Last Days in Iceland

Well lurkers, it is finally time to head home. I'm blogging this from my seat at the gate in Keflavik airport on my way out of Iceland. Yesterday I wandered around Reykjavik, some on the bicycle and some on foot. It started raining later in the day, so I packed the bike up and said that was that.

Is it just me or is that Cathedral extraordinarily phallic?

Went to a couple of interesting museums... the first was the Icelandic equivalent of a wax museum. Statues of Viking types slaughtering each other. Witches being burned. Bishops beheaded. All good stuff. After that I visited the National Gallery, which had modern paintings about the environment and our distruction of it. Also happy stuff. Think Edward Munch but darker.

I'm beginning to think that living here does something to people after a bit.

Today I revisited the Blue Lagoon on my way to the airport. It really is blue as you can see. Apparently it is the exhaust water from the new geothermal powerplant you can see in the distance. You wade around in this stuff. Its like a really nice hot bath that never gets cold. Pretty great really. The building is really nice. This view from inside of it looks out through the restaurant and to the populated part of the lagoon. Busy place, even on a rainy Wednesday. Supposedly it will make me live longer. Or at least I'll have nice skin tone when all those Vikings catch up to me!

So there you have it! Waiting for the plane. Hopefully I'll make it to the next connection in Minneapolis!

Cheers!

2nd Day in Iceland

I spent today walking around town, visiting the local Alto building and the National Museum for a dose of culture, then doing the bus tour thing around the "Golden Circle". Which was very cool despite the hype. Tour included a high through the lava fields... and there is a *lot* of lava here!

We also stopped at a couple of waterfalls, one little, one really really BIG. Not much more to say about all that really...

One of the places we visited was another rift site between the continental plates. I've decided that I want to do an architecture project that is a "rift" building. You know those slot canyons where the light filters down from above? I've seen some examples of what I am thinking, the Alto building I visited here today has that feel to it. Also the library at Viikki with it's slots that radiate out through the circular form. Or the entry hall of Stephen Holl's Kiasma art museum in Helsinki.

One of the last architects who came to talk to us in Finland was a guy named Juhani Pallasmaa. He was pretty amazing to listen to... he has written extensively and read a lot of philosophy which he then integrates into his architecture. I bought a couple of books before I left, one called "Through the Eyes of the Skin" which I brought with me. It is a smallish book, about how buildings need to be designed as a total sensory experience rather than just a visual one. And how the use of computers in design has tended to exacerbate our focus on the visual aspects.

Anyhow, this is pretty cool stuff. Imagine a rift building with a waterfall somewhere inside it...? You see the light coming down, you hear the water, you feel the moisture...

Time to come home! I have one more full day here tomorrow which I plan to spend in Reykjavik. There was an option to do another long bus tour out along the south coast, but to get anywhere else really interesting requires spending the entire day on the bus. I think I'll pass.

More Photos Here! :^)

Day 1 Iceland

Well, I'm in Iceland! Feels kind of weird actually, it is one of those places you always want to go to but never actually do. The Australia of the North. So what the heck am I doing here? Biking of course! :^)

I assembled the bike yesterday at the airport. And today took off for an extended ride. Best made plans and all that... it didn't quite work out as planned. Weather turned cold and rainy. Roads turned to gravel. And *nasty* gravel at that! Think crushed lava and washboard. We, my bike and I, turned back. Then went further on to the "Blue Lagoon". A world famous spa here in Iceland. Never heard of it? Well, obviously you aren't worldly enough.

There wasn't time for me to go into the lagoon and it was too spendy for a quick dip. I am thinking I'll do it on Wednesday morning as the buses are arranged such that you can go there and then on to the airport from there. It does look pretty neat.

The photos here are first of one of the standing stone statues which are all over the fields near Keflavik. The area around the airport. They are very cool and very mysterious looking. Not sure who the artist is, but they are not old.

Next is a photo of the road I was biking on. Not much there there is there? I could have ridden the bus through this... but it would have been a different experience for sure. No cold rain for one. And I would not have turned back at the gravel. Whatever. I did take the bus on from the Blue Lagoon to Reykjavik. I was tired and the stuff I'd read said the road into Reykjavik wasn't much fun to ride on. And they were right... the shoulder on a four lane highway. I'm glad I skipped it.

And just in case you were worried that there wasn't much architecture to see here. Here is a church near Keflavik! From my hotel in Reykjavik I have a nice view of the Cathedral here. There is an excellent city hall and even a museum by Alto!

Tomorrow, the bus. Touring the Golden Circle with a bunch of damn tourists. Oh wait! I'm a tourist!

More Photos Here!

Last Day in Helsinki

Yesterday was my last day in Helsinki! Here is a group photo from the closing party a couple nights back now. Amazingly enough, all six of the design groups pulled together some pretty excellent designs and made the submission deadline. This included some pretty frantic last minute times at the printer (and breaking into the printer supply room to get replacement ink cartridges for the plotter!

On my last full day, I wandered around town some, met up with some other students and visited the Architecture Museum, and finally went out on my own to make one last visit to Suomenlinna Island. The light was looking good that afternoon, and I wanted to visit one more time. I believe that it was my favorite place I visited while in Finland.

Finally, on return to the city, the sunset became quite beautiful. I tried to capture some of the colored clouds behind the Lutheran Cathedral. More photos here!

Competition Entry

Well, here is the result of spending a summer in Finland... a competition entry that I can't read a word of! Regardless, it came out pretty well. As did the model which I like very much...

Anyhow, it is mailed in as of today! More photos here...

Sauna Model

Regular readers of this here blog will remember a few weeks back when we spent a week up at Lake Kiljava measuring sauna buildings there. After returning to Helsinki, we built small scale wooden models of them using the woodshop in the architecture studio building. A *very* nice woodshop I might add. HUT, the university here, has a famous summer program called the "Wood Program" where students from all over the world come for a term or two and build a wooden structure of some sort. Some very beautiful ones.

Like in the US, they build wooden models of their designs. Unlike the US, however, they build these models out of real wood pieces rather than out of the hobby shop, pre-made, bass wood we are used to. The models come out differently... fewer details, more solid, often with wood craftsmanship as a part of the model. It adds something to the models we build... a little extra space for artistry and expressiveness I think.

In any case, here are some photos of the model shop, us working, and the model we built. Which, just to brag a little, was archived by the Finnish Museum of Architecture here in Helsinki! Wooo wooo!! More photos here...

Viikki Library and Church

Yesterday I did another bike tour, this time over to the east edge of Helsinki and the town of Viikki. It is a high-tech area under a frenzy of development. Lots of neat company buildings and apartment structures all going up in a hurry. This is the way that development happens in Helsinki. The city was essentially relocated to this site in the early 1800s from where it had been up north. The goal was to establish a port to compete with the Russian city of Tallin located in Estonia just across from Helsinki. Anyhow, Helsinki ends up owning the vast majority of its own land and development happens under the control of the planning department for the city. It is not like the US where a developer speculates by buying and developing a piece of have buildings here and there and property, here the city decides that a particular area is going to become a town, it is going to over there will be an apartment building which the city continues to own and rent to the residents.

My goal in visiting Viikki was to see the new church there, which has already become internationally famous. It was designed by the firm JKMM, one of their architects had visited and lectured us earlier in the term. Before I found the church however, I came across the Viikki Library, also brand new. I recognized it as a building another lecturer had shown us on Tuesday. It is great! A 5 story round building with a quarter of it sliced out. There are these narrow atrium spaces that run from the floor to the roof along hallways leading out to the edge of the building, where greenhouse spaces are placed inside the double layer glass skin of the building.

After wandering through there I went on down the road to the Viikki Church. This church is very nice, all wood interior and wood shingle exterior. I especially liked the shingled exterior which is weathering to a lovely silver grey. Inside everything is wood. I mean everything. The walls, floor and ceiling are spruce, the chairs are aspen, there is some oak benches thrown in for good measure. The artwork is mahogany with some aluminum leaf. The ceiling in the sanctuary is this dramatic criss-cross of beams and vertical supports. Honestly? There was too much wood and I thought all the beams in the sanctuary ceiling didn't really make structural sense. Meaningless structure. I'm trying to remember the term the prof in Eugene used to tell me my structure was overdone in Fall term. Gratuitous structure or something like that. The same would apply here. The architect had told us that it was designed using traditional Finnish structures but I sort of doubt it. Traditional architecture is very smart about structure, they understood wood and construction was difficult enough that they didn't waste it on extra beams. They wasted it on gingerbread trim instead! :^)

Anyhow, here are photos, you can judge for yourself. This is the stuff you come to Finland to see...

Visit to Hvittrask

Today we visited Hvittrask, the home of Eliel Saarinen around 1900. Saarinen was the designer of the Helsinki Railway station with the great men standing in front of it holding the lighted orbs. He designed a number of other buildings and homes around Finland, as well as teaching and designing the buildings at Cranbrook Arts Academy in Michigan. His son was a famous architect in the US, and designed the St Louis Arch.

Hvittrask was actually designed to be the home of three architects working together, Saarinen along with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren. Saarinen seems like he was a pretty fun guy. With a liking for Scottish Whiskey, he put cast iron "Whiskey Rings" in his living room. The idea was that if you could still stand up, while holding onto one of the rings for support if need be, you could continue drinking.

There is also a rather beautiful stained glass window in the dining area depicting the story of Saarinen, Gesellius, and Saarinen's first wife Mathilda. Mathilda, married to Saarinen, fell in love with Geseillus. Saarinen falls for Geseillus' sister Loja. The various couples remarry the correct persons and continue to live and work together. Lindgren exits. Geseillus dies of Tuberculosis and Mathilda moves to the south of France.

The house and grounds were lovely, however. And it was a great day for a 25 km bike ride out there. We even got some work in during the afternoon. Those people do look like they are working don't they?

More Hvittrask photos here.

Biking to Dragsfjord

Over the past weekend I took the Bike Friday on a three day trip west of Turku. The idea was to get out to the "Finnish Archipelago", a famous area for biking and sailing. After discussing plans with some of the Finns at Kiljava last week, I decided to head for the island of Rosalo, a bit more isolated but with a lot of Viking history. The weekend was a lesson in coping on the road, however, as nothing quite worked out as planned.

On Saturday morning I rode to the train station in Espoo, but after getting to the wrong station initially, arrived at the right one a few minutes late for the train I'd intended to catch. And the next train had no spaces available for bikes. But it was an hour and a half away, so I found a quiet corner and packed the bike into it's suitcase and, wallah! No more bike.

After arriving in Turku I reassembled the bike and rode through some lovely country to Dragsfjord. This was about 80 kilometers. I was pretty tired from riding into the wind and hauling the trailer. Found a nice pension to stay there from the Lonely Planet guide. Too late to get dinner, but I finished eating some snacks and fruit I'd bought along the way.

The next morning I headed for Kasnas, a small resort and the ferry for Rosalo. One of the maps I had seen showed a ferry from Kasnas back to Turku, I figured I could take that back the next day as I had to be back in Helsinki on Tuesday morning. In Turku, to avoid having to pack the bike again on the way home, I bought a train ticket back for 4:00 pm Monday. Rather than following the two lane highway, I decided to follow a "recommended bike route" marked on the tourist map I had. It turned out that the "recommended bike route" included some 8 km of gravel. When I had gotten through that and back on a paved road, I could not find the next portion of the "recommended route" and instead took the paved road back to very nearly where I had started the morning. 16 km of exhausting biking with the trailer on a gravel road and nothing to show for it. It was already 1 or 2 o'clock. I finally got on the main road and headed again for Kasnas, arriving around 4:00, completely bonking. Not enough food and too much exercise.

By now it was too late and I was too worn out to go on out to Rosalo. Instead I stayed over at the little resort. Which was very nice. I also found that there was no ferry back to Turku, so my options were to ride back 100 km or throw my bike onto the bus. I decided to get up early and get rolling, just see how well I did. If I needed to, I could pick up a bus later in the day. Had an excellent dinner at the restaurant and by the morning was feeling much better and ready to go. But when I headed down for breakfast at 6:00, it turned out that they didn't start serving until 7:30! Furthermore, the front desk didn't open until 7:30 and I couldn't leave until I paid my bill! Okay, whatever. I wait, eat breakfast, pay bill, dink around a little, finally get on the road around 8:00.

The ride back was terrific though. I now had, if not a tailwind at least not a headwind. There were sprinkles but no real rain. I even stopped for 45 minutes over lunch at Kemios to visit an outdoor historic museum called Sagalund. I had not expected to be able to do this because it didn't open until 11:00. But because I'd gotten such a late start it worked out that I could. After Kemios I continued but at some point discovered I had a broken spoke in my rear wheel. Fortunately it had just made the wheel wobbly, but still ridable. I rolled into Turku just 10 minutes ahead of the train. And 5 minutes ahead of the downpour that was following me. Train back to Espoo, bike back to apartment. Done!!

More Photos Here!

Back from the Sauna

We spent last week at an Architecture "retreat" site on Kiljava lake about 40 km north of Helsinki. This was a large wooded area on a beautiful, shallow, spring fed lake. The land was donated to SAFA (the Finnish and Swedish version of the American AIA) around the time of WWII. Land was available for architects to build very small summer cabins on and a main building, with water and a shower, constructed where a number of people could gather and stay. The cabins had to be less than 45 square meters in size, basically a medium sized apartment in Helsinki and a small one in the US. They have no running water. But the point was to come and stay and socialize in the saunas with other architects. The cabins could be passed down through the family, but only to children who were also members of SAFA. So if you kid became something less than an architect... like the CEO of some big company or something, they had to go out and buy their own summer home somewhere else. If the cabin reverted into SAFA hands it became available for rent to architects.

We split into groups and each was assigned a sauna house to measure and draw images of. Our sauna was an old log cabin on the opposite side of the lake. It was a traditional "smoke sauna". These saunas had no chimney. You build a fire in the stove, it fills with smoke and heat, and about six hours later your return and open it up, let the smoke out, and do your saunaing. Remember that the houses on the lake didn't have running water so saunas are both an important part of bathing and socializing there. The saunas smell like birch wood. There are specific ways of heating them up, some people start with one sort of wood and then finish heating with a different one depending on how the wood burns.

So you come in the evening, it is dark inside this low log cabin. There is a changing room to take off your clothing, you sit in the sauna room on wooden slated benches up near the ceiling. There is a window to the side with a small oil lantern hanging outside, spreading a dim light into the room. The stove is covered with a layer of rocks and you throw ladles of water onto them to create steam and further heat the space to the desired temperature. Which is *very* hot! There will also be a water bucket and a bundle of birch branches tied at the base. Freshly cut branches with leaves still on them. You wack yourself all over with the birch branches to increase the circulation at the skin. When you are ready to leave, you walk out the door, down to the dock, and jump into the lake. The lake is only about 4 feet deep here and pretty cold. Very fresh clean water at Kiljava. I found the best way to get in was just to do a flat dive out into the lake. Putting one toe in at a time didn't work.

After a few minutes in the lake the water becomes tolerable again. You hang out there or climb out on the dock and sit and watch the twilight because it is summertime and the sun doesn't really go down until midnight (a month ago it was still light at 1 or 2 am). And then you go back in and do it all again! I have to say, it never got any easier to jump into the lake afterward!

More Photos Here!