re: work in finland - aalto's legacy?

[korppu]

Finnish arcitecture of one family houses sucks - too little light, seldom roof-windows (that you can open in the summer etc.).

..maybe because only 2-3 % of the Finnish single family houses are designed by architects . Also as the owner of the future house you get what you ask for....

-Korppu (statistics wizard)

[Rosamunda]

Finnish arcitecture of one family houses sucks - too little light, seldom roof-windows (that you can open in the summer etc.).

..maybe because only 2-3 % of the Finnish single family houses are designed by architects . Also as the owner of the future house you get what you ask for....

-Korppu (statistics wizard)

So who designs the other 97%....._

Tango dancers? Moonlighting Elisa Help Desk staff? Parttime snow plough drivers? Retired ski jumpers? Out of season elk hunters?

[Henry-Finland]

Finnish arcitecture of one family houses sucks - too little light, seldom roof-windows (that you can open in the summer etc.).

..maybe because only 2-3 % of the Finnish single family houses are designed by architects . Also as the owner of the future house you get what you ask for....

-Korppu (statistics wizard)

Have you seen the houses introduced at the different housing fairs (Asuntomessut)? 60% of them are usually failures, but I do not think that the houses has been planned in the pub behind the corner. (In that case there would not be so many failures. )

Btw. I turned down a bigger project once because the house was so ugly. Those sorry a**es never called back. Whatta relief.

Henry

Henry

[korppu]

Finnish arcitecture of one family houses sucks - too little light, seldom roof-windows (that you can open in the summer etc.).

..maybe because only 2-3 % of the Finnish single family houses are designed by architects . Also as the owner of the future house you get what you ask for....
-Korppu (statistics wizard)

So who designs the other 97%....._

Tango dancers? Moonlighting Elisa Help Desk staff? Parttime snow plough drivers? Retired ski jumpers? Out of season elk hunters?

A mixture of all of the above mentioned and "valmistalo" catalogue house companies. A lot of Finns tend to mistrust architects, and we are also somewhat stingy when it comes to one of the most important projects of our lives-our omakotitalos .... "If one saves in the architect planning, maybe then one can buy that poreamme (bubble bathtub) to sit in the bathroom (thats too small for it..)". Quite many houses are drawn based on the owner´s sketches by engineers or draftsmen-architects. Many Finns take building a house very passionately and believe they themselves know how to execute their dreams of a turn-of-the-century style house (that should be cheap) best -to hell with besserwisser professionals (expensive ideas of a bigger bathroom they had, too) ...

A lot of multi storey apartment buildings of the 60-70´s are also duplications the building companies copied around the country once they had one set of element drawings. Warehouses, supermarkets, gas stations, older office buildings -all buildings that you can copy in some way... the percentage of all the building stock existing in the country planned by architects is pretty low.

[korppu]

Have you seen the houses introduced at the different housing fairs (Asuntomessut)? 60% of them are usually failures, but I do not think that the houses has been planned in the pub behind the corner. (In that case there would not be so many failures. )

Btw. I turned down a bigger project once because the house was so ugly. Those sorry a**es never called back. Whatta relief.
Henry

Ive seen them in papers, most of them are ...boring. Conventional is maybe a better word. Then the houses often are so "sterile" kind of plastic feel, In my opinion. (or ocationally they are at the very other end of the spectrum like Stefan Lindfors´ red box) Then they have "Avotakka" come in and decorate to patch that up....also what they often do they put in all the rooms they imagine needed, in a little bit too little space...or make the surfaces of almost nice wood- ....kind of annoying.

I agree, the planners should visit the pub more often .

There are seldom known architects names amongst the planners of the housing fair buildings, most of the houses seem planned by interior architects or opisto-arkkitehtis ("draftsmen-architects"). I remember Heikkinen-Komonen did one , "Kosketus" for Kannustalo. http://www.heikkinen-komonen.fi/Kannus/kannus_e.htm. Oh yes, and Kai Wartiainens "Villa 2000" eco house where you could roll out your sauna on the patio...

[Henry-Finland]

I remember Heikkinen-Komonen did one , "Kosketus" for Kannustalo. http://www.heikkinen-komonen.fi/Kannus/kannus_e.htm.

Looks like a wood-drying facility my friend built.


The "Villa 2000" you mentioned:


With light, I do not mean that people should live in a box:


or like this:

Do not people have matches nowadays?

More "asuntomessutaloja":


and




The source of inspiration in front:







This guy have had wet dreams about becomng a pilot, or at least to work at an airport:



Henry

[Hank W.]

This is what I'd call "conventional"

I've always had inspirations on becoming a kancker

[korppu]

This is what I'd call "conventional"

..well it sure cant be called "sterile".

Nice house, horrible mess, Hank. (Fix that window before its destroyed entirely by water. ) And clean up!

[korppu]

Btw. I turned down a bigger project once because the house was so ugly. Those sorry a**es never called back. Whatta relief.

Heheh funny .

Out of curiosity, what kind of modern houses do you all like? Most of us probably like the jugend houses and perhaps some the 20´s-30´s houses with a good feel of honest patina, but what kind of new houses do you like and why?

[Henry-Finland]

Btw. I turned down a bigger project once because the house was so ugly. Those sorry a**es never called back. Whatta relief.

Heheh funny .

Out of curiosity, what kind of modern houses do you all like? Most of us probably like the jugend houses and perhaps some the 20´s-30´s houses with a good feel of honest patina, but what kind of new houses do you like and why?

- two story
- big living-room and kitchen together (just some half-wall or fire-place making it to 'two rooms).
Much light through the roof-windows (on the northern side). The light coming through to the first floor through the stair and a few square meters of jungle planted on the beams of the second store floor = a few square meters where there is some opening through the floor, only the beams visible. Working-space in the second floor.
- Big windows downstairs also
- a balcony type of place where coffee can be drunk
- a winter garden
- built on a slope; the cellar = a garage from the lower side of the slope, + hobby-room and sauna.

Everything except the fundament, the cellar, made of wood. The roof of tiles.
The visible concrete inlaid with round granite-stones from the sea. (Hard to describe).

Other:
- Isolation => straw and clay + modern stuff = very thick walls
- All outside paint self-cooked
- Warming with wood and pellets
- Much handcrafted details (takes years to make this).
- Sauna ( in the cellar), kitchen, toilet shower, (first floor), toilet (second floor) = all under each other so that the water-pipes does not need to be put across the house = cheaper and easier to build.
- the baking ovens and other fireplaces = round granite hand-picked/chosen from the sea.
- Looking like a crossing of the old Finnish and the German 'Alpen-hütten', hard to describe.
- Neighbours : None. The site has to be some hectares = R&R-, nudity- and booze-proof. And I do not mow lawns "because all other does".

And no house is perfect without a cat.

Henry

[Xochiquetzal]

Some historical perspective about Finnish single homes:

Sure, most modern single family dwellings are type-plan homes. Ironically, and going back to the subject of the original post, we can thank/blame Alvar Aalto. It was he, in the late 1930s with the Ahlstrom company, who designed the first of the modern type planned homes. He designed 20-30 prototypes, of which 11 or so were used, for the Ahlstrom forest company wood factory worker village and with the intent for the company to make and market them throughout Finland. Then the war(s) happened (Winter/Continuation). Several of Aalto's type planned homes were built in Karelia when it was reclaimed after the Winter war but then those were lost again with the war time concessions (as was the bulk of what the Ahlstrom factory could produce). But his work was the watershed of the iconic rintamamiestalo and the standard for the Finnish home for the next 25 years.

Puutalo Ry, a company set up to make type planned wood homes after the war (also using Aalto's plans but with small revisions), sold more Finnish type planned homes abroad (Russia, France, Denmark), than it did at home. Puutalo was highly successful in marketing the Finnish vision of home and financially very profitable as a result.

It was the extremely organized and efficient architects union/league, more than any other private or public organization, who made it possible for Finland to rebuild so quickly after the war. The architects streamlined the home/dwelling building plans, pushed through helpful legislation, and created the lines of communication that rebuilt this country. It was because of that efficiency that Finland was able to meet the reparations demanded of Russia yet still channel money, manpowers, materials into rebuilding. So architects were, and still are, very important to the Finnish building industry.

If we are going to put a blame on someone for the blandness of modern architecture, we should point squarely at Le Corbusier and not Aalto or his contemporaries. It was a slavish reverence for Le Corbusiers 'modernist' thinking that heavily influenced (and still influences) Finnish architecture in the second half of the 20th century. It seems that Eliel's son, Eero Saarinen, is the only modern Finnish architect to escape successfully to the joys of curvilinear shapes (the TWA terminal building is awe inspiring) - and we can thank his father's respect of Frank Lloyd Wright for that.

I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of modern architecture either. I come from a City where Frank Gehry has littered brutalistic concrete monstrosities throughout. This is in contrast to Finland, where it seems all of the office buildings are Nokia corporate headquarters duplicates: blocks with glass panels inexplicably bolted on the exterior (why?). The houses come in three styles: brick box, concrete box, or stone box. Apartment buildings are rectangles with painted wood replacing the 1980s/1990s tiles as exterior decoration. Finland is a small country and its breadth of architecture is similarly limited, unfortunately.

But I wouldn't blame Finnish builders or the architects for the current lack of variety. I finally understood modern Finnish architecture's inevitable mileau when I began to talk with various Finns about a city outside of Porvoo that has no building codes whatsoever. In that city, people can build whatever house they want - and they do. To the horror of the rest of Finland. The reaction I received to that funky city was universal: a shudder and a tsch. Uniformality and conformality are highly desired and praised even now in 2005 and a type planned house is the surest guarantee that the neighbors will sign off positively on your building plans and allow your cottage to be built. I came to understand the latter point well when my next door neighbor began to build on the plot next to our house and had to get approval from ALL of his neighbors to build his Kastelli Puutalo in style Nostalgia II. My mid century type plan wood house is about to paired next to a fin de siecle type plan wood house. Some things never change.....

[Cod]

...it does seem that at the end of the day most people think in terms floor plans...as long as the master bedroom has a walk-in wardrobe and an ensuite and as long as the kitchen has a service island - then its half sold off the plans..

..its like Mercedes said about Smart Car on admitting their loses...'we tried to sell an Idea, but at the end of the day - people just wanted a Car'

[Xochiquetzal]

..its like Mercedes said about Smart Car on admitting their loses...'we tried to sell an Idea, but at the end of the day - people just wanted a Car'

Which is sad considering the same lesson was learned quite sufficiently in the 1950s with a little car called "Edsel"......

[Hank W.]

"Edsel" wasn't "little". Bit it is the sign & times, now say a "little" car like the Bantam of the 1950's and stories of bankrupcy - come hideousities like the "Gremlin"...

BTW Rambler was called "Amerikan Mosse" in Finland, not 100% sure after the 1962 fair in Moscow after the Soviets bought all the Ramblers on show and a new Volga was launched next year (any Brit been inside a 1970's Volga and a 1970's Range Rover - just makes you go hmmm....)

I mean, in 1948 they atleast had the decency to rip-off Packard (that went bankrupt for making too good cars, the owner bought one and kept it...)