With the new Modern Helsinki Map, Blue Crow Media extends their ever-expanding series to one of the world’s northernmost capitals. Too long seen as an outlier to the predominant cultural spheres of Europe, Helsinki is finally reclaiming its unique place in the continent: a thoroughly Nordic country that is at the crossroads of Scandinavian and Baltic, west and east, traditional and modern. Hundred-year-old wooden houses sit side-by-side with hypermodern concrete-and-glass structures, and modern buildings often have traits of traditional Finnish and Nordic architecture, built outward from a core of minimalism and functionality.
Anni Vartola’s introductory text lays out the extent to which the national identity is contained in the buildings themselves:
Clean lines, sensible language of form, humanism, and use of natural materials owe partly to the common trait of practicality, but also to the conditions of building a country… Finland today is a uniquely modern country: over 90 percent of its buildings were constructed after 1940.
Finland is notorious for its winters, and while Helsinki lies far enough south to avoid the full Arctic experience, its proximity to the Baltic Sea brings intense coastal weather year-round, with wind and rain storms an ever-present possibility. And while the region’s buildings are designed with the most extreme weather in mind, and constructed to conserve heat and distribute as much natural light as available, many nevertheless also almost defiantly feature impressive outdoor spaces for the more temperate months.
Examples include the long wooden balcony looming over the front of Oodi Library, the block-long semi-covered terrace of Finlandia Hall, and the amphitheater at Aalto University, which echoes the indoor lecture hall directly beneath it in a fascinating architectural doubling.
The influence of Alvar Aalto looms large over not just his eponymous university, but over the rest of Helsinki as well, with dozens of structures across the city bearing his name as either architect or inspiration. As for the campus, the map covers major structures like the Harald Herlin Learning Centre and Dipoli, the latter of which features a striking steel pinecone sculpture at its curved entrance, and a wood-and-metal structure seamlessly integrated into the surrounding rock.
While the map misses a few campus sites like the cartoonishly brutalist Teknologföreningen, the whole campus has such an abundance of modernist architecture that the featured sites are more than sufficient for orienteering. With the series’ signature two-sided format that shows locations on one side and building details on the other, Modern Helsinki is another strong contribution to the series, shedding light on a once-neglected, now emerging corner of the European continent.
Modern Helsinki Map / Moderni Helsinkikartta
Text: Anni Vartola; photos: Tuukka Niemi
Bilingual English / Finnish text
Blue Crow Media, £13.50
