Diplomatic community

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by William Morgan

The nineteenth-century industrial ambience is reinforced by a modular grid that may in fact have much earlier roots, such as a tatami system. The offices, with their glass block walls, narrow strips of windows, and strong contrasting outlines have an especially Japanese look about them (both Markku Komonen and Mikko Heikkinen studied in Japan). It is not the appearance but the spirit of the traditional Japanese house, with its rigidly prescribed constructional units, that comes to mind here: when the forms are so simple, the proportions, materials, and siting assume a critical importance.

Like Japanese architecture at its best, the embassy is a synthesis of the traditional and the contemporary, with deference to nature. The accent, however, is unquestionably Finnish, for Heikkinen and Komonen have created a beautifully proportioned Modernist building that does not neglect the primal, forest-dwelling heart of the Finn.

The architects refer to the embassy as a jewel box, but it might more properly be called a reliquary, one in which the ghosts of Finnishness have been preserved, held in sacred, decorous trust. This is best seen on the north, less public side. Here glass walls embrace the sloping hillside of woods, and there is a blurring of the boundary between inside and outside, the safety of the cave and danger of the darkness. The trees, many over 100ft tall, compete with the reflecting glass and granite box for the limelight.

The architects have continued the modular pattern of lights announced in the entrance courtyard's granite pavement, but since the hillside drops so steeply here, the lights have been installed on skinny poles, some of which are 40ft high. At night, the lights link embassy and woods and become, in Heikkinen's words, 'a trail of Arctic stars'.

The humour and seriousness, practicality and pure magic of the metaphorical northern lights typifies Heikkinen and Komonen's approach to architecture: traditional principles without eclecticism, Modernism infused with Finnish essence.

The Embassy of Finland is a modest, complex, poetic, even Platonic work in a large city not known for subtlety. It may well be the best new building in Washington in the past 50 years.