Organiser:     The City of Helsinki

Project:         Helsinki Central Library

Competition Summary

Urban Context:

Helsinki is a thriving, modern capital. As the urban focus of a nation it has a responsibility to its citizens to evolve with them and to provide the infrastructure amongst which they can base a modern city life.

Finnish culture has always been proud of its beliefs and traditions, having been forced to defend them on numerous occasions it has prevailed and has catered for them well.  As such, the city has a history of planning its future, regardless of the difficulties presented to it.  An exhaustive account of the city’s history is not appropriate here, but some knowledge of contextual development would seem pertinent, as remnants of the more utopian plans are still present in the current town plan.

Two years before Helsinki was made the capital of a newly formed Grand Dutchy, a plan was drawn up by Johan Albrekt Ehrenström in 1810 and the buildings that followed give Helsinki its Neo-Classical city centre.  Following its independence in 1917, the centenary of which this project will celebrate, plans were drawn up by Eliel Saarinen and in the second half of the century by Alvar Aalto.  Many others have influenced the city, but these two architects are mentioned as the site sits squarely between two of the most important buildings in each’s ouvre; the Central Train Station by the former and Finlandia Hall by the latter.  The location of the new library also relates to the legacy of Aalto’s original masterplan for the Töölönlahti bay area and Hesperia Park, albeit an extension of the ‘endpoint’ of his ‘unit’ of cultural public buildings.

‘The public buildings on the outskirts of Hesperia Park are partly placed in the water, and constitute, along with the park and reflections in the water, a unit in themselves. The concert hall, along with the conferqence hall connected to it, lies by the triangular open area, and constitutes its end-point proper and its culmination. In the northward direction from the concert hall, the proposer has envisaged an opera house, an art museum and a library, together with some public buildings as a reserve for future needs.’