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.

Apart form being forward thinking to take this attitude, its of course a little controversial, how influential will the economics department be on the artists so to speak, and how well can they or should they integrate? I think there is probably a deeper underlying trend also and that is not only design as a key economic leader but that design and high technology are more and more integrated subconsciously into our daily lives and this is a common theme universally across disciplines.

I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by. -Douglas Adams

If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow. -Mario Andretti

1. Copenhagen

2. Munich

3. Tokyo

4. Zurich

5. Helsinki

6. Vienna

7. Stockholm

8. Vancouver

9. Melbourne

10. Paris

11. Sydney

12. Honolulu

13. Madrid

14. Berlin

15. Barcelona

16. Montreal

17. Fukuoka

18. Amsterdam

19. Minneapolis

20. Kyoto

Archigram’s Walking Cities, Koolhaas’s Parc de la Villette, Mies van der Rohe’s Project for an Office Building in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, Boullée’s Newton’s Cenotaph, Le Courbusier’s Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants and Sverre Fehn’s Royal Theatre in Copenhagen are all examples of unrealised projects that have influenced the world in different ways. Never built, but still representing significant contributions to the development of the discipline, of cities and of society.

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)

It is the country with the sixth highest GDP per ca pita in the world; where people buy the most books; where life expectancy for men is the highest in the world, and not far behind for women; it’s the only country in Nato with no armed forces (they were banned 700 years ago); the highest ratio of mobile telephones to population; the fastest-expanding banking system in the world; rocketing export business; crystal-pure air; hot water delivered to all Icelandic households straight from the earth’s volcanic bowels; and so on and so forth.

So there you go plenty of reasons to move if you need them!

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.

This has been for me an extraordinary pleasure because it means a certain misuse of Euclid is dead. Now, of course, I think that Euclid is marvelous, he produced one of the masterpieces of the human mind. But it was not meant to be used as a textbook by millions of students century after century. ….I don’t feel that Euclid is the way to start learning mathematics. Learning mathematics should begin by learning the geometry of mountains, of humans. In a certain sense, the geometry of…well, of Mother Nature, and also of buildings, of great architecture. (via)

Although I don’t agree with everything in the book I think its major strength apart from the excellent quality of the writing, is that it offers an alternative perspective to the clash between organised religion (most of them plainly ridiculous in their base beliefs) and the scientific materialists view of this world as purely a giant machine with no purpose.

Its a life affirming and thought provoking book so order it now.

Buy your copy from floris or amazon |uk|com.

Helsingin Energian tutkija Jussi Palola kertoo:

Kuormitus väheni 2 MVA 29.2.2008 kello 19-20, normaaliksi vertailuarvoksi sain tuolle ajanjaksolle (perjantai-ilta 19-20) 1,2 MVA, joten Vihreä Pilven vaikutus voisi olla täten 800 kVA.

Load reduced from 2 MVA 29.2.2008 Between 19-20, to (friday evening 19-20) 1.2 MVA, and so Green effect of Cloud could be hereby 800 kVA.

Check out more videos at the blog, and photos on flickr tagged vihreäpilvi and nuagevert. It also bears out this article in the economist which explains that car manufacturers estimate an overall energy saving of about 10% if petrol consumption rates are shown on the dashboards of their cars. Again we come to the inevitable conclusion that all homes should show their owners exactly what energy they are consuming and how fast they are consuming it.

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.

“As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs,” said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color.

1. Pick up the nearset book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book on page 123.

3. Find the Fifth Sentance.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people.

Due to my daughters age and strong hands, all books which I used to leave in (not so) neat piles around the house when not in their proper place on the bookshelf are precariously on the shelf in the living room, waiting only for an addition like S, M, L, XL to wrench the shelf off its brackets. The nearest three piles you see in the photo are all being read by me at the moment. They are The Winter Book by Tove Jansson , White Death by Robert Edwards, and Mart Stam’s Trousers by Crimson edited by Michael Speaks and Gerard Hadders published by 010.

So to keep to Architecture my usual blog topic the quote from Mart Stam’s Trousers follows;

Everybody knows what everybody else was doing. It was an extremely small community of architects contaminating one another. Eventually you get an outbreak like the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart.

I’m not actually really reading this book at the moment but got it out because of the threat of demolition of the Smithsons seminal Robin Hood Gardens. There is an interview made for this book with Peter Smithson and I wanted to reread and see if he mentioned Robin Hood Gardens (he doesn’t). The quote interetingly is from that conversation and is actually Peter Smithson speaking about the birth of modernism, however, out of context it could serve as a description of the Architecture blogging community if you know what I mean.

Tagged by me are;

Jukka, darren, Sarno, Igor, Christoph

36 9 today, thanks to everyone that has sent a card or sms especially the friends with whom I haven’t been in touch with recently.

Update: I looked at the petition this morning to see how big it was already, and I was interested to note a few of the names already down; Hugh Pearman, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Louisa Hutton, Carme Pinós, Alain de Botton were just a few of the more notable names, interestingly they form a diverse set of viewpoints but all call for the saving of Robin Hood Gardens. I noted a few bloggers names down too.

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.

I don’t know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear “buildings”… three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not “see” these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had “floors”, “walls”, “roofs”, “windows”, “cellars”.

This is what happened to him after his hearing loss;

What I hear now when I listen to music is a flat, two-dimensional representation. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show, but I don’t get the actual structure: I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive its inner spaces. I’ve never got much of an emotional hit from technical drawings. Here is what really hurts: I no longer respond to music emotionally.

He then met Oliver Sacks the famous neuroscientist who had personally lost his ability of stereoscopy something he has treasured all his life. Both these losses made these people experience forms of space in mono….. monospace.

It proves to me the link that I’ve always felt between the experience of space and music, and that as an Architect and fan of music I find their pleasures somehow equivalent. While not hearing building I definetly sense space, and in Architecture while not experiencing tunes I definetly think of space as being somehow musical. The article is also touching to me as perhaps I am on the brink of loosing this feeling to, that my right ear hears at about 50% of normal I’ve felt that my brain somehow makes up for that when I listen to my ipod forinstance, but for how long?

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.

A couple of daily free papers you get on your commute are uutislehti100 and metro (which you can download in pdf format the latest edition). The big paper in Helsinki is Helsingin Sanomat but maybe thats too advanced for me yet. There is a weekly printed newspaper printed in easy Finnish called selkouutiset or clearness news, you can get from the academic bookshop can’t find a web link at the moment.

There is a simplifed news podcast released every day by TLE which I’m finding really useful.

A great links page at the university site.

Also see my first post about Learning Finnish.

My Friend Nick O’Neill just won the 2007 BD/Zumtobal photography competition with the entry above. You have to take the photos with a disposable camera and then send it in o the organisers before its developed, the results can be great. There were some other good photos there too so its worth checking out all the shortlisted entries at the article.

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.

Beautiful graph of Construction Activity in the U.S.A. by Bill Rankin of Radical Cartography (via). Note the dips during winter.

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.

Junichiró Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows

In the West we chase light, air and openness, as naturally as a flower turns towards the sun. However Junichiró Tanizaki writes about a Japanese sensibility for shadows, or the interior in its widest sense. He writes with the touch of the great writer he was and with the air of a mourner. Even when he wrote this book back in 1933 his delicate world was being hidden by the electric light bulb. This essay however, brings a poetry to life to the culture of shadows he describes that sets the mind and senses racing even in a person who has not experienced that which he writes about. A beautiful poetic book which is a must read on the subject of aesthetics.

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.

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.

Some great past posts by kosmograd include;

06. The Manhattanisation of Bilbao

05. The City Destroyed by its own Beauty

Dusker by Kiln is on ghostly records and also check them out on their my space page.