The Finnish Pavillion at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 will be built to a design by JKMM. Called ‘Kirnu’ which I think translates as (milk?) churn. A somewhat understated iconic design with a really promising internal space that opens out to the sky. I quite like it but……

I wonder however how relevant expos are to the Architectural debate nowadays in the age of starchitects, blogs and the international media. With national borders never lower for Architects at least in these big projects there seems little differentiation or dialogue in the expo buildings of the last 20 years.

I can think of only a handfull of expo buildings in that time that have been remebered when the expo closes its doors. Whereas some of the buildings of the prewar expos have been hugely influential even while no longer existing. They probably serve a different function nowadays anyway being basically stage settings for countries as buisnesses.

When the Russians controlled Finland they built a nationwide network of fortifications. Afraid of a Barbarossa style attack and capture of the then Capitol St. Petersburg. Helsinki was also fortified although most of these fortifications were never used. Now much is destroyed or ignored, while some houses have old fortifications running through their gardens.

Links

Krepost Sveaborg - A great site to find out about the Helsinki Fortifications in particular.

HS has taken some photos (list) of how they are now - zoom out on the map to about 10km and you will see what I mean.

Finland for Thought there are some good comments here too.

hugovk has some good photos.

Finnish Architects PES, have beaten 3XN from Denmark, von Gerkan, Marg und Partner (GMP) from Germany, M.A.O. from Japan and Architecture-Studio from France to the new Wuxi Opera House. The project should be completed by 2010, I guess they want it ready for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

Wearing circular polarization glasses and using a mouse the visitor is able to access a space created using stereoscopic a display. The virtual model of the pavilion can be examined both inside and outside. Spatial sounds make the experience feel real, as if one would be moving inside a historical building. Inside the pavilion model there are digital three-dimensional replicas of some artifacts that were exhibited in Paris.

You can visit the virtual reconstruction in Helsinki in Design Museum Fennofolk – New Nordic Oddity exhibition during 11 June – 28 September 2008. Makes me wonder if there is an Uncanny Valley for immersive 3d visualisations. Its a certainly a step up from the Recreation of Aalto’s 1939 Pavillion which seems now to be offline.

Firstly I think its a fair reflection of where Finnish Architecture is today and the only building I know about and that I’m surprised is not in is the Kotilo or Seashell house by house by Olavi Koponen. Private houses and public competition lead schemes provide most of the best work with Sandels Cultural Centre by Juha Leiviskä being one that stands out for me in particular, maybe because I have visited it.

Housing is again the week link in the exhibition, and shows up I would say are major weaknesses in the housing market in Finland. Apartment blocks here really are basically terribly boring. Both the construction method which is universally precast elemental block design and the conceptualisation of these designs is monotonous in the extreme non of the invention and risk taking evident in Danish housing at the moment are on show here. Even a cursory look at 0607 and then the previous buildings published in the previous two exhibitions in 0504 and 0302 would show you that in this area Finnish design is stagnant, staid and doesn’t serve the public well at all. A notable exception is the Triadi apartments by Huttunen–Lipasti–Pakkanen architects, was it a private commission? - I’ll see if I can find out .

Also why not a proper website for this exhibition and the previous ones? If you want to market Finnish Architecture design to the world you must include this method. It was actually done better previously see Finland Bygger website which covers Finnish Architetcure between the years 1992-97 before this current bi-annual format was launched. This format is, I think, an excellent way to provide a continuously updating overview of the Architecture scene here, the missing exhibition website is a big oversight however if you want to push Finnish Architecture internationally.

The kml I have made is a network link so when I update locations and descriptions after I see the exhibition in person, the file will also update automatically, in the meantime I hope you find it interesting. I will also at some point soon add the previous two exhibitions to the file. It is also worth noting that at the moment Google Earth has surprisingly bad imaging outside of Helsinki. Tampere and Turku Finland’s next biggest cities and with populations approaching 200,000 have no good satelite data at all, please google I hope you can change this soon.

FINNISH ARCHITECTURE 0607 is at the MFA between (4.6.2008 - 28.9.2008)

0607KML (GoogleEarth network link)(Googlemaps)

Jørn Utzon is 90 years old this year and the Danish Architectural Press’s Architectural Magazine dk asked some Architects to send him a sketch greeting and they obliged. The result is dk 2008 02 a fantastic issue given over mostly to sketchs of Utzon’s some never seen before, and to sketches and letters to the Architect by other leading Architects, the issue I guess will be hard to get hold of for most people but arcspace has a small excert of some of them that is wonderful to look at. Someone has also put up a gallery of his work on flickr (via). So Jørn Utzon happy birthday and thank you.

ALA architects have produced a new masterplan for the South Harbour. This area really should be the centrepiece of Helsinki for the visitor as well as contributing to the urban centre for the average resident. The connection to the sea established by the original plan and somewhat undermined since will be improved greatly by the ALA masterplan by bringing the park down to the sea and making a new bridge connection with new facilities on either side of the harbour, its all pretty sensible and should add up to a smooth but large transformation of the area. Also included is a plan for a luxury hotel by Herzog and DeMeuron which will probably draw more headlines and which looks like a bit of shiny transplanted nationalism (on plan it looks like the a swiss cross), its hard to tell if it will be any good but I generally really like H&DM projects so hopefully will get built also. Its the shiny building in the image above.

As an aside the plans for Helsinki over the next few years when looked at together are quite staggering, I’ll need to make a post here soon about this slow drip of new projects and what we can expect greater Helsinki to be like in ten years time. There are no real Supermodernist signature buildings by the Starchitects but much smaller scale building which will add up to quite big changes for Helsinki.

(All images are copright ALA Architects)

On Friday 29.02.2008 Anttinen Oiva Architects won the competition to build a city centre campus library for the University of Helsinki completion is slated as 2011-12. It looks pretty good to me. I Really like the dynamic facades using brick and glass, to match the materials of the street but also conform to the location and program. Its a bit more lively than standard for a big project in Finland which is good too, and I’m waiting to see how they link up with the existing sublevel strees around the metro there.

The office of Zwarts and Jansma came up with an intriguing idea. To build a new underground Amsterdam under the the existing one. The structural solution is what makes uit interesting and unique;

Amsterdam has a 30m layer of waterproof clay which will be used together with concrete and sand to make new walls. We will then be able to work underneath them and pour the water back into the canals. It’s an easy technique and it doesn’t create issues with drilling noises on the streets.

I guess it makes for a pretty much totally seperate structure too. Having lived in Amsterdam I am at once thrillled and appalled by this idea. Maybe they should jsut make it a big road and carpark and then they could take all the cars from the centre of Amsterdam and leave it to the bikes and the pedestrians.

(All images from Swart&Jansma) Originally seen at bd but also them posted at bldgblog.

We don’t really think about it day to day but we live in an energy grid, a complex system of infrastructure and activity of which we know only the vaguest details and definetly rarely think about beyond plugging the light in when its dark. But that really has to change soon, if we are going to understand, manage and limit our energy consumption and change our behaviours. We can all be a little more responsible if we are given the information and tools to do something. Following this way of thinking a few new projects and ideas which cover this same ground have come up recently. Click through to read further.

How in the future you could bring this information direct to people, well Dan Hill has been busy thinking about what the future might bring with the personal well-tempered environment. Its a brilliant post worth reading and disecting at length.

In Helsinki a slice of this vision for a short time will come true Pixelache is organising an art installation nuage vert (vihreä pilvi) which will illuminate the smoke plume of Salmisaari power station in Helsinki according to how much energy is being used at the time by the citisens of Helsinki. The light installation is by HeHe and will run for a week between 22nd and 29th February 2008. (via)

However nuage vert is a macro art installation and taking eco visualisation or at least data collection to a more practical and achievable short term level is ecoterrace, a project by Rob Annable’s office. They have upgraded an existing terrace house row, and will be monitoring it and publishing the results on the ecoterrace blog. The thing I like most about this project is that it is easy to build an eco house from scratch, but another thing to upgrade an existing building, its just messier and more compromises have to be made, but ecoterrace while not breaking any new ground building wise will set a bar for communication and hopefully monitoring of a real project, so congratulations to everyone involved.

image above is of nuage vert by Hehe below is ecoterrace by axis design (flickr set)

The results of Europan9 in Finland are out. With three competition areas in Finland Kotka, Vantaa, and Espoo, it was the winner of the Espoo site which stood out for me as being able to create a real quality set of shoreline spaces without being twee or contrived. Clear connections to the existing infrastructure and reuse of some of the industrial buildings, make really good gritty urban design, I would love to see this get built. It is so that although the Europan competition has some weaknesses, I’ve seen plenty of projects which don’t ake into account the Finnish weather for example it continuues to channel and generate good ideas both experimental and practical and I hope is an ongoing engine of change and experimentation in urbanism. I’d love to see it expanded to look at projects forinstance in Asia where urban growth is a great threat and opportunity. A global competition with the teeth or Europan to even get some visionary projects actually off the drawing board however patchily would be great.

The Winning Espoo project was by Julien Ventalon, and Laura Bartolon both of France, images are from their winning entry. (Also found a post about the kotka entry here which is pretty nice too.) Click through for a slideshow of the espoo winners entry.

The Aalto Database is now open in Engish and Finnish, based on Dr Göran Schildt’s book Alvar Aalto. A life’s Work. Architecture, Design and Art (1994). It covers built and unbuilt work, competitions and masterplans and gives a summary of each building with a photo. Locations, dates and type are easily searchable. But I would like to see them all mapped, a kml link or drawn on a googlemap or suchlike which would be a great adddition. Also more than one illustration but a set of all illustrations and some photos of each project would be good. However as a starting point for a visit to Finland on an Architectural tour or for an Architectural student this is a great first point of call.

1. Gensler

2. HOK

3. Nikken Sekkei

4. Aedas

5. Foster & Partners

6. SOM

7. BDP

8. RMJM

9. HKS

10. Atkins

Last years list.

There is another list site at Baunetz but it looks at media coverage of practices, with its mega projects in all corners of the earth Fosters is the only practice that makes both lists.

Estonia has just opened an embassy in second life, being the second country to do it officially behind Sweden. Interestingly Estonia’s official second life embassy is different from Swedens offering in a few subtle ways that seem to me to make it a more thoughtful offering. The Architecture is especially of interest to me, while Sweden plonked down a copy of their real life Embassy in America, Estonia have had a purpose designed building by Scope Cleaver. Aleister Kronos an Avatar in SL has visited it and posted some photos and I quite like it. Check out the Estonian Embassy blog. You can’t really call this building a simulacrum but I think it should be appreciated on its own terms in the context of Second Life, and its tempting to speculate as to whether the next real life Estonian Embassy somewhere in the world might borrow design elements from this one.

Image above by alkronos. (who has a great set of photos covering the building)

Frontiers of Architecture 1 - Cecil Balmond (flckr set)

Click through to read further.

This is the first in an ambitious, even extravagant series of exhibitions to be put on about Architecture in Denmarks Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The First one about Cecil Balmond ran from 22nd June to 4th November 2007 and showcased the work of Cecil Balmond of Arups, the engineer behind many of the most innovative and provocative works of Architecture in the world right now.

The Exhibition is split into three main sections following the layout of Louisiana
FLUX covering fractals, RAINBOW, explaining in themes geometry in relation to Architecture and Structure and NETWORK, covering the building projects on which Cecil Balmond has been involved with.

RAINBOW

Rainbow gives the background of the concepts of geometry both the simple forms such as the cube which is built on with the more complex forms and fractal geometry generators that Balmond uses. These concepts illustrate the philosophy which informs Balmonds work. The boards are arranged in a curve mixing graphics, audio, video and models to great effect. You can’t be helped but be drawn into Balmond’s world.

FLUX

Shows models and films of fractals the generators of many of the forms that Balmond harnesses in his work. This room mostly without explanation shows the pure geometrical form generally without their application to building projects.

NETWORK

We see in Network the geometries shown in Rainbow utilised in projects for Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaus, Daniel Liebeskind, Anish Kapoor to name just a few. This is a fantastic room covering a who’s who of starchitects and installation artists. Truely Balmond is behind many of the most daring and innovative strutures in the world today. The models especially are fantastic and a perfect link between the structural concepts and forms that underpin them and the built projects, whether finished or not.

Also I must mention quicky H_edge an installation from Arups Advanced Geometry Unit which Balmond formed. Based on a cubic fractal tiling of space known as the Menger Sponge. Constructed of aluminium panels and stainless steel chain a suspended network of reciprocal load paths go up to make a rigid object infinetly configurable from just these two systems. In other words with a collection of small aluminium disks a set of stainless steel chains have been made to form a rigid structural system, its a beautiful thing to see.

What we get out of the exhibition is a refound excitement in the architectural project, and in geometry for its own sake, and that the leading proactitioners of Architecture are being assisted, provoked and inspired by this great engineer, which in turn gives you more faith in some of the projects on show here that can often appear whimsical and iconic in the worst sense. At least the engineering is filled with a sense of daring and wonder which will stand the test of time. A great quote from Toyo Ito sums up what geometry and form means to Balmond.

He has completely transformed the meaning of Geometry in Architecture. To Cecil, geometry is simply the path taken by a moving point. Squares and circles are nothing more than very special solutions to the movement of a point. But we are under the illusion that those special solutions are geometry. - Toyo Ito in A+U Nov2006.

The 2002 Serpentine Pavillion by Balmond and Toyo Ito is a perfect example of Cecils approach generating for the roof a set of rules which produces real randomness and pushes engineering into an artform. This is a breathtaking exhibition in its depth and breadth showing a creative engineer with a portfolio and commitment that few if any current Architect can match. Reading the wired article about him, after visiting the exhibition I also came to see the exhibition in another light. Perhaps that Balmond is a little frustrated that he is constantly hidden from the limelight or the major credit and that this exhibition is a chance for him to pt thi right in a small way. The problem of sharing credit in the design process I think will only get harder with time, but this exhibition goes some way to putting Cecil Balmond in the light he deserves.
Also see; bd review.

A new island forms the centrepiece of an expansion of the Otaniemi campus of Helsinki university in Espoo. The competition won by NRT Architects is for office and teaching space for 1500 people with a further 700 residences. Its a major addition adn improvement to the campus which already contains some world class Architecture.

An update of sorts on a previous post finding architecture I posted over a year ago now. MIMOA is a new website for finding good Architecture in Europe. A database like nextroom but with a social aspect with the ability to contribute, comment and print off projects when travelling. I have held off mentioning it until I had gone to Copenhagen so I could put it through its paces.

So what was it like then? I found it already covered Copenhagen pretty well, although copenhagenx is the best website for the Danish Capital (maybe for any city), still for its age it has an impressive directory of buildings already. I printed off all the pages on Copenhagen and found it really good at helping to filter the buildings and working out my route. It is linking up also with the magazine A10 so filling up the site with buildings should’nt be a problem.

A couple of issues I had were the current print page doesn’t work that well, with no map showing up and the right sidebar slipping, so a screen dump of the building you want to visit produces a better version which is a hassle. Other than that congratulations on a very nice site which I hope to use and contribute to over the coming years. Oh and here is my list of possible future features that could be added;
Expand to the rest of the world
pdf booklets and ability to plot routes
Ability to upload google sketch up models and videos, and last but maybe most importantly….
Georss feed & kml- how about a kml link like flickr so we can see these buildings on Goggle Earth? & with a georss feed I could be automatically updated if a new building is added in Finland or Copenhagen forinstance.

The Oslo Ski Jump Competition Winner has been announced. JDS Architects based in Copenhagen won the international competition. It looks great and has a viewing platform at the top so you can get a little of the experience of making a jump yourself. Here is the article about it.(via)

Fuji Kindergarten by Takaharu + Yui Tezuka is a lovely design. An eliptical roof covers the open rooms and encloses a courtyard where the roof also becomes an outside play area. The children come first and the playground is integral to every aspect of the programme and the childs learning.

View the slideshow about it and then read this article about the Thomas Deacon City Academy designed by Norman Foster, at £46.4m set to become the most expensive state school in the UK, and it’s without a playground at all! The last playground free school in the UK, failed, and then got itself a playground. When Children become ‘clients’ and have every bit of time structured out they will suffer. Play is integral to everyone, not just children, and unstructured play is just as essential. That’s why the Fuji Kindergarten is so fantastic and though I haven’t seen the Foster School I know that I hate it already.

In Finland few places make a worse case for Architecture or Urbanism as practised then Espoo City Centre. It was supposed to be a modern centre for the post war burgeoning metropolis of Espoo now the second biggest city on Finland. But lets be honest its an embarrassment really, an indictment of all that is wrong in post-war planning across the globe generally. Public places smelling of pee, the best central spaces made into badly planned car parks, average architecture stripped by contractors of even a semblance of elegance or meaning, I could go on but you get the drift right?

However there is a shiny new urban plan for this part of the world, and the Office of Lahdelma & Mahlamäki recently won a competition for a mixed use scheme shown here which I think is the kind of anchor project for this area. The moniker is Tango which for some unknown reason has a deep psychological resonance in Finnish culture. So its a plucky name, concept and looks nicely worked out. It definitely has a fresher style than much Finnish Architecture of the recent past, and I really quite like it. Can it be delivered without sacrificing too much to commercial pressure, like in the Hanasaari project only time will tell!

• America’s Cup Building, Valencia by David Chipperfield Architects
• Casa da Musica, Porto by OMA
• Dresden Station Redevelopment, Dresden by Foster + Partners
• Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar by David Chipperfield Architects
• The Savill Building, Windsor by Glenn Howells Architects
• Young Vic Theatre, London by Haworth Tompkins

It used to be for British registered Architects only but it seems they have opened up a place on the shortlist for best European building enabling OMA to get listed. The winner will be announced on 6th October. PartIV is doing a poll so head over there and vote for the unofficial winner, less well rewarded but surely more accurate!

Oh and to help you choose I have the mapped (kml) them using photos from flickr.

Trinity Car Park in Gateshead by Owen Luder

Photograph: Mick Donnelly

As Kosmograd sums up in his post this is a mid 60’s Car Park made famous by its appearance in the film Get Carter. A building I have some personal knowledge of having studied Architecture at Newcastle. When I visited it, it seemed in my student days to evoke a kind of urban cool of revolt against all things kitsch and twee and ‘little england’. However its looming presence over the skyline of Gateshead must be acknowledged as an urban sore. The 60’s planning promise in Tyne and Wear was for a pure modernist future of pedestrian walkways crisscrossing over a modern road infrastructure, a perfect driveable and walkable city.The city and planners went ahead with their scheme straight out of the le corb cook book for city building, (great architect as he was did he ever really understand urbanism?). The price of this dream was the destruction of much of the medieval and walkable city. In its place the road footprint of the modernist dream was built but not the pedestrian one. The actual inhabitants of these cities had been sold a dud.

Now in its place will be some sort of development by Tesco, including ironically a car park. None of the real issues of the urban fabric will be addressed, we will just get a kitsch little england development, a flawed but honest work taken down for the sake of a junk box with no other motivation than profit. Bah!

St. Peters Seminary by Gillespie Kidd and Coia

Photograph: zolita1908 & Photograph: Riba

The next Brutalist masterpiece up for the chop may be St. Peter’s Seminary near Glasgow, except that although this building was always obsolete from before the moment of its completion, its the Scottish modernist masterpiece we never had so to speak. But even as it rots there are strong moves to preserve it in some way. I hope it can be saved. Read the excellent Guardian article about it.

Toppila Pulp Mill by Alvar Aalto. (Built in 1930-33, extended in 1942-44. Mill was closed in 1985.)

Photograph: Jukkar

This fantastic Industrial building by Aalto, perhaps not a brutalist building per say but definitely carrying that same muscular power, unfortunately suffers from a third fate. No longer a working paper mill any redevelopment has been stifled by the authorities, the holy work of Aalto requiring being unadulterated for all time, so it just sits quietly slipping back into the earth slowly! See the notes on the picture in flickr by jukkar.

All these buildings could be saved and even should be reused and reinvigorated, but don’t hold your breath that any one of them will make it!

To see these buildings mapped check out my brutalism tag in tagzania.

Built from 1970 and opened in 1972 the Nakagin Capsule Tower was a innovative masterpiece by architect Kisho Kurokawa. Kurokawa developed the technology to install the 2.3m x 3.8m x 2.1m sized capsule units into a concrete core with only 4 high-tension bolts, making the units detachable and replaceable. The capsules were designed to accommodate the individual as either an apartment or studio space, and by connecting units they could also accommodate a family. Complete with appliances and furniture, from audio system to telephone, the capsule interior was pre-assembled in a factory off-site and then hoisted by crane and fastened to the concrete core shaft. -(via)

But now it’s being knocked down. The concept is beautiful just detatch four bolts and bolt in a different prefabricated unit, but it never happened. Not once in its 35 year life was a unit replaced. Also not being space efficient, the next building on the site will have some 60% increase in floor area, I guess the design has failed with the active collusion of the client who has never maintained the building and seems to have no interest in the opportunities the design brought with it. As maybe one of the pre-eminent buildings of the metabolist movement its a shame that the architect’s plan for saving the building and updating it couldn’t have been realised.

However there is also a wider point of interest that these buildings that are designed to be modified are rearely used in that way at all. Lloyds of london by Richard Rogers is another building that is designed to be expanded by adding floors but this has never been done either, if you have to put so much work into changing a ‘changeable’ building anyway why bother in the first place, you can always knock out any wall and add whatever you want later.

(Nakagin geolocated)
treehugger article(with lots of good links)/case study.

For some more photos

Rosslyn chapel near Edinburgh is a very magical building, not least because I was married there, oh and some famous book and film was set there apparently! However a 600 year old piece of music has (maybe) been discovered encoded into the arches of the building, by a father and son team. There will be a recital of the music in Rosslyn chapel itself in a few days time. See Stuart and Tommy Mitchell’s website for details and to listen to the music they discovered.

Architecture of course a kind of encoding of information into a physical form, but its usually one way, the building itself is a product of explicit codes like the local building code for example and implicit codes, like a cultural value encoded into the decoration of that building. The only modern equivalent of an explicit musical code encased into a building I can think of would be La Tourette by Corbusier who worked with Iannis Xenakis and who may have encoded music into the window fenestration there.

(image from Arkkitehtitoimisto ALA Oy)

ALA just won the design competition for the new urban plan of Hanasaari. As can be seen from the graphic the new housing blocks are going to make a real statement from the sea, with large balconies and an extended wave like form or possibly boat hulls. This development will start once the Hanasaari powerplant is demolished starting in 2008.
(location in google maps)

(photograph by Dmitry Beliakov)

For the one-time gangster who built it, it is nothing less than “the eighth wonder of the world”. The less charitably disposed dismiss it as a glorified barn, fire hazard and eyesore. But on one thing everyone agrees: Nikolai Sutyagin’s home is certainly different. Dominating the skyline of Arkhangelsk, a city in Russia’s far north-west, it is believed to be the world’s tallest wooden house, soaring 13 floors to reach 144ft - about half the size of the tower of Big Ben. (via)

This is one of those weird ones. Its tragic/comic/amazing when someone just builds because he can. I love it & hope they save it although if I was a neighbour I wouldn’t be so sure. I geolocated it and you can visit it on google earth (arkhouse) or have a look in tagzania (arkhouse).

The Architect Shigeru Ban has developed an exhibition of some 14 Alvar Aalto projects which will be showing at the Barbican in London (22 Feb ‘07 - 13 May ‘07). I hope this exhibition can be brought to Finland too so I can see it. I’ll have to make do with the review by Johnathan Glancey which is excellent, and one paragraph stands out in particular;

As for the Finn himself, he was no saint. Fond of the bottle, something of a philanderer, and certainly no soldier, even at a time when Finland needed all hands to hold back Stalin’s hordes, he nevertheless helped give his country something of the character of responsible inventiveness that continues to drive its economy and society today. (JG)

It’s a bit shallow to see one person in terms of a personality of a whole nation but somehow very tempting in this case, its also illuminating that Aatos work is sufficiently deep that it can out as exemplarary of many different, and contemporary subjects that people choose to read into it. I would also say that Sigeru Ban may come to be seen as fitting into this quite exclusive category of Architects in the future.

• 3D Model of Helsinki - A 3d Model of Helsinki
• Alvar Aalto Foundation - Keeps alive the Architecture of Alvar Aalto.
• ARK The Finnish Architectural Review - With some of its magazine content online a nice place to start.
• Association of Finnish Architects’ Offices (ATL) - Helps you choose a relevant Architectural office.
• Association of FInnish Interior Architects (SIO) - Find an Interior Architect to help you.
• Association of Finnish Landscape Architects (MARK) - Find a Landscape Architect to help you.
• Design Forum Finland - Finnish Design, Architecture and the Visual Arts.
• Design Museum - Museum of Finnish Design in Helsinki
• DOCOMAMA Finland - Conserving Buildings of the modern movement.
• Finnish Architecture - Where you’ll see some good photos of recent Finnish Architecture and a list of all Finnish Archtectural offices.
• finnish-architects.com - Some sort of portal for a few architects willing to subscribe but with some information non the less.
• Finnish Association of Architects (SAFA) - Finlands Association of Architects.
• Finland Builds - Best of Finnish Architecture 1992-97.
• Helsinki Utopia’s - Presentation of idealiasations of Helsinki.
• Korttelit - Helsinki centre maps, photos and information on the architects that built them, every building in the centre covered.
• Kultturi.net - List of Links to Architecture and alll other cultural activities on the net.
• Museum of Finnish Architecture (MFA) - Exhibitions all year round etc. Slightly motheaten but excellent.
• Ptah - Academic Architectural Magazine old editions published online, part of Alvaar Aalto Foundation.
• Rakennustieto - Building information group with an online bookshop. main page.

UPDATE

Two organisations you can get unemployment insurance from as an Architect working in Finland.

• IAE
• YTK

I think 2006 was really the year skyscrapers became the driving force of BIG (if not necessarily good) architecture, from Beijing to Edinburgh Skyscrapers are being proposed and realised in ever more iconic fashion, and I don’t see much changing this year either. AR has a nice awards page for emerging architecture in 2006, which includes the sea bath by White Arkitekter near Copenhagen (see photograph above by Åkeson Lindman) . It also includes the mafoombey acoustic space which I saw at Habitaire2005. At Building Design they have compiled a list of last years biggest 100 architectural practices. The top ten are;

1. Nikken Sekkei
2. Gensler
3. HOK
4. Aedas
5. SOM
6. BDP International
7. Perkins & Will
8. Foster & Partners
9. RTKL Associates
10. HKS Inc.

Evata is ranked as the biggest in Finland and one to watch to perhaps get into the top 100 another year.

On the 1st December RMJM won the gazprom city competition in St.Petersburg. But an interesting development was that the Architects walked off the jury before the winner was announced.

Norman Foster and Rafael Viñoly walked off the jury that chose RMJM’s designs for the massive Gazprom City development in St Petersburg. The two stars joined Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa in boycotting the competition, leaving the client and politicians to make the choice. (via)

So the competition was judged without any expert advise in the end, but why? Kurokawa is on record as saying the height of the projects compared to the rest of the city was why he resigned, but what about the others. Was it the height of the building or that their choice/advice was ignored? Seeing as this is a giant monument to the powerful who really cares if it messes up a pretty skyline anyway? Personally the whole enterprise seems slightly tainted looking in from the outside, with the whole question of the buildings height , the vetoing of the competition by St.Petersburg Architects Society just to name a few issues, and because of the nature of these buildings how can anyone separate the badly run from the morally culpable, but then that’s Russia all over at the moment. ArchGFX sums up things pretty well, so I’m not going to go on a rant about it any more, but a world class competition that could have been well handled with the buy in of the whole Architectural community got messed up. See the voting here which predicted the outcome. The winning entry is above and the losers are lined up below. Follow the discussion at archinect.
Five losing entries

The Town of Kiruna in Sweden is cracking apart. Like an earthquake in slow motion the ground near Kiruna cracks and sinks in an ever widening circle which is beginning to tear apart the city. A huge Iron ore Mine to the west of the town has caused the earth to subside around the mine at an ever expanding rate, and like an earthquake, the earth displaces in an ever widening circle creating cracks and subsidence and destroying buildings. This slow motion earthquake will last another 100 years has already begin to encroach into the city and will reach the centre soon. What’s the solution? The town will have to move.

The Existing City
Kiruna is a climate adapted planned city started in 1900 and designed with small scale irregular streets and blocks after Camillo Sitte or Kevin Lynch. The winding streets protect the inhabitants from the bitter winter winds.

Kiruna was built as a ‘model society’ in line with ideals that had evolved in Great Britain, and it became one of the biggest Scandinavian social projects of all time. Town planning, housing construction, transportation and education were adapted to the climate and to the needs of the people, on a scale never before attempted. The construction of Kiruna became one of the century’s great social innovations, and something which still permeates the whole community and makes it a site of considerable socio-historical interest. -via Kiruna website

The Future City

The Mining company