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.

Artek and Tom Dixon have a new range / recycling strategy for their furniture. It’s called 2ndcycle and it is reselling used Artek furniture again. But in addition they add an RFID tag, this tag has information for access to a website which then gives the history of that item, when it was made where and how Artek found it again etc.. The item that’s new to you can then be updated by the new owner with additional information, text, photos etc, which can be in turn passed on to a new owner in the future. As well as being sustainable, its a beautiful implimentation of a real use for virtual information. It also gets to the point of what often gives antiques and design classics their value. It’s their histories and how often they tie in to your family so intimately, or have a fantastic tale to tell, which ultimately gives them their individuality and their value. (via). You can pretty much do this with your own things too with the help of thinglink.

Also see; interview with Tom Dixon, inhabitat, onefloorup.

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.

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)

I am going to Copenhagen on an office trip in a few weeks time. Lots of Architectural sightseeing to do and maybe just walking round the city enjoying the atmosphere.
So I’ve been doing a bit of research and have to say that CopenhagenX is easily the best Architectural website for any city I have yet to see. Everything is mapped, there are podcast walks of the city, and its all tied up to real life exhibitions and publications. Also some other sites I will be checking out are visitcopenhagen, and the Danish Architecture Centre.

Does anyone have any recommendations places to see, shops to visit, a Danish CD to buy or some particular favourite place?

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!

The location was carefully chosen to guard against all eventualities. Built into the rock of a mountain 120m above sea level so it will not be underwater even if the polar ice sheet melts completely. The permafrost of the island should mean the seeds will survive frozen even without electricity, it is remote and guarded by well trained polar bears. The vault itself is 120m long and 4.5m round, with 1m thick concrete walls.

This reminds me a little of a science fiction story I read when I was younger. An alien race recieved a signal from outer space, which turned out to be a blueprint (dna etc) for an organism. It turned out to be human beings. Quite similar to the film Contact but the implications going much further. How soon before we are archiving the entire planets biosystem not just as a collection of frozen originals but as blueprints and plans to be beamed across the solarsystem. The ultimate Doomsday book if you like.

(All images from Statsbygg)

(excellent photo of centre of Tampere by vanikat)

Last weekend we went to Tampere and I had a quick guided driving tour of the city at night although I couldn’t afford any time for a closer look. I like the feel of the city, it seems to be thriving and well worth a visit. Reima and Raili Pietilä are the most famous modern architects who worked in Tampere. Also the Näsinneula tower sits in the centre of the city overlooking everything, and I think it’s still the tallest building in Finland. My nightime photos came out ridiculously badly, which is why we will be getting a new camera very soon.

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

Reading about the recent coverage of the bienalle and more specifically on the talk ‘My kind of Town’ which included a discussion between Rem Koolhaus and Alain DeBotton on Architecture, PartIV quoted something DeBotton said and which was taken up by rob about ugliness;

When at the end, he (A de B) said that he was “looking forward to being able to appreciate the ugly”, I don’t think he was being ironic at all.

and then rob found an excellent quote refering to myspace from ze frank’s the show;

In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that ‘work’ in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

There is a question underlying this and possible meme, can ugly buildings make great architecture? If I can find an ugly building which I think is great architecture maybe that will go some way to answering the question. In the end it wasn’t hard to find, its the PA1 house by PPAG Arkitekken, (see A10 issue11). Its by most standards of Architectural criticism pretty ugly, it looks unfinished and slightly temporary and apart from the frames of the windows and doors nothing is quite straight. You may not like the external cladding which really does look like elephant skin. It’s a world away from a starchitects frontpage project, but I think it’s great Architecture whether you like the look of it or not.

It was built to a tiny budget with really innnovative techniques where the walls are made of reused plywood and coated in a PU coating which also acts as the insulation. There is no finishing on the inside, and on the outside the roof sheds off the rainwater without any drainage system at all. It’s what great Architecture should be, innovative conception and use of materials, and willingness to see the basic ideas through without using an alternative perhaps safer aesthetic. And in finding an ugly building maybe an answer to the first question can be made. Like other forms of beauty Architectural beauty isn’t just skin deep either.

The Kvarken Archipelago is Finlands seventh World Heritage Site just newly inscribed (its shared with Sweden which was inscribed earlier) and Finlands first natural site rather than manmade building to make it onto the list, see this article. It features unusual moraines or stone formations and is part of a feature which in 2000 years time with the continuosly rising land will form a land bridge between Sweden and Finland. Browse on worldmap all Unesco World Heritage Sites here. A new website Ourplace is shortly launching which aims to document and photograph all the world heritage sites. Also see previous entry on the Struve Geodesic arc)

If you go to Helsinki this summer you can get a very good idea of the current state of Architecture and Design in Finland by going to three exhibitions. There is the the Asuntomessut (Housing Fair) in Espoo, the 0405 Architecture Exhibition at the Finnish Architecture Museum and at the Design museum there is the Koskinen and Suppanen exhibition showcasing two of my favourite Finnish designers. Kotilo (Seashell House) by Olavi Koponen is probably the most interesting home at the Asuntomessut. A building designed by Koponen to be his own home. Literally designed around a fireplace of which almost all the spaces of the house are twisted around. The house has a grass roof and timber shingles externally in Larch from Siberia and internally of Aspen from Finland. Its also featured in A10 magazine #10. It definetly has a strong organic feel both inside and out but also perhaps a little surprisingly of a bohemian 70’s residence because of the carpeted stepped space and round orange bed! Definetly very little privacy and not for everyone, but a really spacious and open feel. Very much a departure from the norm and a small gem. See my flickr slideshow of it. Also by Olarvi Koponen Villa Len Villa Längbo Kotilo

Helsinki is about to go through a massive urban change in the next few years. There are many parts to this, of which a good long article might come in the future, but one of the first ones, will be the introduction of houseboats and pontoon houses into Kaisainiemenlahti and Eläintarhanlahti right in the centre of Helsinki. Last night on the news Marinetek (2) were interviewed, and I don’t know whether they have the job, but you can have a look around and see what they are offering, although these kind o visualisations I find pretty offputting. This really is a nice lake in the centre of Helsinki which is underused, its kind of unconnected to its surroundings I feel. But the next few years will telll whether the urban plan for Helsinki can pull this together into a coherent and lively part of the centre. There was an English Helsingin Sanomat article about it also. Also why doesn’t Helsinki City planning throw this open to the whole city. It seems that this area is the only one being offered up for this kind of development. But why only here when the whole harbour area is shortly to be rebuilt? Anyway it will be interesting to see how this catches on.

In any case, because all harddrives are actually geological objects – careful rearrangements of minerals under the influence of manmade geomagnetic fields – then these are mathematical terrains in the most exciting sense: the surface of the earth dreaming of spherical velocities inside otherwise undetectable stellar detonations.

The Biggest computer in the world at the moment is BlueGene/L which sits in its room dreaming of death for the American military. (All via bldgblog)

Ideologies

For the Fascists line up the Olympic Stadium itself or perhaps something by Albert Speer. For the Communists we should take the Palace of the Republic. For Democracy we could take the new Reichstag by Foster and partners home of the German Parliament. The Palace of the Republic for a communist building (proto fascist in reality), is very reminiscent of Cedric Price’s 1961 Fun Palace project in actual brief and realisation, maybe the closest built example of its type in the world. Perhaps however its associations were too close in the past and it is being knocked down (bbc article). The language of the palace Architecture is actually adaptability and, you could whisper it, openness and by implication democracy, not something really in line with its communist clients.The fascist architecture of Speer and March so daunting in real life are doing much better by comparison however, the Olympic stadium for example gets a face lift for the World Cup and stages the Final. Is this because these buildings associations with their ideologies are safely out the way of living history? Late 20thC Architecture in the Democratic realm is well represented by the Reichstag conversion which is a wonderful fusing of new and old suggesting rebirth and continuity, equally however Potsdammer Platz could be read as the commercial public realms grand mistake.

World Cup

However back to the World Cup where the Allianz stadium may represent a relatively new type of architectural expression one perhaps looking for an ideology. The modern cathedral that is the Allianz stadium can hold 70 thousand peole worshiping at the temple of football at one time, it was built on time and budget, it can take cashless payment and with its hi tec skin can instantly become by changing colour any teams home stadium. Its use of the language of adaptability makes it a pretty cool advancement in stadium architecture.

Modern Games

The Allianz stadium is also the latest most advanced building in the line of modern sporting spectacles, where national politics, ideology , sport and commerce mix with modern media. It was of Course the Berlin Olympics which was the first modern world games which introduced the world to this strange mix and which neatly leads us back full circle. So I’ll be watching the World Cup and like every other football fan this summer all over the world participating, by proxy anyway, at the home of the sporting spectacle.

Note

In keeping with my new resolution to try as much as possible to provide kmz files to all buildings I talk about please see Pointingit which has a post to Herzhog & De Meuron and publishes a kmz file on the stadium.

In Helsinki’s Korkeasaari zoo by Ville Hara is a really beautiful viewing tower. It was written up in the March 2005 Techniques & Architecture, and when I went there last I took a few photos. I love it because it creates a sense of place from a view and is a marker for the zoo although it is really small. 1541 took a great photo of it too.