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A giant wave standing on an old dock in the Finnish town of Kotka houses the Maritime Museum of Finland. Vellamo is by the architectural firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki a competition winning entry from 2005 built in 2008. The conceit of building a boat museum as a massive wave has paid off here really clearly. The sculptural form engages with the site and makes internally a straightforward…
Facade of Ceramic House All Photos by Studio RAP / Riccardo De Vecchi Studio RAP is an architectural design company that brings computational design innovation to clients. That means parametric design and bespoke 3d printing, very experimental it’s part architecture, product design, fashion even. Along with co-architects Gietermans & Van Dijk they have created in 2022 Ceramic House, a reimagined…
Meander from the Air Photo by Anders Portman Meander is an Apartment block in Helsinki designed by Steven Holl some 18 years ago in 2006 as a winning international competition entry but only finished in 2024. It compromises of 115 apartments, gardens, a wine cellar, a spa, a movie theater, and yoga studio on an infill site in the Töölö neighbourhood of Helsinki. I think the project was stuck until…
The Book The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine I saw a reference somewhere online to Yuiri Slezkine’s The House of Government and thinking it was a book about a single building a giant 1931 block of flats in central Moscow opposite the Kremlin I ordered my kindle copy and started reading. I had no idea it was an 1100 page work covering the birth of Bolshevism and its first death in Stalin’s…
Ariel View of Stadium - photo by Hannu Rytky For a country with pretty low density cities 1 like Finland still has some excellent examples of urban design. This is not universal by any means, many parts of Espoo for example are just hard to walk and not designed for anything but cars. Location However in Tampere the newly completed Tammelan Stadium designed JKMM and commissioned by the City is a…
Exterior -Image © Wellu Hämäläinen It’s often quite hard to make direct comparisons as to the sustainability of different buildings in the industry as costs, supply chains, and methods of construction to name just a few things are all variable. This is even before size, location and programme are taken into account. So this project in Turku, Finland is really interesting as it is twin identical…
Our Lord In The Attic Is The Building on the left of the lane. Photo by Jean Robert Thibault A highlight of any trip to Amsterdam for me is going back into the hidden church and going up those creaky centuries old stairs into another time. The colors and filtering of the light take you backwards through time, even the air smells other and it feels like you are closer to the lost golden age of…
Tempe à Pailla from the air Although Eileen Gray designed over forty buildings in her career only two were built both by her and Tempe à Pailla is the other one. Anyone not familiar with the story of E1027 her first building should take a look as it’s some story. The Tempe à Pailla is less famous than E.1027 and it’s her second and final building she designed after the breakdown of her marriage to…
Its always good to start a book with a bang and This Gaming Life does just that. In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. From here the stage is set for Rossignol to take you on a semi-autographical tour of the real life world of the games industry. The book is basically…
Part Elevation Photo from Drawing Matter (Hornbaekhaus) was built in 1923 and designed by the Architect Kay Fisker . It was built for a cooperative housing association with government support and is pretty big taking up a large urban block in Copenhagen all by itself. It’s longest facade is about 180m long, and there are about 290 apartments in the block the average size of them being 70m².…
Helsinki Design Week also includes Open House Helsinki which opens up buildings and spaces around the city that are not usually open to the public. I went to visit the viinatunneli in Ruoholahti. The Viinatunneli or Winetunnel was built in 1978 under an Alko factory and linked to it’s central warehouse. It was fully automated in that the alcohol from the factory would travel underground directly…
The Däckhuset or Deckhouse in Kallebäk Sweden was built in 1960 and it looks fairly unremarkable. But as far as I know it’s a one-of-a-kind, there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. The Deckhouse What’s special is that it’s an apartment block of separate houses, an apartment/house hybrid. The structure of 3 concrete floors is totally separate from the individual ‘ apartments’ which sit…
Hammarby Sjöstad an early sustainable city development in Stockholm Sweden Hammarby from the air Overview I visited the area of Hammarby in September of 2011 and was really impressed by the attempt to build an urban eco-development that addressed every aspect of living sustainably. An urban neighbourhood that was both sustainable and whose model could be replicated and improved on as technology…
photo by Pol Viladoms Many issues shared by people across the world come together in the problems of housing. It continues to get too expensive for the average person, locals get priced out by tourists or second homers with increasing income differences between different professions adding to the affordability crisis. New affordable housing could be a positive part of the Green Transition, and…
Were the Paris Olympics the Greenest Ever? The truth was the olympics were headed towards a funding dead end and unsustainable in their current form. Few countries and cities could actually afford the cost of hosting. 1 Previous hosts have spent big on venues and infrastructure only for them to be later abandoned . Fittingly Paris and France as the instigator of the modern games have for the first…
UC Santa Barbara had struggled recently to house all its students and Charlie Munger billionaire and philanthropist was ready to fund a new dormitory. The donation came with some preconditions Munger was to be the ‘ architect’ and only his scheme was to be built. His proposal the Munger Residence Hall UCSB better known as Dormzilla was an 11 story, 1.68 million sqft residence for 4,500 students,…
Status and Culture by David W. Marx Why does culture change over time and how does it change and develop? As Marx tells it, he was reading through the literature and trying to make sense of it all when he realised that there was a key concept that linked everything he was seeing together - status. It’s a fairly simple, stark but nevertheless wide ranging thesis that Marx lays out in the opening…
Solar panels from about 2026 1 will have to be designed into every new build in Europe. In May 08 2024 The New European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EU/2024/1275) came into effect. This could lead to up to an additional 200GW of power by 2030 across the continent. This is great news as grid capacities can be expanded with no additional land use and especially in summer houses can use…
Notre Dame on Fire 2019. Photo by Olivier Mabelly Remember architects it’s simple, buildings don’t exist! I know it sounds absurd but indulge me a second and lets think it through together. Here is what I am saying summarised really simply. Buildings are objects and objects are concepts and they don’t exist independant of the mind . The thread of this argument can be traced through Book X of…
So I watched Oppenheimer recently and about a year late! I am a fan of Nolan’s work (see my review of the film Tenet by Christopher Nolan and it’s Architectural Space ) and surprise surprise I really loved this film too and will try and briefly say why I liked it. Oppenheimer is a biographical film of the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer who was responsible for leading the Manhattan project in Los…
Map of Age of Central Helsinki Buildings By Jani Hannén link Helsinki Region has a great open data website HRI where you can access various mapping data sets. It has a suitibly noble and practical philosophy that in the widespread use of this data can help everyone in Helsinki. Open data increases citizens’ knowledge and understanding of their living area, its history and future development. This…
There is something I find beautiful about the Brutalist style. The use of materials and sculptural forms gives brutalist buildings a kind of quality which is compelling in its starkness. The post war growth of Helsinki means there are some great example of the style in Finlands capitol. I have compiled a list which I hope to add to. Some Brutalist Projects in Helsinki: Asemapäällikönhovi building…
Skateboarding Space and the City Architecture and the Body by Iain Borden Iain Borden effectively tells the history of the rise of skateboarding, board and boardpark history and the evolution of skateboarding itself. Lefebvre’s The Production of Space is the main jumping off point for this book but necessarily reinterpreted through the attitude of skateboarders to the city. Actually its better…
Northern Shores by Alan Palmer, A history of the Baltic Sea and its Peoples. This book covers a potentially fascinating topic. The Northern Sea of Europe the Baltic compared to the more famous and glamorous Southern Sister the Mediterranean gets overlooked. But Its a worthy topic for a book to try to redress this balance a little. This is the stage of the Northerly crusades, of the Hanseatic…
Cities by John Reader John Reader takes us on a historical trip through the city starting in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago and finishing at the present day taking a quick view at the usual suspects, London, Rome, Venice, New York and a few others. I agree with the author that this book is needed as the city is ’ the defining artifact of civilisation ’ , and by 2030 two thirds of us will be living in…
Edge City by Justin McGuick Edge City published by Strelka in 2012 is a short summary of an architectural road trip by Justin McGuick through São Paulo which makes a survey of older and newer developments, of the states attempts at building for the influx of new citizens to it’s indifference. The Mutirado housing programmes, the Zezinho Magahlhaes by Artigas and Da Rocha , the Vila Maria Zelia ,…
Ponte City on the left. The tallest apartment block in Africa. Ponte City is a (173m high) 55 storey skyscraper in Johannesburg South Africa. Completed in 1975 it features a circular central empty core to allow extra light and ventilation. It started life as an extremely desirable address but as the neighbourhood changed in the 80’s it was taken over by gangs. Throughout the nineties it was a…
Torre David photogtaphed by Iwan Bann The Tower of David or Centro Financiero Confinanzas was a vertical slum and an example of bottom-up urbanism like ../Kowloon-Walled-City/ that existed between 2008 and 2014. A 45 story office block (171m high) the third tallest in Venezuala the Torre David was almost finished when abandoned in 1994 due to the Venezualan banking crisis. Over a decade later…