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    Can Helsinki’s modern architecture grow old gracefully?

    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

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    The saving of St Mary-le-Strand

    From the May 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
    The Church of St Mary-le-Strand was once known to London bus drivers as ‘St Mary’s in the Way’. Standing in the middle of the Strand, a congested artery between Westminster and the City of London, the church was long seen by motorists and urban planners alike as little more than an obstruction. Over the three centuries since its consecration in 1724, the road surrounding the church was gradually widened, taking great bites out of the churchyard and threatening to devour the church itself. Threats to the church only seemed to grow. John Betjeman’s last poem was written as part of a campaign to protect it. In 2017, it seemed its luck had finally run out. With the congregation in single digits, the Church of England prepared to sell it off to become a UK outpost of the Museum of the Bible (in Washington, D.C.). Stripped of furniture and fittings, it would have been little more than an empty shell.
    This would have been a travesty. For the church, particularly its interior, is one of London’s architectural glories. It was designed by the Scottish-born architect James Gibbs (1682–1754), his first public commission after his return from Rome, where he had trained in the studio of Carlo Fontana. For an untested young architect, the prominently sited church provided an unrivalled opportunity. He was awarded it as part of his work as Surveyor for the Commission for Fifty New Churches, a body established in 1710 as a monument both to Queen Anne and to the High Church, High Tory ascendancy of her final years. Beginning as the queen’s health deteriorated, the Commissioners knew that they had only limited time to execute their plans. Indeed, when Anne died in 1714, the incoming Hanoverian royal family and its sober Whig ministry quickly wound down the Commission. Only 12 of 50 projected churches were built.
    Those that were built, however – the others were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Archer – are among the outstanding examples of English architecture of any period. With the Commission eager to make an impression quickly, budgets were almost unlimited. Gibbs seized the chance to show off everything he had learned in Italy. He did not quite have carte blanche, having inherited the foundations of an earlier project by Archer. His initial role had been to design a 250-foot-high monumental column to Queen Anne to stand in front of the church; when she died, however, the commissioners quickly dropped the column and focused their energies on the church, which Gibbs designed, taking on some of Archer’s ideas.
    In his executed design, Gibbs decided to make the same point as the monumental column but more subtly. He took his cues from St Paul’s Cathedral – completed in 1711 after nearly half a century of work – showing the sophistication of his Italian training by reworking Christopher Wren’s ideas in a new context. The semi-circular projections of the west and east elevations were inspired, respectively, by the north porch and east end of St Paul’s and, inside, the disposition of the east end closely matches Wren’s design. The ornamental quality of the design is created by Gibbs’s ingenious compression of motifs deriving from St Paul’s into a much smaller area.When built, the church was always expected to be in the centre of London’s life and traffic – in A Book of Architecture (1728), Gibbs explained that he had inserted windows only in the upper storey of the north and south elevations, with niches below, ‘to keep out Noises from the Street’. Of all the churches projected by the commission, St Mary-le-Strand was perhaps the most prominently situated, a point not lost on its architect; he explained elsewhere that ‘the Building can not be too fine for the situation, since it’s so much in viue.’ As envisaged, it was to have been a major monument on the royal processional route into the City of London, something obscured by the comparative unpopularity of the early Hanoverians, under whom it was finished, and their dislike of public processions.
    Since last year, the church’s urban context, so important to its design and history, has been completely transformed. Gone are the streams of traffic that smothered it on either side, replaced by raised beds and picnic benches, part of a scheme to unite the campuses of three of London’s universities, King’s College, the London School of Economics and the Courtauld Institute, into a single ‘Global Cultural Thinking Quarter’. Once an inconvenience, the church is now hailed as the ‘jewel in the Strand’, the focus of London’s newest piazza. The project is not yet totally successful. The zigzagging benches in the supposedly Italianate piazza have a strange, playground quality, and the aims of the and the aims of the Global Cultural Thinking Quarter seem ill-defined. Yet, visiting a year on, a once unappealing – and dangerous – thoroughfare is populated with people, loitering, taking in their surroundings and visiting the church.
    With St Mary’s at last protected from the engine fumes that have for so long blackened and corroded its exterior stonework, and from the developer’s wrecking ball that threatened it in the 19th century, it is now possible to look towards preserving the fabric for future generations. One major ambition is to make the raised ground floor accessible and also turn the crypt (intended for burials) into usable space for events and church activities. On such a cramped site, the project will undoubtedly be challenging. Above ground, the church hopes to restore original features and relight the space to show its magnificent plasterwork ceiling to better advantage. The interior fittings, though the result of several reworkings, retain important original elements. To help achieve this, the church has been awarded a grant of £3.9 million by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and is currently fundraising for the additional £4.5 million needed for its ambitious plans.
    In 1716, as work on the church continued, Gibbs’s former patron John Erskine, Earl of Mar, wrote to the architect from exile in France (Erskine was a Jacobite). It was, he thought, Gibbs’s ‘fair daughter in the Strand […] the most complete little damsel in town’. If done right, the restoration now being planned may bring this church to completion once more.
    From the May 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More

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    In post-war Paris, housing could be really radical

    Gailhoustet still lives in her self-designed apartment and studio at Le Liégat, Ivry – a scheme begun in 1971 and completed in 1986. The stepped concrete terraces with deep apartments pushing back towards the overspilling terraces and patios, with shrubs and trees intervening, were utterly at odds with the norms of 1970s housing. The contemporary effect, now mature, resembles those futile CGIs so beloved of architects struggling to assert their green credentials to credulous clients. At Ivry, the astonishing intricacy of the plan, the spatial verve and generosity, is best understood when caught by aerial photography.
    Internally, there is spatial generosity too, though often expressed vertically. Immensely high ceilings, doubling the heights of modestly sized, oddly shaped rooms, are a frequent feature, as are the eccentrically scattered groups of differently sized windows and angled walls – polygonal rather than rectilinear forms. The tenants discovered that they could use rooms as they wished, taking the inside to the outside, using them in daytime or night-time according to need. Behind this fluidity lay the architects’ understanding of the realities of modern urban society and their belief that shifting demo- graphics can and must be reflected within architecture. As master planner, and as a resident, Gailhoustet knew the local population and her neighbours. She and her team designed housing and amenities, as Moussavi said, that connect to ‘difference and autonomy as much as, even more than, for the nuclear family’.

    A recent report from the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. points out that in strong contrast to most of its peers, most notably the UK and the United States, French central government policy ensures that social housing remains central to the ‘broader social safety net’. With that recognition comes substantial funding and hence fresh thinking: as Gailhoustet herself said in 2018, the private sector tends to be reticent, since with innovation comes financial risk.

    On the discussion panel after the presentation of her award (in absentia, but with her daughter and other colleagues present), it was pointed out by the housing architect Peter Barber that Renée Gailhoustet achieved her results with freedoms allowed to architects that are the envy of her peers in rule-bound Britain. In 2021, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal won the most prestigious of all architectural prizes, the Pritzker, for their transformative work on several 1960s modernist blocks in Paris, Bordeaux and other cities, where they adroitly extended each floor with new ‘winter garden’ terraces and generous glazing, thus bringing more space and light into every apartment. Such masterstrokes in housing design, let alone redesign, do not come often or easily, but they richly deserve recognition when they do. Gailhoustet’s award, like theirs, is a marker of better ways, fresh ideas and social responsibilities, which all deserve our admiration.
    From the November 2022 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More

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    The other-worldly architecture of Rudolf Steiner

    The first Goetheanum (1913–19), an odd mix of temple, dance hall and conference centre, was a double-domed timber and concrete structure looking like a hilltop observatory. Steiner’s philosophic-religious system, anthroposophy, was intended to be expressed through art and movement; its dance, eurythmy – then a massive fad – was fundamental to its practice. The Goetheanum’s halls, intersecting like a compressed figure eight, were designed to accommodate these theatrical movements; the dome of the first building was a garish multi-coloured globe, as if the heavens were awash in a dancing spectrum. That building burnt down, mysteriously, in 1922. Steiner immediately set about designing a more ambitious, more solid structure. Even before it was completed – in 1928, three years after he died – it became a sensation. Visiting architects were awed by this radical structure shrouded in complex scaffolding, its emergent form visible within.The second Goetheanum building in Dornach, Switzerland, designed by Rudolf Steiner after the first Goetheanum burnt down in 1922, and completed in 1928. Photo: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images More