Photo by Tuomas Uusheimo (from ALA website)
Kilden is a concert hall and theatre by ALA Architects. It has just been finished and hit the newsstands and blogs. It is a major work for Finnish Architecture, and it looks amazing. Ark magazine features it in their first edition of 2012, along with an interview of the ALA partners with Bjarke Ingels with which at least some of them worked together at OMA from which I’ll quote from it if only to encourage you to order a copy.
lngels: Normally I would be very sceptical of something that is, even in your own words, so purely decorative as the premise of this building. But I think this actually accounts for a lot of your work. There’s a certain effortlessness, in this case it’s framed with a perfect diagonal cut and then there are some seemingly effortless light-hearted shapes… in Danish you would say suveræne, although ‘sovereign’ sounds weird in English. A single gesture that almost becomes undisputable, even though you can argue that it creates different entrances and pockets. But the relationship between what it does and exactly how is not that bureaucratic – in fact there’s nothing neurotic about it. It may also be Finnish sensibility: you can be really crude, basic and pragmatic in general but sometimes, if you’re going to party, you party hard.
Grönholm: Thanks for that, that’s beautifully said.
Ingels: I think that’s maybe what is unique about Aalto. Most of the time, he is quite a functional and rational modernist – really by the book. Then he has these moments of unapologetic poetry.
Grönholm: Suvereeni in Finnish.
Some more pictures in Domus.
