White castle: the Finnish Embassy in Stockholm represents both a modern democracy and a long interlaced history

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2003 by Peter Davey

For hundreds of years, Finland was the poor relation of Sweden. From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, the Swedish empire crossed the Gulf of Bothnia, with Finland as an impoverished colony. In 1809, the country changed colonial masters and Russia ruled until the Revolution, when Finland finally managed to achieve independence. By the 1920s, Sweden again became Finland's most important trading partner, and remaining links of language and culture were reinforced. But, though Stockholm was (and in many ways remains) the most important posting in the Finnish diplomatic service, the embassy had to work out of cramped and sometimes temporary quarters. (The Swedes meanwhile have the poshest embassy in Helsinki, a dashed great neo-Renaissance palazzo next to the town hall overlooking the harbour.)

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By the '90s, Finland's diplomatic profile in Stockholm was plainly absurd, particularly as spectacular investment in infrastructure, education and technology had enabled the former colony to match the prosperity of Sweden (which was neutral in the Second World War when Finland was ravaged by both Germans and Russians). So in 1992, the Finnish government decided to build a new bespoke embassy. The process of acquiring a suitable site and obtaining planning permission (the latter extremely time-consuming) (1) meant that the building took a decade to complete.

Kristian Gullichsen, in many ways the doyen of the cool Helsinki school, was chosen as architect. He believes that 'an embassy building has a symbolic function; it must represent its country in a diplomatic way while interpreting the codes of its location. The Finnish Embassy in Stockholm does not portray Finland as a wonderland of high-tech culture. On the contrary, it attempts to communicate on the level of the collective memories of the two countries'.

Finland was unable to obtain as grand a site in Stockholm as Sweden did in Helsinki. But, though quite small, the plot (previously used as a car park by the Swedish broadcasting organization, the lumpen headquarters of which is a blot on a delicate area) is by no means a bad one. On the edge of the diplomatic quarter in Ostermalm, the eastern part of the central city, it overlooks the Gardet, a fragment of the national nature reserve Djurgarden, which retains the peaceful quality of tree-studded parkland similar to, for instance, Hyde Park in London. In the '30s, the city managed to persuade the state to sell part of the reserve for development to accommodate Stockholm's rapidly expanding population. Here were made some of the city's first crisp white functionalist housing blocks, built as pavilions in the park at the start of Sweden's socialist mid-century romance with Modernism. (The revolutionary Stockholm exhibition of 1930 was held in Djurgarden.)

Gullichsen, as he said he would, has responded to context. Indeed, seen from a distance, the new embassy could be mistaken for a large fragment of the 1930 exhibition miraculously preserved and slightly moved. But close up, the building is clearly much more substantial and tectonically satisfying than any temporary exhibition pavilion. A long white wall faces the park. It is at once a defensive plane with few openings, and one that offers the promise of welcome through a giant full-height gated portico, beyond which can be glimpsed an inner court. Security is a major determinant of embassy design, and the wall is the building's shield. The building presses to site edges because of the quantity of accommodation to be incorporated in a very restricted perimeter, and because Gullichsen, like most of his Finnish contemporaries, is concerned to bring daylight into the centre of his plans.

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The great white wall, which both protects the interior and demonstrates the variety of inner life with incisions and inflections, is a recurrent theme in Gullichsen's work. Notable uses include the Kauniainen Parish Centre of 1985 and the Pieksamaki Civic Centre (AR March 1990). Like the Stockholm building, both include a great portico, a main public entrance that leads to the interior. The embassy court is particularly compressed, adding to the feeling that the whole complex is a highly abstracted version of a medieval castle. Small events and spatial excavations enliven the white walls of what could easily have been a dull little space. They reflect what happens in the surrounding interior volumes, and are a result of a contemporary interpretation (2) of what Ruskin, praising the flexibility of medieval architecture, called 'changefulness'; a building should alter its outward form according to what it contains. (3) Changefulness in medieval buildings was of course the result of alterations over time. In modern buildings and in the wrong hands, its pursuit can lead to picturesque kitsch, but Gullichsen's buildings always avoid that, even though they are generously sprinkled with abstracted quotations from Aalto, (4) Le Corbusier and less well known masters of the Modern Movement.