Architecture in Helsinki: Engel, Saarinen and Oodi

The architecture most worth seeing in Helsinki is Senate Square with Carl Ludvig Engel's white cathedral, Eliel Saarinen's railway station with its four lantern bearers, the National Romantic National Museum and the central library Oodi from 2018. The city is unusually clear in three layers: a Neoclassical capital from the early 19th century, the granite of National Romanticism around 1900 and a contemporary architecture in timber and glass. Just outside lies the architects' studio home Hvitträsk.

Facts

Engel's Capital around Senate Square

When Finland became a grand duchy under Russia in 1809, the capital was moved in 1812 from Turku to Helsinki, which was then a small town. The German-born architect Carl Ludvig Engel, trained in Berlin, was commissioned from 1816 to design a new centre. Around Senate Square were built the Senate building in 1818–1822 and the main building of the university in 1828–1832, opposite each other, and the university library, today the National Library, with its Corinthian columns is counted among his finest works.

Above the square rises the cathedral, then called St Nicholas' Church, begun in 1830. The plan is a Greek cross with a portico of Corinthian columns on each side and a green dome over the crossing. Engel died in 1840, and Ernst Lohrmann completed the church in 1852. He added four smaller domes at the corners and statues of the apostles on the roof, changes that Engel had not planned. With pale rendered façades, columns and domes around an open space that rises towards the steps of the church, the square is one of the most unified classical urban spaces in the Nordic countries. Engel brought Prussian Neoclassicism with him from Schinkel's Berlin; compare with the guide to architecture in Berlin.

National Romanticism: Granite and the Kalevala

Around 1900 Finland, still under Russian rule, sought an architecture of its own. Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen had started a joint office in 1896 and become known through the Finnish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. In 1902 they won the competition for the National Museum, built 1905–1910. The building is a summary of Finland's history in stone: the tower resembles a medieval church, the wings a castle, and by the entrance stands a bear in stone. In the dome of the entrance hall Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted scenes from the Kalevala in 1928.

Lars Sonck built in rough Finnish granite: the Telephone Company building, Kallio Church with its tall tower and the Stock Exchange, and outside the capital Tampere Cathedral. National Romanticism was common to the Nordic countries, and Swedish and Finnish architects followed one another's work closely; it belongs to the same wave as Östberg's City Hall in Stockholm. The difference from Jugend is explained in the guide Jugend and National Romanticism, and the period under Nordic National Romanticism.

The Railway Station: from Castle to Modernism

In 1904 Saarinen won the competition for Helsinki Central Station with a National Romantic proposal with touches of medieval castles and rich natural ornament. Younger architects criticised it, and he reworked it in a more austere direction. The station opened to traffic around 1919, at about the time Finland became independent. The façades are clad in Finnish granite, while the frame and vaults are largely of reinforced concrete.

The entrance is an enormous arch, and on each side stand two granite figures by Emil Wikström holding spherical lanterns. Behind the arch lies the ticket hall under a high barrel vault, and to one side rises the clock tower. The lantern bearers have become symbols of the city. Saarinen emigrated to the USA in the 1920s, after winning second prize in the competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower, and there headed the art academy at Cranbrook. The station shows how National Romanticism was simplified just before the breakthrough of classicism and Modernism.

Hvitträsk and Aalto: Excursions from the City

In Kirkkonummi, west of the city, the three architects built Hvitträsk in 1901–1903, a shared home and drawing office on a bluff above Lake Vitträsk. The lower parts are built of rough natural stone, the upper parts of logs, and the roofs are steep and shingled, modelled on Karelian farmsteads and English Arts and Crafts. The interiors, with open fireplaces, rya rugs and furniture, they designed themselves; they are shown in the design section under Hvitträsk, and the idea of the house as a whole is explained in the guide to the Gesamtkunstwerk. Saarinen is buried on the site, and the house is today a museum.

Alvar Aalto is Finland's best-known architect. In Helsinki he designed Finlandia Hall, 1967–1971, a concert hall in white marble by Töölö Bay. His principal works otherwise lie outside the capital: the sanatorium in Paimio, 1929–1933, and Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, 1938–1939. More about him in the guide to Alvar Aalto.

Oodi: the City's Living Room

Opposite the Parliament House lies the central library Oodi, or Ode in Swedish, designed by the Finnish firm ALA Architects after an international competition in 2012–2013. It was inaugurated on 5 December 2018, the day before Finland's Independence Day, as a gift to the country on its centenary. The façade of Finnish spruce bulges out over the square like an arch, and the structure rests on two long steel beams that span the ground floor.

The building has three floors of different character: an open ground floor with a café and cinema, a middle floor with workshops, 3D printers and sewing machines, and at the top Book Heaven, a single bright room under an undulating white roof, with a balcony facing the Parliament House. In 2019 Oodi was named by the library organisation IFLA the world's best new public library. The library shows how a library has become an open meeting place for the whole city. The Nordic present is covered under contemporary Nordic architecture, and all the buildings on the map.

Helsinki in Three Layers

Exercise

Who designed the town plan and the cathedral around Senate Square in Helsinki?