House of Silence by Juhani Pallasmaa

moved about between the shafts of light filtering in from the little windows. The upper floor was built of wooden louvers with light flooding in between the slats accompanied by a fresh breeze. A web of metal wires was strung across the space where the finished sheets of paper hung up to dry. The scent of drying paper filled the silent space that was bathed in light. The subdued sounds of work echoed from below.

More than twenty years ago, Aulis Blomstedt and Reima Pietilä had a brief but pithy exchange about the concept of “monument”, in which Blomstedt quoted a Shakespeare sonnet which crystallises the idea thus: “Your monument shall be my gentle verse which eyes not yet created shall o’er read.” Here, the monument is a gentle verse which carries a memory, an idea, value and meaning beyond time. It is thus a question of something that is in some way a complete opposite to boastfulness and arrogance. The strictest definition of architectural values is linked above all to monumentality and artistic quality.

         The same thing is expressed in Chinese calligraphy by the term “Qi”, the vitality that a line is charged with. It is deemed to be one of the most important features of calligraphy.

         In the 1920s, the young geologist and poet Aaro Hellaakoski examined artistic aims with these thoughts:

         There is still a good deal of clumsy and wooden material. Of course, I am entertained more by sketchy rough-hewn work than polished work. I cannot stand eclectic manipulation. My verse does not aim for any special suppleness or flexibility. I am happy if the words feel natural and true. I feel that poetry should be genuine metal which gives a metallic ring when you strike it.

         I am going brother you with yet another literary quotation in an attempt to show that architectural study material is scattered far and wide, outside the palisade of our profession. At the turn of the century, Anton Chekhov advised his young colleague, the writer Maxim Gorky, about his work thus:

         They are splendid things, masterpieces; they show the artist who has passed through a very good school. I don’t think that I am mistaken. The only defect is the lack of restraint, the lack of grace. When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace … The descriptions of nature are the work of an artist; you are a real landscape painter. Only the frequent personification (anthropomorphism) when the sea breathes, the sky gazes, the steppe barks, Nature whispers, speaks, mourns, and so on – such metaphors make your descriptions somewhat monotonous, sometimes sweetish, sometimes not clear; beauty and expressiveness in nature are attained only by simplicity, by such simple phrases as “The sun set,” “It was dark,” “It began to rain,” and so on.

         The energy at the core of art is a conscious aesthetic intention somewhere below the surface. Creating art is a matter of digging out this core. Development can appear in science and technology, but not in art. We have progressed no further in art today than the painters at Lascaux and Altimira, but it is the same thing that keeps us going.

         To conclude, I will tell you briefly about a building that fulfills the criteria of monumentality. I saw it quite by chance about twenty years ago in northern Portugal. It was a small paper mill that used rags and waste paper as raw material. The building was set beautifully in a rolling landscape with a little stream running through it. The lower floor was built of massive blocks of stone. The hot paper pulp steamed inside this dimly lit production space. The figures of the mill-workers

ahead within the sphere of building materials, construction technology and equipment technology, but above all, what lies ahead is the need to integrate the separate sectors with each other.

         Ecological building is an area of technology where integration comes under the spotlight. It calls for traditional methods and control of sophisticated technology and the ability to combine the two together in a flexible manner. The buildings of our time have often been examples of incompatible partial solutions. Spatial arrangement, structure and circulation have not been in synergy. In outlining the outlook for the development of technology, it is still worth bearing in mind the Ancient Greek wisdom contained in the story of lcarus. What we know about this generally is only that it involved an audacious flight and a tragic ending. However, there are several dimensions to the myth.

         Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the architect who built the famous labyrinth for King Minos of the island of Crete. At the end of this mammoth task, however, the king threw the architect and his son into jail. The only chance of escape lay in developing the technique of flying. They found a technical solution to the problem and at the moment of departure, Daedalus gave his son some guidance on the importance of choice of flight path, warning him not to go too close to Helios the Sun-God. They both arched their wings and took off towards freedom. Daedalus navigated wisely, but Icarus’s mind was overrun by an intoxicating feeling of omnipotence – hubris. In Greek mythology it is an attitude and a state of mind that the gods punish immediately with death.

         Thus, with Daedalus, the responsible tradition of wise consideration was transferred to architects as well as technical skill. Daedalus was Arkhitekton, a building artist whose task had been to erect the palaces and monuments of Minos, which would guarantee the king immortality. The architect’s inescapable task is to create built monuments, to immortalize the intangible value of materials linked with our culture, our collective memory. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was also a dilettante architect or an architect manqué, said that it is a requirement of architecture that there is something to extol. If there is nothing to extol, there can be no architecture. But isn’t talk like this about monuments in sharp contrast to what I have said about wisdom and sustainable development? Not at all, if we give up the vulgar interpretation of the word monumental. Let us take a look at this question of semantics. After all, “monument” in the context of architecture, is one of the most erroneously used concepts, but nevertheless, it is one of the key words of the art of building and indeed of all culture. The meaning of monument or monumental has become distorted in a pejorative manner to mean, in normal conversation, something large in size an pompous in spirit, not to say ostentatious. Nevertheless, even the most modest architectural task should include the dimension of monumentality. It is in precisely this dimension that the humanism of architecture is crystallised. Monumentality has nothing to do with large size or small. The Pyramids are monuments, but so too are the togunas or meeting canopies of the Dogon people of Mali, which are dimensioned from a free sitting height. One might say that the veranda of every Finnish lakeside sauna is a built monument in miniature.

         Recently we have been able to learn from the excellent Animal Architecture exhibition that the structures of the animal world, developed during the long evolution of nature, are supreme achievements compared with the efforts at building produced by the human race in its short history. Even the finest steel constructions cannot compare in tensile strength with the spider’s web. Nor can any ventilation adjustment that we control compare the complicated but clear functioning system in a termites’ nest. Against this background, it is of course paradoxical that in the last blink of an eye in human history, also referred to as the “Age of Technology”, the construction sector has finished up in a situation that is in many ways untenable.

         Modernist architect included the essentially sound idea of applying advanced technology to building, but it was also associated with a blinkered approach to experiments with new material and new technologies. In architecture and in other areas of culture, the romance of the machine age, which made a fetish of technology, was more or less an expression of puberty. The buildings that were manifestations of the wonders of technology did not always show control of the technology – far from it. It is worth bearing in mind that at a time when the silicon chip and the micro-cosmos of the circuitry contained within it would already have accurately described the state of technological development, fashionable high-tech architecture still expressed the steam-age aesthetic. In this context, it should be pointed out that the environmental reality that horrifies us all today has not arisen from some untenable architectural ideal, but from much greater and more corrupt social vectors. The sanctification of technology and the machine in architecture was, however, a clear reflection of a worldview, a vision of a simple mechanical order, of mechanical domination of the world.

         In recent years, the counterpart to this techno-architecture has been the architecture of chaos. It looks as though popular discussion of chaos theory has found reinforcement for this kind of explanation of the world, that is, that the world is now mixed up and without any fixed points anywhere. From recent trends in architecture we can easily recognize interpretations of a new superficial worldview. Rudolf Arnheim, 90-year-old Harvard emeritus professor of the theory and psychology of the history of art, recently commented wisely on the fashion for chaos. He said that the atmosphere today is very similar to the atmosphere that existed when Einstein’s theory of relativity was published. The popular interpretation then was that the theory showed that nothing was objective, nothing was certain. Arnheim points out that the interpretation was completely at odds with the actual content of the theory of relativity. In fact, in the early years, Einstein had tried to call his theory the “invariant theory”. Invariance, fixed points and some kind of fragments of order were what chaos theoreticians were probably looking for when new, more multi-dimensional fields of view were opening up in front of them. Architects, too, should scrape together the fragments of order into their own profession rather than building unsustainable scenery from a trivial interpretation of science and technology. The challenges that are facing us of developing building and putting it on a more sustainable foundation, call for a new kind of integration of the work of architects and engineers. There is a great deal of research and development