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.

 

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.

Unlock! Liberate! Regenerate that shoreline!

Architecture, some folks say, is the biggest star of urban politics now. There’s some truth to this. Wherever you look, it seems, there are either thrusting cranes or brash advertising slogans proclaiming the recently-constructed, soon-to-be-opened or newly-regenerated urban experience.

Even the never-likely-to-be-built but still eye-catching schemes of computer-aided and latte-fuelled architects’ studios are also getting more and more media coverage. In Helsinki also. Who knows, Herzog and de Meuron’s ice-cube hotel might yet make a return, or ideas for a wooden skyscraper in Katajanokka…

So it is sort of refreshing (if not lacking in elements of scariness) to see the Helsinki City Planning Department start from the ground up in a new exhibition about the future of the city. This future vision is currently on display at Laituri but also in a touring version at the London Festival of Architecture and will do a stint at Helsinki Design Week at Kaapeli in late August too.

The vision in question is, of course, the waterfronts of Helsinki vacated when cargo shipping and other harbour functions were moved to the edge of town to Vuosaari. Readers of JHJ will know that many of us think this is a city of elegant and human-scale buildings that has tended to shun flamboyance yet has achieved occasional architectural brilliance. It has also long been referred to as the the Daughter of the Baltic – cue images of Engel’s masterful Senate Square with the Cathedral shining in the sun…

In 2010 though that language and those images feel old, too old. So the Planning Department uses a newer language in its new product, Tailwind: Helsinki Horizon 2030 and tells us:

Helsinki is faced with changes on a magnitude that the city has not experienced for more than a century. Vast harbour and industrial areas have been liberated in the city centre and will be developed over the coming decades into three new urban districts.

The little touring exhibition is built into a shipping container. Its packaging, if nothing else, thus recalls some uses for waterfronts that aren’t about luxury housing development. We mean waterfronts before they were “liberated” as the Planning Department has it.

At which point the cynics in JHJ’s editorial offices wish we could have in writing a promise that all waterfronts in Helsinki in 2030 really will be open to the public and not (as in much of London) locked up behind gates, security guards and offensively ugly buildings put there simply to make profit.

While it’s in London, Helsinki’s exhibition container has been set up behind the Oxo Tower, a commercially successful and iconic  success of waterfont development along the River Thames. It’s not too ugly either, though we do want to stress that the process of removing docks from London has produced some truly, horribly dynamitable architecture. The waterfront is also where you’ll find lots of the thoroughly objectionable urban design of the kind we just mentioned. We really, really want to underline the offensiveness of the locks, gates and more subtle privatisations that this regeneration or “liberation” of the waterfront brought with it in London.

But back to the promises for the future being offered by Helsinki. The container was opened by Hannu Penttila (below), one of the mayors of Helsinki and it’s going to be on show there until July 4th.

Helsinki is embarking on the process of reorganising this “liberated” land some 40-50 years later than the famous centres of colonial commodity trading like London or the former rustbelt towns like Pittsburgh.

Helsinki can benefit from hindsight then. So there is at least a theoretical chance that it will learn from the mistakes of these precursors. And since we gather Copenhagen’s waterfront is quite nice though we haven’t seen it, we expect great things. We are watching!

What Helsinki has time for

Marinas of all kinds and all levels of luxury pepper this city. Clearly people have time on their hands to use their boats, to sail into the sunset and, perhaps, motor their way back to port after the wind dies down. Still in the sunset, since it lasts for hours even if you don’t live facing north or where the water reflects the rays, like here, in Katajanokka (photo taken in Tervasaari).

And here’s Helsingin Moottorivenekerho with Tervasaari behind. It’s all really easy to miss if you drive along Pohjoisranta in a rush to get to the burbs or the airport.

And here’s a church boat crew training or just enjoying themselves. It’s the small thing in the water, in front of the harbour cranes.

And should you want to get involved in this pastime, we believe that Soutumiehet, located on the other side of the peninsula, on Merikannontie, across the water from the rowing stadium, have the kit and the organisational skills and what have you. Like time.

Should you not have time you might like to find our more about this lot: “Time research institute, 2nd floor. Only by securing time”. Which translates, obviously, as “by appointment only”. If anyone knows anything about them, do let us know.

Sorry folks, that’s all we have time for.

Good night.

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.

Waiting for the dust to settle

While Iceland comes to terms with its latest volcanic eruption and, according to the gentleman on YLE YKSI with impending floods as it melts the glacier around it, the online media’s attention is almost exclusively fixed on the dust that’s stopped air travel.

Dust, in spring, in Finland? Everywhere where those men with hoses and brushes or, more modernly, little street-sweeper trucks haven’t managed to clear away the winter’s grit.

In the background there is Katajanokka, from the other side, not the side that the tourists or even most of the angry commentators would think about. One suspects that if Herzog+deMeuron’s ice cube had been given permission, it would actually be extremely visible from quite a lot of angles – but not this one.

It seems there is a lot of dust yet to settle on this debacle, but then its dynamics were quite spectacular in running roughshod over any semblance of democractic process in urban planning, including public debate and maybe even consultation and certainly including bending an ear to the experts. Now local papers and online forums as well as face-to-face encounters, are going over what went wrong. An item in Töölöläinen, a local paper that seems to be doing regular features on architecture, headlined “Häirikkörakentamiselle piste”, or “Full Stop to ASBO Construction” (as it were). Still, the usual suspects are suggesting that nothing should prevent Norwegian inward investment from coming to the rescue of municipal finances, but perhaps they’re the same folks who’d a) sell their grandmother as well as the family jewels to stay globally competitive and b) who see the Senate Square as just a pile of old stones that aren’t being exploited to their full commercial potential.

People are saying, “never again”. Alas, it’s likely with all this waterfront land and all these non-critics of commercially driven urban development in charge of the whole thing, that we’ll be seeing loads more of this sort of thing. Already, the fact that they, experts that is (including highly respected international architects who are intimate with Helsinki), were consulted and then summarily ignored to the huge extent that they were, is possibly a new departure in Finnish political culture where, thus far, trust in the experts and the authorities has been almost moving (naive?) and ubiquitous.

Perhaps a decade and a half inside the European Union has brought Finns into line with others across the continent who are less respecting of authorities, or maybe the silliness around parliamentary expenses in recent months has raised levels of mistrust. Or, shock, horror!! Have Finnish decision makers, whether politicians, bankrollers or municipal officers, always had a tendency, as architecture writer Paula Holmila observes, to flex their muscles when they feel those around them need to be reminded who’s in charge…?

Of course, experts of various sorts have protested eloquently and loudly since the hotel scheme was first made public. And they did so again in anticipation of the vote earlier this month. Let’s just remind ourselves of one of the reasons for why the scheme had to be turned down, that is, it’s visual impact.

Relief in absentia – waterfront potential (again)

Well, we’ve been rather concentrated on other matters, other event-spaces than Helsinki. Thus the date we had once dreaded came and went without notice. Until, that is, Arkkivahti‘s feed reminded us of the issue of the month: the icy waterfront hotel scheme.

Well, on the seventh of April 2010 Herzog & deMeuron’s icy cross was turned down by the City Council. The local media – based on a v. quick internet search, i.e. Hesari and one or two others – seems to be engaged in some quasi-critical reflection in which it is suggested that the ‘antis’ were (as is usually the case in fast-capitalism), well, if not wrong, at least populist and thus discreditable. We hope there will be more sophisticated and design-savvy commentary elsewhere in time to come, as there was in November for instance, as reported via this blog.

But hey, maybe after six months, a year, three – depending on where you were in the networks of government and construction partnerships, or how keen you were to keep politicians accountable for public space – an outporing of one sort or another was to be expected.

So now, dear friends, with the demise of this bit of silliness (for that it was, however grand a design this seemed) Helsinki’s decision makers (who do, yes, still make the odd decision) have unblocked the development potential of an important and highly valued site. Put another way, just think what a sterile pursuit it is for a city in the boreal zone (cold and coniferous) to plug its waterfront with accommodation for tourists!

Eyes peeled then in months to come for Taivallahti.  Not for tourists, but not for many others either, there’s also the eastern edge of Lauttasaari (below X 3  last November, interestingly YIT the construction firm gets far more coverage than the architects). Whatever else next…

Architecture, global capital and really big countries

There are different ways one could look at the prospect of a two-tier-Swiss-flag-in-glass popping up on the waterfront by Helsinki’s market square. Here’s one, for example.

The port of Helsinki closed down harbour functions here some while ago and what we have left is largely disused building or car-parking space. So perhaps it is time to move on from the port’s understanding (see website) that this is just some prime-quality SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

Though of course it isn’t, and never was, left over that is.The idea of getting some of that footloose and still relatively abundant global (Norwegian) capital to settle in Helsinki is never, so it would seem, far from the minds of the city’s decision makers. Will Finns soon be meekly going where many others have gone before?

Having expanded at length on the HDHD previously and since the damning views by the international commentators are available online anyway (oh, Mr Holl, Helsinki needs you now!) we’ll move on to other aspsects of the debacle. For instance, waterfront development generally. Here’s what Finnish researchers Rauno Sairinen and Satu Kumpulainen had to say about it before the money wobble:

Today, urban waterfront regeneration takes place in a societal environment of increased capital mobility and inter-urban competition (…). Because cities have to compete for investments and affluent residents, city governments cannot merely manage the development, i.e. focus on the redistribution of resources, but have to actively pursue investments and publicity … Urban governance has expanded to involve not only the government but also a range of private and semi-public actors. This approach … based on public–private partnership, flagship projects, aggressive marketing and consumption-oriented projects such as retail and tourism centres, has been labelled entrepreneurial urban governance (…), and it is often well exemplified by large-scale urban waterfront regeneration projects.

(From ‘Assessing social impacts in urban waterfront regeneration’  in Environmental Impact Assessment Review 26 (2006) 120– 135)

If you left things at that, you’d want to give up on any semblance of critical debate whatsover and of course they don’t. In fact, the authors note that

According to the Land Use and Building Act there should be adequate investigation of
a plan’s potential environmental impacts, including implications for the community
economy, social, cultural and other effects. … environmental impacts are
understood as direct and indirect effects on:
– people’s living conditions and environment;
– plants and animals, water, air and climate;
– flora and fauna, biodiversity and natural resources;
– regional and community structure, community and energy economy and traffic;
– townscape, landscape, cultural heritage and the built environment.

Well, we haven’t seen these yet for the plot in question. Nor can we find anything recent on the City Planning Department’s website (even on its sweetly titled “participate and influence” page). [Updated 24.3] Initially we found no trace of the report on the cultural and architectural values of the area that was promised by Hannu Penttila a month or so ago and cheered us up so but a polite email to the City Planning Department fixed that problem and provided the link (in Finnish).

And why are we bothered? Because Helsingin Sanomat and other media reported that the hotel scheme is back off ice again, to be voted on early next month. The City Board already decided it was in favour of Norwegian money in the shape of a luxury hotel by ueber-starchitects Herzog + de Meuron, even while tons of other folks, including the Katajanokka Seura (local amenity society) are collecting signatures to make the (horrid) thing go away. In the mean time, however, the poor old politicians appear to be more and more worried that if they don’t embrace the thing (which some admit to not liking) they feel bound to go with it just so they get their hands on that money.

Alas, to imagine politicians saving municipal budgets through savvy real estate deals is to indulge in make-believe. And we don’t just mean Helsinki – London’s own spectacular Canary Wharf had to be saved by massive, massive injections of public money and by “legal” bolsterings of private enterprise.

And yet there is a precedent in Helsinki. Not knowing what was up, I photographed these port-a-cabins which signalled the start of something new to me back in September. Another hole in the ground perhaps, for Southern Helsinki’s fecundly reproducing cars, I thought at first. I didn’t find out about that one either on the Planning Department’s media outlets but rather via The Usual. It’s the plot on Neitsytpolku, (maybe Helsink’s answer to Maiden Lane) also known (aptly? ironically?) as the Kätilöopisto (College of Midwifery or Birthing Hospital) site. It was sold off in 1990 by the city to the Soviet Union, whose embassy was next door. Sale price: a paltry 75million granny’s markkas. Over the next few years the decision was bitterly contested as some folks suggested getting the land back, others at least to insist that planning permission be conditional on an architectural competition to include Finnish entrants. Didn’t happen.

In those days the journalists at The Usual looked to typical blunders of the times to inject a tone of criticism. They considered the various embassy buildings that Helsinki had, in moments of lax judgement it suggested, sold off to sovereign foreign states who then blithely ignored architectural context if not always planning regulations. Interestingly, they saved their most venomous language for the Norwegians and how they replaced a jugend villa by Selim Lindqvist with a box of aluminium and glass (perhaps to remind them of back home in Oslo?).

This could all be quite amusing if it weren’t for the way 21st architecture is getting just SOOOO BIIIG which in little Helsinki really doesn’t appeal at all. Mr Holl, if you have any views on Katajanokka or Helsinki still, might you publish somewhere prominent quite soon?

Crane index or shipping news

Apparently city fathers, municipal politicians, decision makers, development corporation executives, whatever you want to call the people who get to decide on big investments in the urban context these days, talk of a “crane index“, i.e. the number of tall (sky scraper-scale) building cranes they can see from their own office window. (Presumably said window is located on one of the upper floors of an already finished piece of turn-of-the-millennium corporate architecture, giving a good view.) Some even attribute the phrase to an Australian politician who dismissed his economic adviser’s councel on the grounds that all he needed to know was what he could see with his own eyes, out of that window: cranes = $

A Finnish decision maker might see this out of their window, but only if the perspective was from their own home or a walk on the (still publicly accessible) stretch of water in Lauttasaari.

Well, such a Finnish decision maker is most likely up to his or her neck in economic woes professionally speaking if not personally. Regarldess, many, like the Australian politician, are willing and able to brush off the relevance of available research evidence.

It might not immediately strike one as an urban issue, you’d think, but recently there’s been a flurry of reports about the quality of research done by stakeholders, including government ministries, on the impacts new mineral extraction. Kainuu and Lapland have plenty of economic woes but also, it seems, a lot of raw materials waiting to be dug out of the ground with the willing labour of local jobless people. Good thing, bad thing? Worth the billions in investment? The impact of new mines on the environment? University researchers and others disagree vehemently.

However, the cranes visible in the picture above are mostly not of the construction type but what’s left of central Helsinki’s harbour functions.  Though minerals are cheaper to extract where life is cheaper, it’s likely that any minerals excavated in Finland will also find a buyer however expensive and disruptive it might be to get at them. Contemporary urban growth and activity still needs one heck of a lot of STUFF and METAL to keep it going, virtual or no.

Personally, I prefer a harbour town where the harbour functions, cranes, ships and ugly industrial buildings and all, are visible, to one with only tarted up consumer-centred waterside boulevards.

In Helsinki the port was moved out of (some people’s) sight. Still, the shipping industry is going strong, much, much stronger than thirty, forty years ago. It would give the city variety and liveliness, and it might even be wise in some weird way, to keep the shipping world in view when the rest of us city dwellers go about our business. Of course, in an era when we take it as given that cities never have enough money, the small question of land-values does complicate things a bit. Waterfront housing development, anyone?

Onward march of waterfront strarchitecture

The miserable weather continues. Taking a deep breath here, dear readers, at a loss for words and arguments, but also aware that this designer hotel business is putting other things into its shadow.

To recap – working hard here to deliver a measured post. Yesterday Helsinki’s planning committee voted 5 to 3 in favour of altering the development plan for the area of Katajanokka. This allows putting a prominent building on a prominent site on Helsinki’s waterfront. The structure is aptly described as a huge ice cube. The site is currently underused former harbour, located next to a configuration of buildings and open spaces of different ages, and abutting the old market square. It is part of a cityscape that is unique in Finland for its extensive morphological and visual harmony. The area in question is of national importance. For this reason this cannot be considered a final decision, the whole City Council will have to vote on it.

The Swiss architects of the hotel, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, are highly regarded, for good reason. Many will know their work first-hand from their extraordinarily successful and respectful conversion of a power station into the Tate Modern gallery in London, or their spectacular and highly praised “Bird’s Nest” Stadium in Beijing. But this hotel project has been seen by many in Finland, as well as by international architecure-planning experts, as inappropriate for the site in question. What is also particularly galling, not just to Finnish architects who may feel they were sidelined in the process of choosing a design but to Helsinki residents as a whole, is that the planning process seems to have lost all pretense at involving the public or even a decent smattering of experts. Those who were consulted were predominantly critical, but their comments were dismissed.

Whereas often in the UK public debate about architecture easily descends into farcical and uninformed spats between proponents of “modern” and proponents of “classical”, this debate has been remarkably nuanced and informed – mostly. Modern isn’t necessarily opposed to classical. Good architecture isn’t about buildings only, it’s about places we inhabit. And so on. It’s terribly sad (actually, it’s obscene) how many people in high places articulate their support for the plans by describing and so dismissing the critics as anti-change.

In a country where “old” stone buildings date from 1757, I believe age and love of age deserves special respect. (In the image of the Senate Square the low blue-ish building with the mansard/folded roof is the grand old dame in question. British critic Jonathan Meades may consider this kind of thing boring, I doubt many Finns would agree). And in a city which regularly produces delightful architectural novelties, even if not everyone is immediately enamoured of them, as with Leiviskä‘s campus building on Yrjö Koskisen katu (right), the idea that novelty is spurned is simply false.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hotel development being proposed would be financed by Norwegian capital and used by international businessmen (and some women). It would break up a skyline which is particularly stunning in the architecturally (not to mention humanly) challenging local conditions (Helsinki is at over 60° North). It does promise visibility and charisma.

Taking a broader view, the proposals are part of a now well-established pattern of waterfront development. This international trend is the result of changing technology (the port functions of Helsinki’s waterside have recently been moved to an up-to-date far larger facility in Vuosaari), of deindustrialisation and of the shift to trading with information, business and services. At the same time municipal politicians face pressures to make their towns and cities “attractive” to populations and businesses that can enhance that economic activity. Some refer to the resulting style of city government as “place wars”, loads of academics (Leslie Sklair is one) have written eloquently but also rather quietly, about the impacts of big, new architecture on people and places. Whichever way you approach it, starchitecture has a central role in the political imagination of today’s urban elite.

p.s.

What is perhaps surprising is how long it has taken Helsinki (though not Espoo) to even threaten to become part of this international megatrend of waterfront development for prestige (though note Eiran Ranta featured earlier on this blog). Helsinki has in fact been keen in recent years to improve public access and enjoyment of the waterfront and has put in some fabulous facilities along much of the way, like this, photographed, of course, before things turned grim.