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Clear Finnish: an annexe to the Finnish parliament building helps heal rifts in urban fabric and throws new light on the democratic process

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2004

The nineteenth-century heart of Helsinki is a precise model of NeoClassical urban propriety, but twentieth-century parts of the centre have much less coherence. To the north, isolated object buildings, Parliament, the National Museum and Aalto's Finlandia concert hall straggle along Mannerheimintie, the road leading north from the original centre. The Parliament building is a huge and austere '20s stripped Classical block a la Tengbom in pink Finnish granite by J. S. Siren, massively colonnaded and raised on a daunting stepped plinth. Since it was finished in 1931, it has started gloomily east over Mannerheimintie to a large dingy area of run-down industrial land behind Saarinen's magnificent railway station.

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At last, there are plans to turn the scrub into a proper park. And now Siren's building has been drawn into urban conversation by a new southern annexe over Sodra Jarnvagsgatan and a railway line in a cutting. An addition to the Siren building was needed because the 200 MPs have each been assigned an assistant, so demand for individual offices has doubled, far outstripping the capacity of Siren's plinth. The site, the only one available within walking distance of the Chamber (to which it is now connected by an underground passage), was a tatty and little used triangle of park.

Pekka Helin won the competition for the new building with a design that fulfilled a daunting set of constraints. To the east, the building line of the adjacent city block, Kamppi, had to be observed. To the west, roads restricted the site to an acute-angled triangle. The height had to be no greater than that of the National Romantic Hankkija building that terminates Kamppi, while the massing had to respect the Parliament building. Into this extremely tight mould, 259 offices had to be poured, along with formal committee rooms and a good deal of ancillary accommodation.

Helin's solution was to sink four meeting and services floors below ground, so allowing all offices to have daylight. Of the seven levels above ground, the topmost is devoted to the international department of parliament (civil servants), and the first floor is largely devoted to offices for the parliamentary ombudsman. On the ground floor, apart from offices and entrances, there is a visitor centre totally open to the public, with a bookshop, information sources and a cafeteria. In the middle of all this is an atrium that stretches from the restaurant, one level below ground, up through the whole building to its glass roof. The move allows daylight to be brought into the middle of the deep plan. Some offices get their daylight from this dramatic space, others from the perimeter, allowing office corridors to be double-banked. The atrium is made generous and unclaustrophobic by a curved wall that leans outward to north and west. This is the inner echo of the curve of glass that looks out at the Siren building, while allowing passers-by on the northern pavement to look in to see whether their MPs are hard at work or snoozing. (The outer layer of glass is supposed to be thick enough to be projectile proof.)

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This part of Helin's building has flanks of the pink granite that Siren used (though here, it is paler). The curved form is perhaps intended to respond to the banana shape of Steven Holl's Kiasma across Mannerheimintie (AR August 1998), but the curves are too far apart for them to resonate for me. The southern and eastern part of the new annexe, higher than the granite and glass element, is clad in dark purple bricks, reminiscent of those used in the Hankkija building. Rations of solid to void in the walls of the annexe are similar to those in the National Romantic work, but in the new, windows are syncopated. Both halves of the annexe respond to their contexts, but their relationship to each other is more problematic, dramatically illustrating the urban fault-line in the city that runs east-west straight through the building.

Though the outside may be divided, interiors are consistent and very well detailed. As in the Siren building, the architects have designed much of the excellent furniture, and Finnish materials are used wherever possible, for instance, floors of common areas are of granite or spectrolite. Panelling in the Grand Committee room, the auditorium and the small conference rooms off the restaurant is of different Finnish woods--one of the small rooms has veneers from poplar trees formerly growing on the site, complete with dark figuring from urban pollution.

The site itself is as yet still unfinished. Helsinki city is responsible for the little park between the building and Mannerheimintie. Sadly, costs prevent realization of the architects' plan to get this park to flow down into the disused and picturesque railway cutting to connect under the road to the big green space to be made in front of Parliament. A pity, but the building itself will remain a model of ingenious geometry, excellent craftsmanship and decent urbanity. P.D.