Three weeks ago I attended my office Spring day at the Dipoli1 building in Otaniemi. It was my first time visiting this slightly less well known Finnish design classic. At the time it was built it was apparently controversial and a ‘brave’ building. I couldn’t really see it form the outside. It has a kind of Elementalism a raw natural aesthetic of rock and tree cover, at least that was my interpretation. Something maybe between Brutalism and Romanticism where you can see these ideas, cross over to good effect. Anyone even vaguely familiar with Finland will realise these are themes played out in public and private in Finnish society and their art and as such it’s really nice to see them so clearly referenced and effected in a building.
Anyway on the inside this romantic ‘kalevala’ or walk continues with rough stone walls and a Viking size spit on which you could roast a horse if you wanted. But the roof of insitu concrete which undulates and morphs like a tree canopy is the thing I really noticed and why I suspect it was a controversial building at the time. Although it fits right in with the idealistic Architectural rules of the building aesthetic its a real break from constructional norms of any time. The effort from the entire construction team to see this through so well must have been great, and it feels like a breaking of a rule about ceilings to no uncertain effect.
Contrast this with the latest large public building completed in Helsinki, The Music Center2sandwiched between Finlandia House and Kiasma on Mannerheimintie right at the centre of Helsinki. Johnathan Glancey wrote a piece for it in HS which hasn’t been published in English yet about the Music Centre and how it’s a bit anonymous and like a modern office building3. Having followed the building of the Music Center with a gnawing despondency over the years I have to say that the finished building from the photos I’ve seen are much better than imagined but that yes some ‘Grand’ Architectural spark is missing. I hope that unlike its neighbours though it will properly relate to the street and park around it.
The week after I visited Tallinn for the weekend, even on the walk up from the harbour the evidence from the few modern buildings seen before you get to the old Hanse town is overwhelming if you want to see Architectural experimentation alive and kicking go to Estonia. Coming back again to Helsinki on Sunday morning, the Sun shining as I walked through some of the South Harbour competition site and up through Esplanadi I saw Helsinki again afresh loving being part of the urban scene. When struggling to find a way to reconcile two apparent contradictory feelings about the nature of experimentation and conformity in buildings it was lucky I found a quote by David Chipperfield which I think elegantly reconciles this apparent contradiction,
While our monuments may justify the response of awe, generally architecture is something to be occupied and adopted, not to be held at a distance and puzzled over. The modern buildings to be admired are those where the physical, material and spatial potential of architecture has been coherently organised, leaving us with a quiet conviction that the way the building looks, and the experience of being within it, not only reassures us through its physical authenticity, but inspires us to consider what our built world could be.
The process of architectural composition must consider what society expects architecture to look like and be like. While it is not our role simply to fulfill these expectations, they must influence our approach. Architecture must engage innovation both at a formal and technical level. While we must search for new possibilities and ideas we must be suspicious of innovation for its own sake. This does not preclude the radical exceptions that we need as provocation.
We must consider innovation within the self-imposed limits of understanding and meaning. The generation of form that has no explanation beyond its own desire to be innovative must be measured against the imagined limits of precedents.
The pursuit of spectacular form erodes the idea of normality. We desire of our environment, buildings and spaces that aspire to their own sense of nature; spaces and buildings that both respond and describe the individual’s position within a civic society.
The rejection of such ambitions based on the fact that social patterns, political authority and commercial structures have changed and that our new situation need new forms and new types of spaces, succeeds in giving license to the erosion of urban structure and uncontrolled urban sprawl. – David Chipperfield in Form Matters (via)
Conformity matters in design, not in the sense of it being worse or better but when to conform and when not to. As form and content are inextricably linked. Just having experimental or superstar Architecture isn’t going to make for good cities by itself.