Ideals: 

Both Saarinen and Aalto witnessed great ideological debates within architecture during their careers; a debate between neoclassicism and national romanticism for the former and the breaking wave of modernism for the latter.  Today’s architectural debates have involved the ubiquitous nature of modernism to deny a vernacular.  Technical advances in building have largely meant the lack of a dominant recognised contemporary style.  This offers a liberating freedom to architects yet also risks the nature of urban development and its ability to provide a coherent modern urban fabric.

The brief requested a building that is timeless.  So too does it lean towards an architecture of idealism, reflective of the utopian ideals of the city’s former architects mentioned previously. A building as ‘a world house’ and the city’s ‘common living room’ also echo the paragons evident within Finland’s Library Act.  So it was from these ideals that the project was approached.  Timeless, Modern, Appropriate, Efficient, Sustainable are all words that can be applied to the following proposal; a building of elegant character that will identify it as a new and welcoming figure among the existing architectures of Finland’s capital, Helsinki.  As such the proposal is Janus-faced, looking both to the past and future.

Approach:

The proposal aims to follow the current townplan in a disciplined way.  The townplan fixed the position, maximum perimeter and height of the new face to Makasiinipuisto.  In its architectural response it offers recourse to the traditional vocabulary of architectural history.  Words like pilaster, proportion and column and crown, are applied through the proposal not as a trivial historic quotation but as an attempt to reclaim, for contemporary architecture, values which are often lost through iconic celebration and the misjudged deployment of modern technical prowess.

To provide a timeless architecture, one must first accept an ignorance of the future.  In doing so, spaces within the building have not been provided that are programme specific.  Rather, by providing a range of different spaces that can be connected and opened but above all changed and adapted over time, a series of spatial experiences is provided along with the ability to adapt to the developments of the unknown.  The building will provide a flexible infrastructure for the ‘world house’.  The rate of technical development exemplified by the information revolution of recent decades, precludes both the need and the possibility of an architecture of specifics.