Changing tempos

Latin languages treat time and weather as the same thing. At least they are given the same word (temps, tempo). Such usage presumably once captured a sense of cosmic order as reflected in a cyclical pattern of weather. Much like the last couple of years of JHJ’s blogging, where, to our surprise, “weather” was a very frequently used tag.

The beautiful colours of autumn 2009, the great snow of 2010 followed by the great heat of the summer of that same year. Then there was the even greater snow of 2011 and the almost equally amazingly warm and wonderful heat of the long summer of 2011. And then, from around early November, it’s been c**p.

We do not believe in retribution by weather gods or any other kind, but this feels uncannily like payback time.

But it also makes one think back to say, 15-20 years ago. Today’s 26 metre per second (in a snowless/cheerless) December was something I imagined happening in decades to come if the political powers didn’t do something drastic. Ho, ho, ho, I’d never have believe a Durban would be possible in those youthful days.

Now I know that the closer you get the poles the more you notice the changes in the climate. Alas, proof of the matter is undoubtedly going to remain as elusive as the mystery of the Makasiinit. And so columnists and irritating people will keep bleating on about how anthropogenic climate change is just an international conspiracy.

The relevance?

Many of us Helsinkians have left the city in search of a traditional christmas (snow). Some are already heading back into town to escape the power cuts, fallen trees and other emergency situations that the miserable mostly snowless weather conditions are offering.

(Below a real-time map of all the places the emergency services have been busy today. Notice the icon for a fallen spruce.)

It all seems to fit the mood this christmas. World = bad. Friends and people I know = good.

Must get out. Going stir crazy here!

Up and down like a …

Yo-yo? Whore’s drawers? (Though I’ve already once been told off for using that word on this blog I thought I’d share it with you). Anyway, what’s going up and down is Helsinki’s temperature.

Here was the sun trying to come out a few days ago.

When this blog was dreamt up it never, ever would have occurred to me that so much of it would be about weather.

Two very snowy winters, with a hot summer sandwiched between them, have given us plenty to comment on with variously successful efforts at connecting the weather up to the built environment. And of course it’s connected.

Builders, ignore weather and climate at your peril! Trial and error, some learning and a bit of human imagination, one hopes, helped produce thick walls to keep out heat or cold. Finland has plenty of threshold spaces to help make the passage from one extreme to another like Italy has arcades to create shade and so on and so forth.

Today the mercury dipped to well below -10 degrees and we had lovely sunshine that made even newly erected lift-shafts look faintly attractive. (Actually I have a bit of a liking for them, sculptures that remind us of what’s in a building.) I thought here in Jätkäsaari, the former docks, there was going to be an urban area of maximum 7-story residential buildings. I am finding it difficult to get information on what these shafts will serve. A Marriot hotel? No, says an FAQ sheet from a recent public discussion evening? Anyone?

What I had so far not come across in Finland, however, was this (below). Though in a life spent in institutional and other buildings in Britain I am used to the idea that some things might need extra warming.

P.S. this is from the newly opened, well, almost opened Jätkäsaari Information Point. The venue as a whole was quite well heated and generally promising, and not at all like British institutional building – guess they just hadn’t got around to fixing the loo-roll-holder.

Better slipping

The Finnair stewardesses have ended their strike leaving both business types and holidaying families, and even the odd anachronistic Finns who think you need to travel abroad to buy decent Christmas prezzies, to slip away from Helsinki with the ease to which the late 20th century accustomed them.

The staff may have returned, but flight departures may be delayed. All kinds of journeys are likely to be disrupted. The snow gods have not stopped their mischief. The white stuff continues blanketing the city in its charms but it also makes for challenging travel conditions. White mounds hide cars and many smaller evils, making life just that much more exciting for Helsinki residents.

Should you be unlucky enough to have a fall as a result of the snow and ice, HUS accident and emergency services will no doubt sort you out. Rather delightfully I also discovered that Finland’s Association of People with Disabilities, Invalidiliitto, publish a website (in Finnish and Swedish) called, more or less, “Wintry Tales of Tension: Introduction to Slipping” (Talvisia jännitysnäytelmiä) which encourages you to wear sensible footwear, know where to step and to fall softly if you must. Remember, a tense faller-over will hurt themselves more badly than a relaxed one.

Should you nevertheless need to or wish to venture out into the world, a new opportunity has arrived: a high-speed train to St. Petersburg. When those “spaces of flows” that modern technology helped create become less fluid, when they get clogged up by strikes, snow or acts of god(s) or rising fuel prices, geography will come to matter again for Finns. Maybe different conventions of moving about will have to be adopted.

It’s possible that the world will become huge again. Then again, older technologies may be adapted to newer needs. Fast trains may replace slow ones, even in Finland (and Russia, whence Finland’s wide railway gauge originally came). It used to take an overnight train to reach the truly stunning classical architecture and urbanism of St Petersburg, but as of next week the train should [sic] only take three and a half hours. Then again, you never know. Apart from the possible effects of excess snow, there are quite a few ambiguities on the website itself, including this:

Finnish Sibelius and Russian Repin trains are longer operated on Helsinki-St. Petersburg line as Allegro services start. Russian night train Tolstoi continues to run between Helsinki and Moscow.

VR’s grammar aside, St Petersburg is a site/sight to see, particularly for anyone interested in architecture. According to the website Chto Delat (“What is to be done”) its Imperial cityscape (which Helsinki mimics in miniature) will be spared a garish 21st-century skyscraper. The city is finally saying goodbye to its controversial Gazprom tower scheme.

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 …

Summer Weather, Summer Waltzes

To visit Hvitträsk I took the M-train to Kauklahti. Today four of us came back to town on the Y-train after a pleasant but extraordinarily warm weekend beyond the commuter belt. The ticket collector was good-natured, as they almost always are on Finnish Railways, even as we struggled to get our brains to work, if not singly then at least together.

… I pay for the ticket, ignore the change, my friend takes the change and gives it to me while my second friend takes the ticket. Or was it the third friend’s ticket?

No matter. This year we can truly stop repeating that old Finnish mantra “we shouldn’t complain in this country that it’s too hot”. Cos it is too hot. And it’s, well, it’s not good.

As much as one avoids the news in the summer (even after the end of the holidays) there are now plenty of folks in Eastern Finland who are breathing the smoke created by the rageing fires across Russia.

There’s now lots of information online and on TV and radioa about the exceptional circumstances created by these weeks of intense and unprecedented heat.

What could one say about Russia where there are thousands whose homes and cherished landscapes have been devastated? And then there are all those who have seen the fires bring death to loved ones. It’s hard too, to know what to say about the remarkable book (a film was made also) by Cormack McCarthy called The Road. But the association is there.

I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but there seems to be a new brownish-yellow tint to the sky I can see out of my window.

In simpler times I’d not have spent the evening sitting on my computer. I’d not be dashing off emails with the TV on in the background with Kesäillan Valssi (more or less “Waltzing in the Summer Night”) programme reminding me of Finnish traditions that are sticking despite rumours of globalisation. I might have had a home at the other end of the Y-train with my own vegetable patch. And I might have been at a dance with real people and real live music (acoustic, of course). And it wouldn’t have been so hot.

Maybe.

A city gets used to heat

Ice-cold harshness may well be associated with Helsinki in the minds of many an architectural observer. As well as Helsinki’s relatively demanding climate, this impression might have something to do with our Swiss friends Jacques and Pierre. Their proposed hotel scheme for Katajanokka which was debated here last year, was presented in renderings that made this city look hard, gray and steely. To the hardness H+de M added their own contribution.

More frequently architects’ drawings and architectural journalism present the not-yet-built in more attractive terms that easily shade into the unrealistic. Like oasis-like greenery in the American desert, for instance, or (the architectural equivalent of motherhood and apple-pie) ecological sustainability, frequently rewarded these days if less frequently built, it seems.

So, dear reader(s), here is a photo (au naturel) of the past that gives a bit of a sense of how things have been around these parts. It was taken on the evening of Tuesday 27th July 2010. It shows Kaivokatu, one of Helsinki’s oldest streets. And it was taken from the rooftop terrace (=outdoor drinkery) of the Vaakuna Hotel/ Sokos department store/ 10th floor or Ravintola Loiste. Helsinki’s streets are filled with tanned people, lots of relaxed cyclists and a good smattering of happy faces. Oh, and tons of tourists.

JHJ and co went up to the terrace on the day before the warmest day on record in Helsinki (said one free paper). Part of a heat-wave that’s sat on this part of the world for a few weeks now.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised given the adaptability of the human animal, but it seems that most people in Helsinki have become quite used to it being hot and humid.

For the record. Today, Thursday 29th July 2010, it began to rain in the centre of Helsinki at 21.24 local time.

P.S. 21.51 and the rain has ceased.

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?

Terassi-season or the piazzas at +0°

There’s still a little snow in Helsinki – mostly in shady areas and spots where it got piled up in all those places presumed to be out of anyone’s way. Like in areas that in the summer are taken over by terassis or outdoor eatery or cafe or, let’s be frank, drinkery (Finnish: juottola) but that in the winter are quite simply redundant, spots to rush past or at least to ignore. Like the area outside Restaurant Elite, gearing up, our informants tell us, to a liquid summer in the comfort of warm blankets. (The photo below was taken ten days ago – those particular blobs of snow have since disappeared).

If you weren’t familiar with the Nordic world, or the Arctic, for that matter, you might not be aware that there was such a thing as “plus zero” degrees. There is. We had it the day before yesterday – almost. And the sleet. And some hail. So we know it wasn’t -0° but +.

Finns, for the most part, are not made of sugar though. A little nip in the wind and a complete absence of anything that most Europeans would recognise as warmth hasn’t prevented Helsinkians from wrapping up to roll up on their terassis. I’m not keeping track scientifically, but I would almost put money on there not having been as many outdoor drinking opportunities a couple of years ago at this time of year as there are now. Admittedly the country is gearing up to Vappu (May Day with a twist) a festival of inebriation that does tend to herald the beginning of the summery season, in a mental sort of way if not in a meteorological sort of way.

Those heaters will come in handy if people want to start the let’s-pretend-we-live-in-Southern-Europe season this early, with or without blankets, especially if they think overcoats are so last century. Maybe it’s the smoking ban that accounts for why so many chairs and tables have been out for quite some time, as they have across the road from the Storyville overflow terassi (above) being fixed up for another summer of jazz, conviviality and ever so slightly over-priced beer.

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.

Staying looking good

Well, gush-warning as I find myself – amazingly – well disposed towards Kamppi (the building complex) whose top-floor hosts a reasonably pleasant cafe. This uncharacteristic charitability towards that turn-of-the-millennium excuse for urban space is probably motivated by strong feelings of affection for Helsinki and its (currently) blue skies, smiling tram drivers, buildings painted to just the right shades to catch the magic of spring sunshine, park benches returned to parks, mountains of snow reduced to crusty bumps of grit and next month’s lawn slowly (very, very slowly, it seems) coming to life (see foreground). Of Finland’s four seasons, spring may not be the most memorable, but when you’re in it, it certainly is a season!

But it doesn’t happen all by itself. If the rooftops were teeming with snow-removers a month or two ago, the streets are now littered with “move-your-cars-out-of-the-way-of-the-street-sweeper” signs (if only the cars would just go away and stay away!) and caretakers hosing down the grit and the street dust. It’s tempting to think of this as spring cleaning, but after the winter’s constantly visible signs of maintenance – and on an all-too-fleeting visit from grimy London – I realise that one of the constants about Helsinki in recent memory is that it has a year-round beauty regime. Let’s hope it continues. You can tell when something’s looked after.

I always knew there was a strong sense of good manners and respect for sharing space (a kind of urban version of Finland’s everyman’s right of access to natural areas) and some legislation on maintaining streets in Helsinki. But it’s only struck me this year how many people are visibly working at keeping things in shape.

Alas, I fear our windows are letting the street down. Nobody but me to wash them. A direct hit on my civic conscience was this, the cleaning equipment left outside by a caretaker. Can’t get away without at least a spring clean in that slanting sunshine …