Open House Helsinki 2010 is running from 1st to 4th September, again it’s part of Helsinki Design Week which looks better than ever.
Back to Finland
So I’m back at work and in Finland after a very long summer which took me and my family to Italy and Scotland. It was nice to arrive back after many weeks to the news that Finland is the best place in the world to live.
These polls or surveys of best places like the ones in Monocle magazine for instance seem to be limited in that they don’t , indeed can’t, include for those things that can’t be statistically analysed. But how much of the love of a place comes from these things important as they are? It was still nice to be ranked top though, and I do think in a limited sense it’s a good sign and deserved too.
I now have a huge backlog of half written posts some about what I’ve seen or read over the summer so hopefully there will be alot more activity here now again.
City 2.0 to Europe
Chinese Mortar
How do you make Mortar the traditional way in China? Just add Rice Soup.
“Analytical study shows that the ancient masonry mortar is a kind of special organic-inorganic composite material,” Zhang said. “The inorganic component is calcium carbonate, and the organic component is amylopectin, which comes from the sticky rice soup added to the mortar.”
Scandinavian Summer
Detail of Wigert Summerhouse in Brekkestø, Norway by Wenche Selmer (taken from the book Norwegian Wood – the Thoughful architecture of Wenche Selmer / photography by Frode Larsen) (via)
This photo of a beautiful detail sums up something of the Scandinavian Summer, long days by the water, living with nature, escape from the burdens of city life.
Walking the Line
There is an old railway line that leads from the shore to the centre of Helsinki. I remember talking about it while on a little Architectural trip in Helsinki during the summer with some friends. So last autumn when I saw on flickr that vornaskoti had walked it and knew that with the closing in of the days the time was now to do a little urban exploration.
Posted in Urbanism Tagged disused, helsinki, path, railway, underground, urban exploration Leave a comment
Roundabout
I was invited to make a guest post on Life of an Architect, it’s here so please go and visit it and then have a look around Bobs’ place its a great blog. If you have landed here from Life of an Architect please feel free to have a look around. I can recommend a few posts to you:
- Kiruna the city that’s cracking apart.
- Subterranea Helsinki
- Jørn Utzon Lecture Report
View from Stockholm
Johnathan Glancey in a recent article stated that Stockholm and Helsinki are under threat of getting the ‘world class city’ treatment. This of course is a bad thing because it means a kind of internationalized blandness in the pursuit of some imagined advertisers dream. I was just in Stockholm for the first time a couple of weeks ago and I really loved it, and it definitely qualifies as a ‘world class’ city, while having it’s own distinctive identity. I think its right to identify also that the life blood of a city is people and activity and to a certain extent a little mess, a little accommodation to climate, location and necessity, when someone tries to make your city perfect you know they have already screwed it up. Some of my Stockholm photos are here.
Provisional Book Review
Provisional – Emerging modes of Architectural Practice US by Elite Kedan, Jon Dreyfous, Craig Mutter (Princeton Architectural Press 2009)
This book takes nine practices from the U.S.A which are by their nature different from a standard architectural practice and look at how they work.
Some things are about the practical building relationships during a project for example LTL have revised contractual relationships to retain quality control. SHoP retain a financial interest in some of the projects they design. Servo are a little similar to Ocean which has a strong connection to Helsinki.
Otherwise mostly these practises are in some way using computers, their methodological use of them and transformation of them to open up new possibilities, the work of Chris Hoxie with his various collaborators is a good example. But that’s more of a subtext to the wider enquiry of how Architects work and how that might change in the near future.
It’s not strictly a book about the buildings which these Architects make but about the processes that the Architects use in order to arrive at the buildings. This then is quite a rare book in that it looks at the process of Architecture and is not much focused on the end result.
This book could be seen then as a cross section in that it is organised by type, eg into essays, images, interviews, even construction documents. Its also a cross section by intent, meaning it gives you a deep insight into how these contemporary Architects work today, and by implication how we all might work tomorrow.The interviews succeed the best in shedding light these designers processes , the drawings and photos provide some background flavour but don’t go much beyond that.
This is an optimistic book one where it’s subjets are all in different way changing the process of architectural design itself some more and some less on the edge of traditional idea of an architectural practice. If you aren’t an Architect or Designer this book is of limited value and won’t sit well on a coffee table however if you are then this is a book that is worth diving deep into.
Herzog & DeMeuron Hotel Cancelled
Herzog and DeMeurons’ hotel design for the centre of Helsinki has been rejected. Earlier this month on 3rd April the city council voted against the scheme and it looks like a study of the whole area will take place before another competition is announced. I’m not sure but I’m guessing that that this will probably mean the end for the whole of the current South Harbour scheme.
This would have been only the second time a foreign Architect would have built a major building in Finland and it’s a little disappointing if not inevitable that it won’t go ahead. Inevitable in that for several years already this has been the most controversial site in Finland and it seems no one can get a project off the ground there. This proposed Hotel was also drawing much critisism from Helsinki residents and professionals also, only the city planners seeming to back it.
I’m not sure the Herzog and DeMeuron project was best suited there either but I think the city could have looked at some alternatives, like locating it in the Jätkäsaari area instead. There a suitable place over the water could have been found for a brave design in terms of materials which could have added something to the often times too polite modernism of the last few years in Helsinki.
- Interview with Jacques Herzog.
- South Harbour scheme.
- Photo is by Herzog and DeMeuron click on it for full size
Posted in Architecture Tagged cancelled, helsinki, herzog&demeuron, hotel, jätkäsaari, south harbour Leave a comment
Life of An Architect
There are a diverse range of Architecture blogs or blogs that are Architectural to put it more accurately. The best often cover theory and conjecture or post cool stuff. But someone who hits the sweet spot somewhere in the middle is lifeofanarchitect.
Against the Eiffel Tower
Note: The following post is by my Father Graham Martin. He sent this to me after a conversation we had over the phone. I don’t remember exactly what we started talking about but we ended up with Dad telling me about this passage by a famous French author about the Eiffel Tower which had been newly erected in his beloved Paris and had enraged him so. I really wanted to know what he said, it seems so many of the worlds great landmarks start off life being despised. Being a retired French lecturer of course helps a little when you want to translate some french so here it is with my dad’s comments of course.
Posted in Architecture Tagged eiffel, eiffel tower, Joris-Karl Huysmans, paris, theory Leave a comment
Michelin 2010
First LEED Building in Scandinavia
The first LEED certified building in Scandinavia is the office Moveres Business Garden in Pitäjänmäki in Helsinki, Finland. By SARC Architects and with the artist Outi Martikainen who designed the custom painted glass facades.
Posted in Architecture Tagged helsinki, LEED, office, Outi Martikainen, sarc, scandinavia Leave a comment
Ascending and Descending
The first showing of M.C.Escher in Finland is now at the Amos art gallery. With a film and most of Eschers best loved wood cuttings and prints on show it is a real treat. What I love about Escher is his play with dimensions. He shows with his illusions on the paper the difference between reality and its representation and he is able to incorporate the dimension of time into his pictures by defying reality, for example ascending and descending with its infinite stair loop.
Gombrich in his seminal book Art and Illusion showed how art moved from portraying reality ‘as it was’ to ‘how it appears’ and then in turn with the invention of photography and film moved away from the format of representation. But Escher by using the rules of perspective moves us to see the tricks behind the portrayal of space in Western art. He is playing both with us and with reality, and this makes him special indeed singular in the art world.
I think there is much to learn from and be inspired by the ideas and implict demonstration by Escher of the inferiority of one sense alone in the understanding of space and I wish more of that thinking, that type of questioning, was present in our design culture at the moment.
House of Orphans by Helen Dunmore
House of Orphans by Helen Dunmore Amazon (.com) (.uk).
This is an interesting book because it is by a British author but the novel is set in pre-revolution Finland. As such the author faces the challenge of making the characters and settings both believable and accurate without bogging down the story with too much detail. So the art of storytelling the signs of a good writer are abundant here. Infact from my perspective Dunmore has managed to bring realistic characters to life as well as bring out Finnish Archetypes without them overshadowing the story. The clash of Swedish Fins and Fins through the references to nature versus civilisation for example or of the struggle between political and social world views going on at that time. This is a book that perches historically on the edge of the abyss of civil war and even later the struggle for survival of the winter war.
The novel for me dissolves a little at the end with the characters drifting off into the crowd, also the central character of Eeva is never dealt with for me fairly in this novel. Mostly she is the subject against which others characters thoughts are reflected. So this book feels like it could and should have gone in a number of different directions at the end.
However I had an ulterior motive for reading this book in that it could be added to a list of books about Finland (about Finnishness) that allow you to understand the Finnish psyche a little better. Something Dan Hill in relation to designing for a Helsinki housing block called Method Designing. This book would slide into the required reading category in understanding Finnish politics even up to the present day as it highlights something of the route to independence that Finland took.