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Finland: Modern Architectures in History
Buildings speak volumes, not just about their occupants or owners, but about the countries in which they exist. From colonnades to paving stones, the architecture of any building does more than simply date the structure—it celebrates the spirit of a people and a nation.
Roger Connah's latest book, Finland , explores the culture and democratic spirit of a country whose buildings carry the indelible markings of Finland's political and physical climate. Nearly all of the country's buildings were constructed after 1917, when Finland gained its independence from Russia. The resulting architecture—often springing from hugely popular public competitions—is emphatically democratic in structure and usage. Finland's extreme northern latitudes, for their part, have given rise to buildings with an acute sensitivity to the physical environment and to the delicate interplay of light and shadow.
From museums to schools to subsidized housing developments, Connah's Finland is an important survey of the country's architecture. Fully illustrated and with detailed examinations of many of the Finnish master architects—including Alvar Aalto—it is also a valuable contribution to the studies of modern architecture and Nordic history.
Roger Connah's latest book, Finland , explores the culture and democratic spirit of a country whose buildings carry the indelible markings of Finland's political and physical climate. Nearly all of the country's buildings were constructed after 1917, when Finland gained its independence from Russia. The resulting architecture—often springing from hugely popular public competitions—is emphatically democratic in structure and usage. Finland's extreme northern latitudes, for their part, have given rise to buildings with an acute sensitivity to the physical environment and to the delicate interplay of light and shadow.
From museums to schools to subsidized housing developments, Connah's Finland is an important survey of the country's architecture. Fully illustrated and with detailed examinations of many of the Finnish master architects—including Alvar Aalto—it is also a valuable contribution to the studies of modern architecture and Nordic history.
280 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2006
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January 16, 2023
English-language books about modern architecture in Serbia, Eritrea, and Brazil have brought out the tensions between national styles of modern architecture and the power of supranational trends to override them. This Reaktion Books series explores those tensions in various countries; this volume on Finland uncovers them in the architecture of Alvar Aalto whose architecture, as Kenneth Frampton puts it, “is the principal heuristic device, illuminating both figure and ground” for Finland, even for the Finns themselves. But Roger Connah’s authoritative account covers not just Aalto but the work of many other architects too.
The period of eclecticism and Art Nouveau in Finland were not national in character, but international, as they were everywhere else. Eliel Saarinen’s protomodern 1904 Helsinki railway station looked back towards neoclassicism but also forward to Art Deco, whilst Lars Sonck’s massive Kallio church (1912) explored revivalist themes that were also being investigated elsewhere. In the wake of the 1917 Bolsevik revolution in neighbouring Russia, and the architectural revolution that accompanied it, Finland broke free from traditional constraints; the previous efforts to develop a national style were now countered by the imperative of participating in international movements.
At first, in that earliest period, Alvar Aalto’s language was an orthodox version of modernism: smooth white walls, strip windows, flat roofs. But in his chapter on “White Functionalism”, Connah notes that some architects were beginning to accept modernism "in a more reserved manner”. From the work of De Stijl in the Netherlands to that of the Russian Constructivists working so close to their own border, the Finns perceived modernism as a heterogeneous multifacted phenomenon; in his more mature work Aalto's architecture was never much affected by movement dogma, and that was wha gave it its freedom. His masterpieces of the late 1920s and 1930s (the Viipuri Library, the Turun Sanomat, and the Paimio Sanatorium) “apply his own approach, with panache” representing “a genuinely new and individual approach to design” that adapted the precepts of modernist architecture to the local situation, expressing“an individualism that set Aalto apart” and which“eventually isolated him within Finnish architecture” which continued to go in another direction, as he continued developing his “Nordic kit of parts”.
Connah’s reinterpretations of Aalto’s buildings give us another opportunity to delight in his architecture, and Connah also takes a close look at some of Aalto’s contemporaries: the ruthlessly stripped monumentalism of Yrjö Lindegren seems indebted to Loos and the mitteleuropean school; and something similar might be said of the remarkable Väinö Vähäkallio, whose architecture seems more concerned with solidity than with transparency - offering strong affinities with much that is happening today in the work of architects like Kolhoff, Fretton, or Caruso & St. John. Other contemporaries of Aalto (Erkki Huttunen, P. E. Blomstedt, Erik Bryggman, and Finland’s great female architect Elsi Borg) were taking modern architecture in the same monumental, solid direction that looks newly relevant now.
After World War II, Aalto’s Säynätsalo Civic Centre (1952) and his Finlandia Hall, Helsinki (1961- 75) fully embraced a language of solid masses, not extensively fenestrated, and experimented with local materials and rough surfaces rather than glass walls. A delight in the craftsman’s skill, superseding machine-made industrial design, becomes evident in details like door handles or in complex timber roof trusses, where the hand of the master carpenter is apparent.
In more recent years, the traditional timber-built villages of Finland have been an inspiration for the informal, relaxed urban design of outstanding contemporary practices like Raili and Reima Pietilä, whose residence for the Finnish President (1984-93) demonstrated that a modern country can choose innovative, serious architects for its most representational buildings (although elsewhere, the sometimes opportunistic work of Pietilä has strayed into strange bulbous formalisms, such as the library in Tampere (1979-85) .
In a troubled chapter entitled “Deconstruction and Reconstruction” Connah tries to identify some clear direction in Finnish architecture now. It's a story of stylistic decadence, from the richness and multidirectionality of earlier years, to the dead-end of 1980s and 1990s postmodernism exemplified in provincial, superficially ingratiating architecture like Jyrki Tasa’s Be-bop building in Pori (1998) or AARA Architects’ hideous Valintatalo supermarket at Espoo (1982). Connah traces the ideological path that led to this po-mo decadence: a path that leads from Robert Venturi to Charles Jencks and Tom Wolfe, whose famous condemnation of modern architecture was apparently “widely read in Finnish architectural circles” at the time of its publication.
Connah's conclusion is tragic: “by 1992 the profession of architects was at its lowest ebb...generosity and solidarity had been almost lost... aggressive tendering procedures ...began dictating the shape... of a new quick, slick architecture”. But in the work of dignified practitioners like Juha Leiviskä it was still possible to take hope. Leiviskä’s (unsuccessful) 1993 competition entry for the new Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art was an assured arrangement of strong, simple volumetric forms and spaces, with a plasticity that “echoes Leiviskä’s dialogue with De Stijl, Mies van der Rohe, and modern art”. It is rigorous architects like Leiviskä who “serve to display the continuity between Aalto and Pietilä” and seem most likely to keep Finnish architecture on a courageous path.
At times Connah goes into such detail that we lose ourselves in too much information, and the very few photographs mean that most of the projects he mentions are not illustrated. Whilst his book is a valuable overview on architecture in Finland (and a reality cold shower) the pre-eminence given to words over pictures suggests it will be more interesting to academics than to architects.
The period of eclecticism and Art Nouveau in Finland were not national in character, but international, as they were everywhere else. Eliel Saarinen’s protomodern 1904 Helsinki railway station looked back towards neoclassicism but also forward to Art Deco, whilst Lars Sonck’s massive Kallio church (1912) explored revivalist themes that were also being investigated elsewhere. In the wake of the 1917 Bolsevik revolution in neighbouring Russia, and the architectural revolution that accompanied it, Finland broke free from traditional constraints; the previous efforts to develop a national style were now countered by the imperative of participating in international movements.
At first, in that earliest period, Alvar Aalto’s language was an orthodox version of modernism: smooth white walls, strip windows, flat roofs. But in his chapter on “White Functionalism”, Connah notes that some architects were beginning to accept modernism "in a more reserved manner”. From the work of De Stijl in the Netherlands to that of the Russian Constructivists working so close to their own border, the Finns perceived modernism as a heterogeneous multifacted phenomenon; in his more mature work Aalto's architecture was never much affected by movement dogma, and that was wha gave it its freedom. His masterpieces of the late 1920s and 1930s (the Viipuri Library, the Turun Sanomat, and the Paimio Sanatorium) “apply his own approach, with panache” representing “a genuinely new and individual approach to design” that adapted the precepts of modernist architecture to the local situation, expressing“an individualism that set Aalto apart” and which“eventually isolated him within Finnish architecture” which continued to go in another direction, as he continued developing his “Nordic kit of parts”.
Connah’s reinterpretations of Aalto’s buildings give us another opportunity to delight in his architecture, and Connah also takes a close look at some of Aalto’s contemporaries: the ruthlessly stripped monumentalism of Yrjö Lindegren seems indebted to Loos and the mitteleuropean school; and something similar might be said of the remarkable Väinö Vähäkallio, whose architecture seems more concerned with solidity than with transparency - offering strong affinities with much that is happening today in the work of architects like Kolhoff, Fretton, or Caruso & St. John. Other contemporaries of Aalto (Erkki Huttunen, P. E. Blomstedt, Erik Bryggman, and Finland’s great female architect Elsi Borg) were taking modern architecture in the same monumental, solid direction that looks newly relevant now.
After World War II, Aalto’s Säynätsalo Civic Centre (1952) and his Finlandia Hall, Helsinki (1961- 75) fully embraced a language of solid masses, not extensively fenestrated, and experimented with local materials and rough surfaces rather than glass walls. A delight in the craftsman’s skill, superseding machine-made industrial design, becomes evident in details like door handles or in complex timber roof trusses, where the hand of the master carpenter is apparent.
In more recent years, the traditional timber-built villages of Finland have been an inspiration for the informal, relaxed urban design of outstanding contemporary practices like Raili and Reima Pietilä, whose residence for the Finnish President (1984-93) demonstrated that a modern country can choose innovative, serious architects for its most representational buildings (although elsewhere, the sometimes opportunistic work of Pietilä has strayed into strange bulbous formalisms, such as the library in Tampere (1979-85) .
In a troubled chapter entitled “Deconstruction and Reconstruction” Connah tries to identify some clear direction in Finnish architecture now. It's a story of stylistic decadence, from the richness and multidirectionality of earlier years, to the dead-end of 1980s and 1990s postmodernism exemplified in provincial, superficially ingratiating architecture like Jyrki Tasa’s Be-bop building in Pori (1998) or AARA Architects’ hideous Valintatalo supermarket at Espoo (1982). Connah traces the ideological path that led to this po-mo decadence: a path that leads from Robert Venturi to Charles Jencks and Tom Wolfe, whose famous condemnation of modern architecture was apparently “widely read in Finnish architectural circles” at the time of its publication.
Connah's conclusion is tragic: “by 1992 the profession of architects was at its lowest ebb...generosity and solidarity had been almost lost... aggressive tendering procedures ...began dictating the shape... of a new quick, slick architecture”. But in the work of dignified practitioners like Juha Leiviskä it was still possible to take hope. Leiviskä’s (unsuccessful) 1993 competition entry for the new Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art was an assured arrangement of strong, simple volumetric forms and spaces, with a plasticity that “echoes Leiviskä’s dialogue with De Stijl, Mies van der Rohe, and modern art”. It is rigorous architects like Leiviskä who “serve to display the continuity between Aalto and Pietilä” and seem most likely to keep Finnish architecture on a courageous path.
At times Connah goes into such detail that we lose ourselves in too much information, and the very few photographs mean that most of the projects he mentions are not illustrated. Whilst his book is a valuable overview on architecture in Finland (and a reality cold shower) the pre-eminence given to words over pictures suggests it will be more interesting to academics than to architects.
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July 31, 2024I think maybe I was not the intended audience for this book. It felt esoteric and impenetrable, but from reading the other reviews I am thinking that I was mistaken when I took this as an introductory book to the subject of Finnish architecture. That's my bad, so I'm not going to give it a rating.
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