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...