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      Australian projects shortlisted in 2023 World Architecture Festival Awards

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      More than 30 Australian projects are among the 495 from across the globe that have been shortlisted in the 2023 World Architecture Festival Awards.
      Australia is among the top 10 countries with the most shortlisted projects.
      “We are delighted with both the quantity and quality of this year’s entries,” said WAF program director Paul Finch. “They are a reminder in a world experiencing numerous crises that architects continue to address both everyday and unusual challenges with skill and imagination.”
      The World Architecture Festival will return to Singapore for the first time since 2015. The shortlisted projects will be judged live in front of various panels of judges. The festival program will also include keynote talks and social events.
      The 2023 World Architecture Festival will take place at Marina Bay Sands from 29 November to 1 December.
      The shortlisted Australian projects are:
      Completed Projects
      Creative Re-use
      55 Southbank Boulevard – Bates SmartLocomotive Workshop – Sissons Architects, in association with Curio Projects, Buchan and Mirvac DesignThe Greenland Centre – BVN with Woods Bagot
      Culture
      Melbourne Holocaust Museum – Kerstin Thompson ArchitectsMPavilion 2022 – All ZoneOman Across Ages Museum – Cox ArchitectureTe Pae Christchurch Convention Centre – Woods Bagot in association with Warren and MahoneyThomas Dixon Centre – Home of the Queensland Ballet – Conrad Gargett (now merged with Architectus)
      Display
      Puffing Billy Railway Visitor Centre – Terroir
      Health
      Murrenda Residential Aged Care Home – STHVictorian Heart Hospital – Conrad Gargett (now merged with Architectus) and Wardle
      Higher Education and Research
      Boola Katitjin – Lyons with Silver Thomas Hanley, Officer Woods, The Fulcrum Agency and Aspect StudiosUniversity of Melbourne Student Precinct – Lyons with Koning Eizenberg Architecture, NMBW Architecture Studio, Greenaway Architects, Architects EAT, Aspect Studios and Glas Urban
      Hotel and Leisure
      Delatite Cellar Door – Lucy Clemenger ArchitectsIron Creek Bay Farm Stay – Misho and AssociatesThe Jube – Blight Rayner Architecture
      House and Villa
      Concrete Curtain – FGR Architects
      Housing
      Liv Munro – Bates Smart
      Office
      Heritage Lanes 80 Ann Street – Woods BagotKew Office – Kavellaris Urban Design
      Religion
      Macquarie Park Cemetery Mausoleum of the Holy Way – GW
      School
      Alexandria Park Community School – TKD ArchitectsLibrary and Innovation Centre, Abbotsleigh Junior School – AJC ArchitectsThe Centre for Science and Art, Abbotsleigh Senior School – AJC ArchitectsWurun Senior Campus – GHD Design and Grimshaw
      Sport
      Allianz Stadium – Cox ArchitectureSt Margaret’s Girls School Sports Hub – Blight Rayner Architecture
      Transport
      Lilydale and Mooroolbark Railway Stations – BKK Architects, Kyriacou Architects, Jacobs, Aspect Studios
      Glenroy Station – Genton and MALA Studio
      Future Projects
      Commercial Mixed-Use
      Lighthouse at Darling Park – Henning Larsen, Architectus
      Education
      Resource Recovery Learning Centre – Terroir
      Health
      Alexandria Health Centre – Warren and Mahoney
      Infrastructure
      Metro Tunnel Project – Hassell, Weston Williamson and Partners, and RSHP
      Leisure-led Development
      Mallanganee Lookout – Terroir
      Office
      55 Pitt Street – Woods Bagot and Shop ArchitectsFulcrum – Bates SmartWarada on Walker – Woods Bagot
      Landscape
      Gardens, Parks, Ecological/Environmental
      Delprat Cottage and Garden – Bosque Landscape Architecture / School of Architecture and Built Environment More

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      Winning design unveiled for Barangaroo Harbour Park

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      The New South Wales government has unveiled the winning design for a 1.85 hectare park on the foreshore at Central Barangaroo.
      First Nations-led consortium Akin, which comprises Yerrabingin, Architectus, Jacob Nash Studio, Studio Chris Fox and Flying Fish Blue, with Arup as engineering consultants, has been named winner of an open design competition launched in December 2022.
      The winning design features nature play for all ages and abilities, a 6,000-capacity event lawn for hosting community and cultural events and winding pathways to explore.
      The design honours the long and deep history of the Gadigal people and showcases First Nations design methodologies. The Country-led design supports regenerative ecology, natural systems, drawing insects, birds and other fauna.
      The landscape will be planted extensively with a variety of endemic grasses. Native trees such as Sydney red gum, casuarina and cabbage tree palm will provide canopy cover, and a series of interactive waterways and ponds will collect and filter water through the landscape before it returns to the harbour.

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      The winning design for Barangaroo Harbour Park by Akin (Yerrabingin, Architectus, Jacob Nash Studio, Studio Chris Fox and Flying Fish Blue, with Arup). Image: Akin

      The design also includes a series of significant public art installations that will become places for exploration, play, education, shade and celebration. The artworks reference natural elements of water, wind and moon (or “vessels”) that have special significance in Indigenous knowledge systems.
      The water vessel, which will become the connection point to the harbour and a place for gathering and ceremony, will be made from timber, referencing pre-settlement campfires that burned along the harbour. The artwork will frame Me-Mel Island/Goat Island, which is the largest island in the harbour and was recently transferred back to the local Gadigal people. It will be a significant cultural landmark for Traditional Custodians.
      The wind vessel will be located at the windiest corner of the site to capture the westerly winds each morning, giving “voice” to them.
      The moon vessel will feature an oculus and a lined underside that reflects the tidal waves of the harbour. It will be located at the west-facing end of the site – a landscape that “never sees the dawn.”

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      Annotated plan of Barangaroo Harbour Park by Akin (Yerrabingin, Architectus, Jacob Nash Studio, Studio Chris Fox and Flying Fish Blue, with Arup). Image: Akin

      The design team will consult with community to further refine the design.
      “We are incredibly honoured and humbled to be part of such a defining public project, weaving together the threads of landscape, art, and architecture,” said Yerrabingin founder and CEO Christian Hampson.
      “For us, this is much more than a park – it’s a place for us to celebrate an enduring culture and to move with Country, acknowledging and experiencing our collective past and present while dreaming of our future. This design is a new chapter connected to the most ancient of stories, carved in the Sydney sandstone: the story of Country and of us, its people.”
      “Our design is a new chapter connected to the most ancient of stories, carved in the sandstone of Sydney: the story of Country and of us, its people. We hope this new chapter inspires all our young people, fanning the embers inside them into a fire as the future artists, architects, designers, and engineers of our cities and our nation.”
      Jessica Hodge, landscape architect and urban designer at Yerrabingin, added, “This project represents a symbolic shift in the landscape architecture and design culture of Sydney. It’s significant, city-shaping work led by an entirely local team, with a scheme built upon First Nations knowledge and a deep respect for Country. Setting a new benchmark for design and process, the landscape architecture unifies all elements, including art and architecture, with a shared objective of elevating Country and ultimately creating a place for all kin.”
      The Harbour Park at Barangaroo will be part of a 14-kilometre continuous harbourside walk from Glebe to Woolloomooloo.
      “Barangaroo Harbour Park will generate for Sydney a public place like no other: a city-scaled platform positioned on the Harbour’s edge, where a Country-led, layered landscape will positively contribute to a deeper understanding of First Nations people, culture, and knowledge,” said Architectus principal Luke Johnson. More

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      Five houses to visit during Open House Melbourne 2023

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      Private home tours are back at the popular Open House Melbourne program, in which the public is invited to explore the city’s iconic and contemporary architecture.
      More than 180 buildings, tours, events and design talks are on offer during the last weekend of July, including 16 contemporary and historic houses across Melbourne.
      We combed through the program, found five of the best houses to visit, and made an itinerary – so you don’t have to.
      Hawthorn 1 by Agius Scorpo
      The owners of this Hawthorn home approached Agius Scorpo to create a flexible studio for their adult son, a utility shed and a pool in their existing backyard. The solution was a serpentine fence that unified all the elements and avoided littering the garden with disparate structures.
      Read the review by Houses editor Alexa Kempton.
      Hütt 01 Passivhaus by Melbourne Design Studio
      This compact home accommodates a family of five on a tiny site of 250 square metres and internal area of 78 square metres. It is also certified Passive House Premium – which means it produces more energy than it uses – and is rated the highest category in Life Cycle Assessment. The project shows how we can build better houses in Australia.
      Hütt 01 Passivhaus was the winner of the Sustainability award in the 2022 Houses Awards.
      Canning Street by Foomann with interiors by Bicker Design

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      Canning Street by Foomann with interiors by Bicker Design. Image:

      Willem-Dirk du Toit

      This freestanding house is tucked behind a single-fronted worker’s cottage in North Melbourne. It accommodates three bedrooms in its 110-square-metres footprint. A sweeping curved ceiling defines the open-plan living, dining and kitchen zones.
      Read the profile of Foomann by Peter Davies.
      Lippincott House by Roy Lippincott, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin
      This 1917 home is part of Glenard Estate in Eaglemont, designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. The home was initially designed by Roy Lippinscott, who was the Griffin’s head draughtsman, and Walter’s sister Genevieve. It is located next door to Walter and Marion’s own home, Pholiota.
      Blackburn North Passive House retrofit by Alwyn Projects, Studiofang and The Sunday Garden Landscape Design

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      Blackburn North Passive House retrofit by Alwyn Projects, Studiofang and The Sunday Garden Landscape Design. Image: TK

      Australia’s leaky homes directly contribute to high energy consumption. This house demonstrates how a typical 1950s suburban weatherboard home can be retrofitted with passive house principles to prioritize energy efficiency, comfort and affordability. It also demonstrates how materials that are already on site can be reused.
      The 2023 Open House Melbourne will take place on Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 July. The first ticket release will take place at 12 noon on 6 July, and the second will be at 10 am on 8 July. More

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      UNSW Canberra City campus masterplan approved

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      The ACT government has approved the UNSW Canberra City masterplan, designed by MGS Architects, Snøhetta and Turf Design.
      The major new campus, to be built on government-owned land on Constitution Avenue within the Parliamentary Triangle, will accommodate 6,000 students and become a hub for defence and security innovation.
      “The campus is an ideal location for industry, government and universities to collaborate and work more closely together,” said Emma Sparks, who has been appointed dean and rector of UNSW Canberra.
      “The campus will also be the new home for UNSW Canberra’s highly successful Launch initiative, which is a purpose-built precinct designed to host industry and entrepreneurs in a vibrant, connected environment.”

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      UNSW Canberra City masterplan: view west to Reid Campus Core. Image:

      Courtesy UNSW Canberra City

      The masterplan includes 14 buildings across eight hectares and is framed as an integrated learning community with five connected precincts with distinct themes: City Edge, which will showcase the university to Canberra City; Reid Parkside, which will create a “sensitive interface” with the heritage easement and suburb of Reid; Reid Campus Core, which will form the heart of the campus; Civic Interface, which will be a “distinct and activated academic streetscape”; and Parkes View, which will “connect the campus to the city’s parliamentary and natural landscape views.”
      “The last three years [have] seen UNSW consult and work with the local community to ensure the masterplan not only delivers educational and innovation outcomes, but also delivers a campus that revitalizes the eastern edge of the Canberra CBD,” said ACT chief minister Andrew Barr.
      The appointment of architects will begin later this year. The campus will be built in stages, with the final stage scheduled to finish in 2036. More

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      NSW gov’t introduces Connecting with Country Framework

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      The New South Wales government has finalized its Connecting with Country Framework, which provides guidance for designers, planners and governments on how to respond to Country and empower Aboriginal voices in the design process.
      Developed by Government Architect NSW, the framework encourages all built environment projects to take a Country-centred approach, guided by Aboriginal people.
      “What better time to introduce this important new planning and design guide than during NAIDOC Week – a time when we celebrate and recognize the rich history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” said planning minister Paul Scully.
      “Introducing this framework will enable the NSW Government to better protect Country, community, and sacred sites in the planning and design of our places and buildings.
      “Archaeological investigations and recording of Aboriginal heritage have been a well-established part of the planning process. This new framework builds on those practices by valuing, respecting and being guided by Aboriginal people, who know if we care for Country it will care for us.”
      The framework aims to improve the health and wellbeing of Country through sustainable land and water use management in order to reduce the impacts of natural disasters; valuing and respecting Aboriginal cultural knowledge through co-designed development projects; and protecting Aboriginal sites and ongoing access for Aboriginal people to the ancestral lands.
      “First Nations peoples around the world have long understood the importance of living in balance with the natural world, developing traditional practices and knowledge to support that way of life,” said NSW government architect Abbie Galvin.
      “In a time of rapidly increasing development, the Connecting with Country Framework demonstrates how to work with Aboriginal communities to guide that development to be more sustainable, resilient and culturally responsive.”
      A draft framework was first introduced in 2020 with a pilot program and was used on a number of government projects including Sydney Metro. Feedback from the pilot is also included in the final framework.
      “The Connecting with Country Framework is critical in [the] re-imagining of how we engage with Country and cultural landscapes. It enables Aboriginal people’s values, knowledge systems and mechanisms for connecting to country to influence the design and planning processes for building and architecture,” said the NSW Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Treaty, David Harris.
      “First Nations peoples’ connection to Country can provide our state with invaluable insight to our design, construction, and architecture.” More

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      Timber offices proposed for Brisbane’s Newstead

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      O’Neill Architecture has designed a sustainable commercial office building on the fringes of Brisbane CBD in Newstead.
      The four-storey building will be the headquarters of Asia Pacific Internet Development Trust, accommodating 80 staff.
      “The design is an interrogation of visibility and duality. The building owner and occupants work in a virtual world, providing internet protocols,” said the architects in a design statement. “Everyone connected in the Asia Pacific region experiences their work in their everyday lives. The design for the building reflects this relationship: present but secluded, hiding in plain sight but present visually along Breakfast Creek Road once known.”

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      56 Breakfast Creek Road designed by O’Neill Architecture and Lat Studios. Image:

      O’Neill Architecture

      The building will be partially recessed into the sloping landform of Montpelier Hill in Newstead.
      “The design blends into the exposed phyllite rock face and sub-tropical vegetation endemic to the Montpelier Hill site. This represents the occupant’s connection to the world around them, which is concealed yet omnipresent,” the architects continued.
      The offices will be constructed from cross-laminated timber, with a layered facade of glazing and perforated metal screens that “provide expression and depth from the outside world shielding vision, sound and light where required.”
      “The indoor environment is framed by the materiality, textural tactility, and calming scent of timber,” said the architects.
      The building will be L-shaped in plan, reaching out in parts to the surrounding bushland setting. At the centre of the site, an auditorium, a sheltered courtyard and staff recreation areas form a “social heart.”

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      56 Breakfast Creek Road designed by O’Neill Architecture and Lat Studios. Image:

      O’Neill Architecture

      “For the owners and occupants, the design creates a new home within the city, and a thriving community within the site,” the architects said.
      Renewable and recycled materials will be used throughout in a design that maximizes natural ventilation, energy creation and efficiency.
      The project will be targeting 6-star Green Star, 5.5-star NABERS and WELL Gold certifications, as well as a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions through design and material selection.
      The landscape, designed with Lat Studios, will “enhance functionality, enjoyment and identity through a contemporary scheme that includes lush and layered terrace planting and hardy, sun-loving courtyard gardens. Endemic species encourage a local ecology with a focus on re-use of existing geology and reinstatement of the existing bushland to the west of the site.” More

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      Genteel flats for genteel people

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      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
      In the 1760s the Adam brothers built a speculative housing development on an insalubrious patch of London between the Strand and the Thames. To appeal to punters, they used grand symmetry and pilasters to give the new terraces of the Adelphi the outward appearance of a single classical riverine palace. Financially, the scheme was a near-disaster, but the aesthetic ruse was a success. In the second half of the 19th century, with London’s booming middle classes needing places to live, and often reluctant to slog out to the new suburbs, builders again turned to the palace frontage. In 1852, as part of the creation of Victoria Street in Westminster, Henry Ashton designed a long Italianate six-storey block containing 36 large flats. With this, he created the London ‘mansion block’, a distinctive typology explored by Karin Templin in At Home in London: The Mansion Block, published in May by MACK and the Architecture Foundation. The mansion block prospered over the next half-century, and subsequently experienced two revivals: between the world wars, and from 2010 to the present day.
      It’s this latest revival that makes Templin’s survey more than a vintage snapshot. One of the three-pipe problems of British politics: everyone wants more housing built, but people are often very resistant to anything being built near them. Conservative policymakers have in recent years treated the problem as largely aesthetic, sweetening the pill of new housing by promising ‘building beautiful’, ‘placemaking’ and so on. Sometimes this verges on simple euphemism: a ‘garden suburb’ might stir up fewer angry residents’ associations than a ‘housing estate’. Similarly, ‘mansion block’ sounds a more urbane neighbour than ‘block of flats’.
      Which raises the question of whether it is truly a typology, or just a marketing gimmick to make apartment buildings more palatable to a suspicious public. Templin lays to rest some misconceptions about this. The Victorian Londoner was not as sceptical of apartment blocks as is generally assumed: the mansion block was widely advocated and welcomed. By 1911, more than 10 per cent of London’s population lived in flats. (These were generally rented, even for the upper-middle and upper classes: home ownership became a national obsession only later in the 20th century.)
      Speculative building led to some extraordinary heaps, such as Queen Anne’s Mansions beside St James’s Park, designed by Henry Alers Hankey and E.R. Robson and built between 1873 and 1889. This piled 300 flats on 13 teetering floors, connected by the capital’s first residential hydraulic passenger lift. The facade, a monotonous grid of barely adorned windows, was slightly inflected, adding to the sense that it loomed over the street below. It was demolished in 1973. But generally the Victorian mansion block was distinguished by architectural unity, visible in the handsome red brick and pale stone blocks built around the Albert Hall by R. Norman Shaw and others. It is these blocks that are such a characteristic part of Chelsea, Marylebone and Mayfair. The density of population they permit, and the shops and restaurants they often incorporate, have done much to make those neighbourhoods attractive, as Templin explores.
      Dolphin Square in Pimlico, London, designed by Gordon Jeeves (1888–1964) and built in 1937. Photo: Matthew Blunderfield; courtesy the artist and MACK; published in At Home in London: The Mansion Block by Karin Templin (MACK)
      The second age of the mansion block, after the end of the First World War, came in a very different style, as art deco and neoclassicism elbowed aside Edwardian fanciness, and often on a very different scale. Previous efforts were dwarfed by red brick megastructures such as Du Cane Court in Balham – 632 flats – and Dolphin Square in Pimlico, with 1,310 flats, for a time the largest residential building in Europe.
      These giant buildings were often meaner on the inside. Driven by modern ideas that stressed economy of space, and traditional housebuilders’ ideas about generosity of profit, the individual flats were shrinking. The interwar apartment block was the subject of satire. How to Live in a Flat (1936) is a collection of wonderful illustrations by Heath Robinson (glued together with a chatty text by K.R.G. Browne) showing the space-saving devices necessitated by a modern flat: dining tables that double as beds, baths that protrude out of the side of the building, and washing lines attached to hot-air balloons. Significantly, it is the middle classes who are under scrutiny, and made to look ridiculous for tolerating these innovations.
      A similar message comes from Osbert Lancaster’s Pillar to Post: The Pocket Lamp of Architecture (1938), which gave the world the typologies ‘Stockbroker’s Tudor’, ‘By-Pass Variegated’ and so on. ‘Park Land Residential’, a block for the wealthy, and ‘LCC Residential’, for the working classes, are two halves of the same joke: it’s the same building, but the version for the working classes is nicer as it’s not on a busy road, the rent is lower and it has trees outside rather than shops.
      These lampoons contributed to a sense that flats were good enough for the lower classes, and only the lower classes. After the Second World War, with modernist planning ascendant, apartment blocks were mostly designed without the street frontage characteristic of the mansion block. Floor plans were also regularised, partly as a result of the structural logic of the high-rise. In Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator (2014), Andreas Bernard writes about the homogenising effect of elevators on building plans: since an elevator shaft appears in the same place on every floor, it governs the rest of the layout, and repetition naturally follows.
      An excellent feature of Templin’s book is its inclusion of floor plans, which help prove that there’s more to the mansion block than decorative twiddles and a better class of tenant. These plans are often fascinating, revealing great internal variety. This is partly dictated by the demands of a street frontage, and the deep bays, recesses and courtyards needed to give every room a window (so much easier when your block is a tower isolated in the middle of the site). And it’s a quality that lives in modern mansion blocks by architects including Peter Barber – the ultimate being the honeycomb interior of 79 Fitzjohns Avenue by Sergison Bates, completed last year.
      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More

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      Can Helsinki’s modern architecture grow old gracefully?

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      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
      The Helsinki skyline is startlingly low for a capital city, its further horizons determined by water and scattered wooded islands. In the centre, urban civility and a clear-headed planning regime have established a height limit of around eight storeys, punctuated by occasional eminences. The standout is the heroic central station, designed in the early 1900s by Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero). Otherwise, only a few spires and the lofty white Lutheran cathedral, the jazz-style tower of the Hotel Torni and pencil-thin chimneys from redundant power stations cut into the ordained pattern. One of the power stations, Hanasaari, which closed down this March, is currently preoccupying the city authorities. They have turned to Buro Happold for advice, in the hope that the firm’s experience with Battersea Power Station may help rescue the 1970s brick shell. A little further east, overlooking the harbour, a gaggle of multi-storey blocks has recently loomed – as if testing the water.
      Another factor is starting to determine the physiognomy of the city centre: some of it is – and more will be – sited below ground. There is no single clear reason for this, though factors include the exigent climate, respect for that polite skyline, and the key part that open space plays as amenity, in the city as in the overwhelmingly forested country.
      The use of subterranean space and the creation of a new realm overhead are becoming a speciality of Helsinki-based architectural practice JKMM. The Amos Rex art museum (named for the Finnish publisher and patron Amos Anderson) sits beneath a swooping pedestrian square – formerly a bus terminal, now an unorthodox playground of sculptural skylights and domes at the foot of a cheerful art-deco clock tower. The galleries below are reached via the handsome glazed entrance of the Lasipalatsi (‘Glass Palace’), part of a restored modernist complex together with the Bio Rex cinema (1936) next door. Elegant stairs sweep into a lobby and the sequence of soaring new galleries. A small traditional gallery space is now showing work collected by the critic, architect and admirer of the Post-Impressionists Sigurd Frosterus, who designed the flagship Stockmann department store (completed in 1930) in central Helsinki, and whose collection was incorporated with Amos Anderson’s in 1994.
      Out on the west coast, an hour’s drive from the city, JKMM, under the same lead architect, Asmo Jaaksi, has just completed the Chappe Art House, a small-scale variant on these ideas. Set in the diminutive surroundings of Tammisaari old town in Ekenäs municipality, the new gallery was the dream of a distinguished professor of human genetics, the late Albert de la Chapelle and his wife, professor Clara Bloomfield. (They both died in 2020, so neither lived to see the outcome.)
      Chappe is a chunky black spruce-clad box, set among a random group of brick and timber buildings, a sprightly cuckoo in the small-town setting. Yet what at first sight looks very small indeed is – displaying the same ingenuity as the Amos Rex – generous in terms of volume and light. The entrance leads to a timbered roofed hall, soaring on a startling scale, a space that is to be both gallery and public meeting place. The simple building, modestly tucked beneath our feet, is a nest of surprises. For its first exhibition, four artists have been invited to respond to a single landscape painting from the de la Chapelle collection.
      A third subterranean structure is due to open in 2027: this is an ambitious underground annex for the National Museum of Finland in central Helsinki. The spectacular new space is flagged by a circular cantilevered entrance, a concrete vortex from which visitors will descend on a series of stairs to the galleries and facilities below. Above, a public garden will be open all year round.
      Aerial view of the centre of Helsinki, which is still a low-rise city (photo: 2020). Photo: Subodh Agnihotri/Alamy Stock Photo
      For decades, visitors to Finland had been drawn by Alvar Aalto’s questing version of modernism, seen as closely aligned with Nordic social democratic aspirations and sustained by a tight group of followers, at home and abroad. Inevitably, his work has been challenged by the passing of time and changing usage. In Helsinki, the shrouded hunk of the white Carrara marble-clad Finlandia Hall, dating from 1971, is in the middle of a recladding expected to take five years; the crisp Academic Book Store of the 1960s – a smart street-front clad in beautifully detailed copper, with dramatic angular roof lights bursting into life within – is compromised by chipped and stained marble facings on the entry columns.
      West of central Helsinki is another post-war landmark: the ‘garden city’ of Tapiola, which has been highly influential in European town planning. It shares its roots with British first-generation New Towns and, patched and amended though it is, it still offers compelling evidence of an urbane landscape, the antithesis of the formless out-of-town development that the critic Ian Nairn called ‘subtopia’. As my guide, Mari Antoni, a resident of 20 years’ standing and former town councillor puts it, ‘The idea of Tapiola is the thing.’
      When considering a future for the best works by Aalto and his circle, there is often a clash between function and feasible preservation, but in Tapiola there is also a town of 9,000 people to consider. The building materials of the early 1950s, especially in schools and sports buildings, have not stood the test of time; the hazards of asbestos are ubiquitous. The swimming hall, already restored once, is wrapped in sheeting and plywood, its fate uncertain. Yet the best of the flats and housing are highly sought after: the terraced houses, with perky monopitch roofs and skinny clerestory windows on to the roadside, benefit from back gardens and immediate access to a natural landscape of rock and pinewoods. The little cinema has been restored and is highly valued, the lake remains centre stage and expanses of open parkland stretch out on every side.
      The societal hopes that brought Tapiola into being in 1953, according to the ideas of a visionary lawyer, Heikki von Hertzen, may have faded. Established according to principles of social enterprise, Tapiola has been outstripped by Espoo, the municipality of which it is a part, and which is a product of modern broad-brush urban development. But Tapiola is more than just a name in the history of town planning – it richly deserves a second look and, even, another close look at those founding principles.
      From the July/August 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More