an art museum in the sweet smell of popcorn in the Tennis Palace, it’s still unclear why Pajunen should be so gung-ho about the scheme in the first place.

But some parallels do suggest themselves.

Doc Point’s documentary film festival is enlightening Helsinki audiences about the bluff and bluster of foreign investors (Trump for one), who offer to develop beautiful environments in the name of progress and er… Apologies, I digress.

More bad news, alas, related to foreign investors and really big money in urban development. A friend reports that there are many self-styled progressives (Greens to be precise) who think it would be right to build a 33-storey hotel (which was initially given planning permission at a measly 16 storeys), a new “landmark” in Jätkäsaari. The location is effectively within the little peninsula that forms the core of our elegant city. There goes our silhouette and, with it, our uniqueness.

Wonder what other dreams there are among Helsinkians other than these dreams of high buildings and, well, whatever it is that the Helsinki Guggenheim represents? A fabulously unique new public library maybe? Or one that looks like it was created on a computer like computer-generated environments everywhere else?

p.s. check out some wonderful and wonderfully subtly titled photographs at learning to see Helsinki.

Vive les différances!

For example, isn’t it great that the moment kids are once again handed over from the  weirdness of nuclear, composite or other other contemporary family types to the safe hands of the collective, then the lovely lazy summer turns into absolute dismalness?

It’s a good time to reflect on other differences too. The time-place that is Finnish summer tends to throw up lovely scenes like this:

and this

Kallio or Kuhmo, Kuhmo or Kallio? Tip, you don’t need a vihta at Rytmi bar (but then you don’t need as good a lock in Kuhmo as in Kallio).

Finland also now has many types of beers. True, monopolies and mergers rules are so outrageously flaunted in little Finland (“it’s too small for genuine competition”), that you’d think there was a quasi-official drive to force us all into Hemingways pubs with their offers for loyalty card-holders. But no. We now have genuine variety!

As in a beer in Kallio (from Laitila)

and a beer in a small town somewhere on the Baltic.

(As an editorial note, Finland’s old standard beer bottles, as distinct from what’s inside them, are much loved by us here at JHJ. Apparently each one of those number 3 or 4 beer bottles is reused about 35 times.)

Then there are so many different ways to liven up a slightly tired waterfront. Here’s the temporary cafe in Kalasatama where a notice to staff reminds them to water the plants, do the washing, save the world and take out the rubbish:

 

Then there’s Cafe Tyyni, which was almost stolen from us. Helsinki’s more official but definitely zealous types wanted to close it down because of a hose pipe (as JHJ reported in April) but really because the city thought a higher-end producer might pay it a higher rent. Apart from showcasing some undersung heroes of Finnish design (Felix and Turun Sinappi), they have been offering live music and dance and good cheer of late and all that with hardly a hint (well, maybe a bit – note the English-language ad) of doing it for the tourists.

And then, for our tour de force today, a brand new beach in Eira (photographed on a Nokia phone. Sorry bout that).

Estate agents appear to think that something like this is a significant attraction to bring in new property investors (surely home buyers? ed). At a square metre in the area costing upwards of 6000 Euros, and given that it’s a rare olde worlde kind of urban environment within spitting distance of all the best retail and other services, one might think that the newly created beach isn’t that big a deal.

But what do we know?

Ice pea

Zillions of people seemed to be out walking on the ice in front of our fair city on this sunny Sunday. But one poor b*****d in a boat has been going around in circles for hours preventing ice from forming so that more lorry-loads of snow can be dumped into the Baltic.

Anyone wanting to go there, take the 14B or 16 to the end stop, tip of Hernesaari, and be mesmerised.

Besides the zillions on the ice quite a few people were hanging out in Hernesaari. Part of New Helsinki (which is to say where Helsinki used to go to work when work was physical and manipulated stuff directly), Hernesaari is a strange thing. Largely landfill, the jobs still being done there will have to go in 2012 after which it will be liberated for uses with better price-quality ratios (as we Finns say).

Currently there are some sizeable harbour buildings and facilities. Loads of boaty things, helicoptery things, a place to get the statutory check up of your car sorted, and somewhere to arrive by cruise ship and buy souvenirs (at the back of the line of cars), and to park cars. Presumably they were mostly there to chauffeur kids to and from ice hockey or figure skating training.

My young ice-hockey playing friend was taken by public transport. He told me and the parent about how much he likes ice hockey. He also told us about the painting or mural on the wall of the cafe in the ice rink. Cafe Jääherne, Ice Pea. (Yes, Herne does mean pea). I’d already spotted the mural on the corrugated iron wall. And I’d photographed it (small people in vastly expensive sports gear whizzing around an ice rink is a cute thing to watch but it didn’t really sustain my interest very long).

So my friend told me that the people who run the cafe are going to build a new one when the ice rink (once some industrial building) gets torn down and is replaced by all those new homes. That’s why they drew a picture of what the future will be like.

The cafe is a bit hard to see, but it’s there on the right-hand corner of the cross street, by the yellow car

My little friend’s parent started to say something along the lines of, why is Helsinki being turned into luxury homes. I’m not sure Hernesaari will be but even if it does fall victim to waterfront-development, I’d not know how to have a very constructive discussion about it.

So we began to talk about pancake. While one guy had some.