Model Home no. 4

The last weeks I have been settling in a new home. That is when you suddenly become aware of the routines that make up daily life, and have to recreate them in slightly differently ways. The light switch can’t suddenly be found in the dark, you can’t recognise individual noises, things need new places, new formations. New ways of doing become small rituals of inhabiting, small meditative actions, before disappearing again from your consciousness, as they once again become routines, the kind of everyday life, that is hardly noticed.

Olari, photo Hanna Meriläinen

Olari home, 11.6.2015

photo Hanna Meriläinen

This has been on my mind thanks to Kirsi Saarikangas and her not at all new book “Eletyt tilat ja sukupuoli” (SKS 2006), where she investigates the boundaries between spaces and inhabitants, repeatingly emphasizing how architecture is constantly co-created by the people in a space, by their actions and reactions. Architecture encourages some behaviours more than others, but is also constantly re-interpreted and changed by its users. In her book this comes of course more elegantly put and with a hearty dose of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir.

Taking these thoughts to the 1970’s suburb of Olari in Espoo allows trying new perspectives. Olari can of course be looked at as belonging to a larger shift in society  in the 1970’s, from rural to urban, to new jobs in the city, to new industrially built homes for everyone. It is also possible to view it as an experimental project by an eccentric building contractor Arvi Arjatsalo and two young and ambitious architects, Simo Järvinen and Eero Valjakka, and as their pragmatic work of art.

Olari in the 70s, photograph Simo Rista MFA

But Olari is now something beyond what the politicians, city planners, builders and architects had in mind. For almost 50 years it has been a home for thousands of people hating and loving it. As the built environment might have changed their life, the inhabitants have left their own traces there, sometimes adapting, sometimes resisting change. For my book I visited homes in Olari that had virtually not changed in decades, looking like it was still 1972. Some homes had little resemblance to the world outside, living in their own time. New, overlapping, contradicting, personal layers of meaning have been added to the place and the buildings. People who spent their own childhood there come back with a feeling of nostalgia that was unthinkable a few decades ago.

On a practical level Olari homes have adapted remarkably well to completely new ways of living, thanks to the constructive system that was ahead of its time and already prepared for change. Instead of standard bearing walls there are bearing columns that allow a free flow of spaces and lots of individual changes. Freedom on the inside was contrasted with systematic repetition, even monotony on the outside, that was slightly softened by the ever-present forest surrounding the houses.

photo Hanna Meriläinen

photo Hanna Meriläinen

And the sauna. Olari was the first Finnish building project to implement individual saunas inside the apartments. The sauna space even had direct access to the balconies. The sauna was a technical novelty that in an unprecedented way managed to give new city dwellers a new sense of luxury as well as a sense of autonomy and emotional ownership. Standing in the bath towel on your balcony, drinking beer and watching the sunset. Now that’s being-in-the-world if anything, right Heidegger?

photo Hanna Meriläinen

Soukka Gallery House

The mid-seventies were a bleak time for Finnish architecture. At the same time more was built than ever before, mostly large suburbs to house people moving into cities. Professional conversation was filled with disenchantment, questions of responsibility and angry accusations. It was becoming quite clear that much of the new living environment was not very good. Engineer Eero Paloheimo actually said already in 1976 (ARK 1/77), that if more money had been spent on building quality and individual design of the new suburbs, people might like to live in them even 50 years from now.

This apartment building though was one of the few examples deemed good enough for display in the architecture exhibition Suomi rakentaa 5 in 1976. Situated in Soukka, a southwestern suburb of Espoo, it was designed by Matti Vuorio in 1971 for Asuntosäätiö, a large housing company that had become a synonym for high quality when building Tapiola decades earlier. Built in a time when experimenting was not really part of Finnish architecture in general, this gallery house still managed to be a positive addition to its site and to existing housing architecture types. A bit of an oddity, that is.

Soukka, a remote, mostly still rural part of Espoo was first called Lounaisrannikko “Southwest Coast” and even Alvar Aalto was invited to do some sketches for the new city in the 1960’s. But then the usual happened, and it was built as a pretty stereotypical suburb: almost identical high-rises scattered in foresty nature, roughly following the rocky landscape, a view to the sea from the upper floors. A small shopping centre, wide and empty streets.

Although nothing spectacular, Matti Vuorio managed to do a good job. The buildings are only four stories high and connect with the main street. The use of wood accentuates the smaller, friendlier scale. The smallest apartments on the ground floor have a small front garden. On the first floor there are spacious two-room apartments while big multilevel apartments upstairs have large roof terraces. The round stairs are the architectural highlight in the otherwise unassuming architecture. The well used gallery typology allows views into both directions and creates a house/apartment hybrid, probably much appreciated by the inhabitants. It seems to have remained a exception, because this type of gallery house is pretty much nonexistent today.

p.s. You can find the Strange Home Atlas now on Instagram as well!

The Secret Gardens of Garden City

Last week I visited the suburban paradise of Tapiola and the Hakalehto courtyard houses on its outskirts. This group of 17 houses from 1963, originally perched in a small birch forest in southern Tapiola, is even now beautifully situated but quite brutally close to the later built motorway. The group was designed by Pentti Ahola to be a mediating low element between the higher apartment blocks of Tapiola and the free landscape. Locally it is known as “Arabikylä” or Arabian village.

The nickname grasps the idea: These are whitewashed one-family houses that close themselves almost completely off to their surroundings and instead open up to an interior courtyard, which is invisible to passersby – most often called courtyard houses or atrium houses. This was a home typology that gained popularity from the late 1950’s and had its heyday in the late 1960’s as the more luxurious and private version of a row house (but having the same efficiency in terms of land use and infrastructure). The roots of this type of course can be traced further than the obvious examples Pentti Ahola must have had on his mind: the Atrium houses designed by Arne Jacobsen presented at the Interbau in Berlin 1957 and the Kingo houses by Jorn Utzon from 1956-58; this type goes all the way back via Scandinavian farmsteads to finally Roman homes with atria and ancient Middle Eastern courtyard houses, hence also the nickname, that suggests an Eastern pedigree.

In fact we do have a tradition of courtyard houses in western Finland as well. There are examples of “umpipihatalo” or closed courtyard houses that protected people and animals from perils lurking in the outside world (thieves and wolves mostly)  and had everything neatly under one roof. One of the most prominent preserved examples is Kauppilan umpipiha in Laitila that dates back to the 17th century.

  

At first sight this would seem to be the perfect home solution for a country with late but speedy urbanization like Finland in the 1960’s, where city dwelling was still finding its shape. The most valued things from the rural living environment remained: connection to nature and privacy. You lived closely with your neighbors in a suburb but in complete and controllable privacy, with a sauna and storage space in a side building and a sheltered outdoor space that served as an extra room in the summer. The apartment is spacious and allows wonderful views through courtyards and rooms even further enhancing the feeling of space. Although quite a few of “atrium-houses” were built in the 1960’s it still makes me wonder why it never caught on big time. Why didn’t this become our favorite kind of house? Was it the energy crisis that made these quite large and sprawling houses expensive and impractical or is a closed garden not enough for the Finnish soul – should there be a view to the external world (to the forest, to Lapland) as well?

Hakalehto was built with 1960’s  state-of-the-art prefabricated elements and huge windows with probably little consideration for energy efficiency and seems now to be in need of repairs, whitewashed walls grey with dirt. The park around the buildings feels deserted because all life happens behind walls and not in the common space. In terms of neighborhood sociability this is maybe not the best urban model. All evidence of life I found was an empty swing hanging from a tree. But what I loved were the high set living room windows by the entrances, like friendly eyes welcoming inhabitants and guests. I also loved the small glimpses into gardens and trees growing over the walls, allowing one to imagine the secret garden within those walls.