I Haven’t been writing for a few week because we have a new arrival called Anna who has been keeping us busy but happy. She arrived on the 26th June and both her and Kirsi are doing really well. Eer and now I’m back at work and back online! I shall start to put a [...]
Textile and Architecture can make good bedfellows. The work of SARC Architects has recently incorporated patterned designs by the textile artist Outi Martikainen adding an extra depth to their walls. The Kone headqurters for example has three different glass print designs which combine to give a depth and artistry to the side wall double skinned [...]
An interesting postcard came through our door a few weeks ago. It has a link to a website on it explaining the details (in Finnish only I’m afraid). It comes from a number of villages in Finland, and is an appeal to ex-members of those villages to relocate back there, and it seems to be [...]
As an Architect you win some and you lose some, I took part with my office in a design competition for Aviapolis Tower which we lost. Davidsson won, and the winning entry image is top left. Its an interesting development mainly because of its height. At about 100 metres high it puts this project at [...]
Some terrible news that Porvoo Cathedral had a major fire at the weekend (via). It was a beautiful 13th Century part stone part timber Cathedral. So a couple of fires in major Finnish buildings within the space of a couple of weeks, accident or deliberate, its pretty suspicious? But while Makasiinit was due for demolition [...]
Architectural design now more than ever is a shared production with the Chief Architect perhaps if he or she is lucky leading the team, but we all want to believe in the Starchitect as Renaissance genius, while the truth is perhaps more mundane the effect of brand building and name dropping by developers and journalists. [...]
Yes Lordi won Eurovision, but what will happen next year in Helsinki, are we going to see a floodgate of kiss impersonators entering the competition or even more diverse and downright weird offerings, I hope it gets weirder as it can’t really get worse can it? The Finnish English language blogs I read covered [...]
Louis Kahn was a hero of mine while I was studying, I felt he injected modernism with a substance and a dream of immortality if not the reality. So I bought the DVD of my architect by Louis Kahn’s son recently. It really is a fantastic film, and somewhat beautiful. The buildings at first perhaps [...]
Did you know that the biggest charity in the world is dedicated to ‘innovation in the field of Architectural and Interior design.’ At some $36 Billion its bigger than the Gates Foundation which is a paltry $27 billion by comparison. But while the Gates Foundation goes around giving out money to fight disease and deprivation [...]
Let one building be like another. We won’t be published in Deutsche
Kunst und Dekoration and we won’t be made professors of applied art,
but we will have served ourselves, our times, our nation and mankind to
the best of our ability. (via) -Adolf Loos
Something about this quote really makes sense, sometimes good design means not being noticed.
Unit 2 of the AA are designing and making a summer pavilion with the help of Finnforest. They were just over there getting drunk with the rest of us in Esplande on Vappu. Looking forward to seeing the pavilion take shape on their blog .
Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo.
I found this a hard book to review, as it has elements I both love and hate. It is an updating or retelling of the Finnish Troll legends, where a troll enters the life of a young gay photographer in Helsinki. The troll comes from a past/parallel [...]
