Aaltosites is a nice app showing Alvar Aalto buildings has been released. It gives a description and photos and shows the address and puts it on a map for you.
You can also save a list of favourites. It’s for IOS & android at the moment but it only has Aalto buildings in Helsinki. However the aim is to release updates to eventually include all Aalto buildings. (via)
6 Entries have now been chosen for Stage 2 of the Helsinki City Library competition.
A great article in Domus about Architectural publishing.
The digital revolution has spawned a new generation of small, agile and hyperactive publishers who, over the last decade, have profoundly transformed how architecture and design are broadcast, both in print and online.
I remember having a disagreement about what blogging and the internet meant to Architectural publishers with a no longer writing blogger a few years back. He thought basically that there would be no Architectural journals at all and a lot less published work full stop. I was extremely sceptical. For sure the landscape will change drastically but TV didn’t kill Radio and the Internet won’t kill the book or the journal. This article shows that a new very interesting scene is emerging, and I think personally there will be a lot more to change in this space over the next few years, again from the Domus article,
What one finds today, therefore, is not that online formats seek to replace or supersede printed formats. Instead, the poly-vocal, movable and interactive capacity that is most amplified in online production is actually part of a wider change affecting both print publishing and architectural production itself.
I found a nice list of record shops in Helsinki and a map to go with it.
A great day for science
The Higgs boson appears in a theory first fleshed out in 1964 by Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University and five other physicists. Finding the particle proves there is an energy field that fills the vacuum of the observable universe. It plays the crucial role of giving mass to certain subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter. (via)
Jonathan Speirs was a great lighting designer, definitely the most famous and certainly one of the best. I had the pleasure of working with him and his team on a project in Edinburgh and he impressed with his no fuss professionalism. He died a few weeks ago and will leave a great hole in his profession and beyond. His office has made a visual tribute.
There were 530 entries in the Helsinki Central Library Competition (via). Proposals will be shown in the Autumn and final winning proposal next summer.
Robin Hood Gardens by Peter and Alison Smithson has been approved for Demolition. A real shame, it is one of those seminal but unloved works of that period it is the same age as I am. Perhaps it’s fate though was sealed because the cost of saving them would have been ’prohibitive’ . (via)
These days, when a building is constructed, there is less individual involvement. Take the old SPIEGEL building by Werner Kallmorgen. One can assume that (SPIEGEL founder) Rudolf Augstein saw this building as his personal statement. There was something at stake for him when he had it built. It was supposed to reflect the identity of the magazine. But, nowadays, a client is in a much more abstract and opaque situation. Money has become more important; a lot more people are involved. Nowadays, a building like this is mainly a development project. Take this building, for example: Its neighbor is its double. SPIEGEL (the German word for “mirror”) is mirroring itself. Of course, that introduces a personality crisis. And there always has to be an atrium! In its emptiness, it forms the actual substance of the generic city. – Koolhaas
Koolhaas is a good interviewer as witnessed in his latest book Project Japan, Metabolism Talks but he is also good interviewee as Der Spiegel show when they take him round Hafencity and the new Der Spiegel HQ building and have a few words with him. (via)
A great, and long post showing again why Estonian Architecture punches way above it’s weight.
It’s been long expected, but finally announced, there will be an international competition to design Helsinki Library beginning of 2012. The site is in Töölönlahti, in the area between the Makasiinipuisto park and the Töölönlahdenkatu street.
update: there is now a website to keep everyone updated about the project. Not to mention Facebook page and twitter feed.
If a decision was made to build an undersea rail tunnel between the two cities, the price tag of that might be in the region of two to three billion euros (via)
Someone is still dreaming about this it seems.
This years Open House Helsinki between 15-18th Sept. It really looks better than ever, as for the first time there is a lot of infrastructure included in the programme, its inclusion something I think is long overdue and very welcome.
Great article about the political divide in the USA and increasingly elsewhere, included below is a quote via that article
the war we can expect if the cold war will end. It is the war that will take life and power from the centre and give it over to left and to right, it is the war that will teach us our meaning -Norman Mailer
BIG have won a competition to turn a waste incinerator power plant in Copenhagen into a ski slope. Also worth checking out because of the google earth model you can download from their site complete with skiboarders (you knew those dudes at BIG just wouldn’t be skiers right!)
update: it got cancelled.
