Helsinki Art Nouveau: KOP Bank by Onni Törnqvist (later Tarjanne)

Finland’s really strong suits in terms of culture, it could be argued (although not by us!), are not so much literature as architecture and music. Enter a new website designed for those in search of information on both news and the history of Finnish architecture and its makers, on the built environment, policies, research and organisations.

Informative rather than critical, the site will be useful once some of the glitches are ironed out. Entering the names of some famous Finnish architects in the main search facility, for example, gave a null result, while doing the same thing in the Architects section offered a form in Finnish, and the link to the (English-language) Museum of Finnish Architecture site yielded a confusingly large number of citations in Finnish.

The site is maintained by the Finnish Museum of Architecture (Helsinki) and the Alvar Aalto Museum (Jyväskylä), with help from the Finnish Association of Architects (SAFA), the Association of Finnish Architects’ Offices (ATL) and the Building Information Foundation (RTS).

Photographer Juhani Seppovaara and architectural journalist Netta Böök have collected examples of timber construction: timber was traditionally used to build churches, cottages, villas, farmhouses, parsonages, saunas, manor houses and entire residential neighbourhoods. The authors even include dance pavilions – thousands of them were built around the country after the Second World War. As early as the end of the 18th century, doctors were recommending timber houses as healthy places to live in. However, wars and fires have destroyed many of Finland’s wooden buildings. The book also presents stories of those who lived in them and built them. The 1960s and 1970s in particular saw the demolition of valuable timber-constructed neighbourhoods, which were pulled down in order to make way for structures of a more modern kind. Today timber is once more an inspiration for builders and developers.