Helsinki Heart - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Peter Davey

Almost until now, there has been a big urban quagmire in the middle of Helsinki. After the delightful urbanity of the nineteenth-century Neo-Classical ideal city which stretches westwards from the harbour and the main square along the elegant Esplanade and its parallel streets, everything until recently ground to a halt in a series of scattered formal object buildings connected only by dreary roads, railway sidings and bits of greenery that pathetically aspired to be parks. Numerous suggestions were made for the area, including Aalto's horrendously scaled post-war plan. Recently, the whole neighbourhood has started to look up. Steven Holl's gallery of modern art (AR August 1998) was the first new building to try to pull the area together, though its urban contribution is a bit recherche for most people. The big newspaper office with its huge public atrium by SARC Architects (February 2000) firmly relates the Neo-Classical grid to a new park on ex-railway land which is being made in front of the '30s Parliament building by the elder Siren. A little to the south of this dour, pompous colonnaded lump is the bus station, a big, almost desert site, several blocks deep and covered with all the miserable paraphernalia of bus travel: depressing shelters and signs, oil stained and messy. It is the last big empty site in the centre of the city.

Helsinki city council has built up a fund for developing the bus station based on planning gains for development of other sites under its aegis. A competition was held for teams of architects, each linked to a developer. Out of four entries, the one designed by the group led by Pekka Helin won. [*] A key move was to put the bus station underground: the architects argue that modern technology and judicious introduction of daylight shafts can make a subterranean bus station that will overcome the potential problems of marshalling people and large numbers of buses emitting stinking fumes in deep, enclosed spaces.

This single move transforms the whole site. To the east, Viljo Revell's long low block on Mannerheimintie was required to be retained, and so was the two-storey nineteenth-century military-functional Russian barrack block behind it. Now, a bus-free square can be created between the two. Moving westwards, a public library by Heikkinen & Komonen runs roughly parallel to the barrack block. Then, there is a new square over the heart of the bus station, then the main building, a mixture of bus and metro interchange, restaurant and shopping, which is combined with what could be a large atriumed office building for a single user, or for multiple tenants.

Further west is the most impressive urban contribution. To the north is a linear park, properly planted, contained and robust, unlike the dingy grey bits of green space already in the area, Facing onto this is the housing element of the scheme, in which Marja-Riita Norri has produced a gentle urban scale, partly by inclining the flats to obtain an almost straight westerly orientation in a block which fundamentally faces north. The three housing blocks are back to back with offices by Helin and on top of a layer of shops and cafes. Helin's red brick elevations echo the early twentieth-century brick facades across the road, but are much more severe, almost Berlin-rational. As a whole, the scheme is right for its site and for its importance in the city: it has appropriate scale (or rather scales), a mixture of uses appropriately located, and an urbane lattice of public, private and semi-private spaces. Helsinki should find the will and the cash to build it.

(*.) Underground bus terminal: Pekka Helin, Vesa Jantti, Tom Cederquist, Mariitta helineva, Kimmo Lumatainen, Juha Vesen, Ville Rautiainen Housing: Marja-Rutta Norri Annanhalli (Anna Hall), library: Mikka Heikkinen, Markku Komonen, Mikko Rossi Finnlines, park Kirsi Leiman