Aulis Blomstedt’s Annex to the Workers’ Institute, Helsinki, 1959

strong in the optimistic belief in progress of the 1920s, until the iron fist of fascism shattered all the dreams. Utopian thinking did not die, though.

         In the 1960s a new view of society spread among planners, behind which lurks the Three Sector Model of Jean Fourastié. The scientific and technical revolution is expected to eliminate the old class structure as a tour de force, and any new problems will be common to the whole industrialized world.

         The main emphasis is on the constantly expanding third sector of the economy and its effect on planning and building. This theory (also adopted by many planners in socialist countries) is clearly also behind the statistical thinking, computer worship and futurological dreams of the young men of the 1960s. This is the path to a new utopia and a new aesthetics, a unified brave new world in the sunshine of technology! Who could bear to bother with day-to-day policies!

The Marxist young

The young people in Finland today no longer talk about techniques or beauty or the relation between them. They project themselves into the conflict between work and 

All in all, the new social and technological-minded generation nevertheless considered the Finnish architecture of the day anti-social. The answer to this accusation could be that architects do not themselves choose what they are commissioned to do. Obviously. But architects can both privately and collectively take a stand on the interest which their limited resources should serve. They can also express ideological values in the style of their architecture. And the style of architecture does no always merely reflect the economic basis of building. It may also mould it. First we make things that look cheap and social. Then we really make things that are cheap and social. That’s how the functionalists began in the 1920s. at the next stage they believed that the new style would spread and affect the whole of everyday building. And everything did work to start with, but then world politics overturned the chariot of progress. When, after the war, society was ready to adopt the forms of functionalism, many of those who had created them were no longer sufficiently interested. They were already creating new forms for new things, individual expression to serve the interests of a small minority. The social field of building was neglected. But what alternative were the younger generation of the 1960s offering?

The heirs of functionalism

“Acceptera den föreliggande verkligheten!” “Accept the reality that exists!” could have been the battle cry of the young, as it was of the Swedish functionalists. The older generation’s talk of humanism and play with forms was to be replaced with aesthetics derived from the newest science and technology, and social good would follow automatically. In fact this was very up-to-date, and concentration and efficiency grew. But the social analysis was lacking – after all, the science of architecture that emerged in the 1960s and was so eagerly adopted here came from the cradle of planning liberalism, the USA. Soon they stood wondering just what goals they were supporting. Town centres did not turn out to be airy meeting places for pedestrians, but rather selling machines intended for car-owners outside the town. Housing areas did not turn out as cosy urban fabric, but an ironic, inhuman interpretation of the theme: “Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum”. And uncritical reliance on interdisciplinary cooperation and technocratic planning methods paved the way for the consulting monopolies which today replace the old fruitful interaction between public planning and studio work. Architect’s tendency towards utopian thinking had again borne fruit. The weapons they had chosen to increase equality had fallen into the hands of enemies of democracy.

         The amazing thing in the younger generation’s optimism is that they did not notice that Sweden had gone through the same stages somewhat earlier, that the exemplary housing of the “people’s home” had become a harsh oligarchy of producers. Perhaps the very power of our own expressive architecture (Sweden had nothing like it) confused them. They though that it was the main guilty factor explaining the social weakness of our architecture.

        In fact, this kind of utopianism has dogged the steps of modern architecture even since its early stages, since Ruskin and Morris. It was particularly fine and 

Reima and Raili Pietilä’s Kaleva Church, Tampere, 1966

Alvar Aalto’s Worlfsburg Culture Centre, 1963

         The younger generation criticized Reima Pietilä especially sharply. Pietilä was one of the central figures of the 1960s, building his prize-winning competition entries. Aalto, who had become a national institution, was eventually left in peace. The angry young men, as assistants at the University of Technology, prevented the emergency of a Pietilä School (which was actually on its way), and the trial of strength between Pietilä and Juhani Pallasmaa in the Finnish Architectural Review after the completion of Dipoli is already one of the classics of Finnish architectural debate.

         Gradually some adjustments of attitudes proved necessary. On closer study, a too straightforward interpretation of Pietilä’s architecture as “built ideology” does not seem to hold good. His starting point is more likely a view of the inner nature and logic of architecture than of its relation to society – and the same can be said of his opponents in many respects. Gradually, as one began to see how multinational business had adopted the Miesian style as its architectural image, attitudes to Pietilä’s architecture also began to change, however irrational it was. In the hurly-burly of the EEC debate some people even saw similarities between the political role of Pietilä, and that of the National Romanticists of the turn of the century.

Kaija and Heikki Siren’s Chapel in the College of Technology Village, Otaniemi, 1957

young men did not, though, criticize the programmes of the plans so much as the style, which they considered anti-social. Aalto was accused of exclusiveness, Pietilä of subjectivity and Revell of formalism. These accusations combined both aesthetic and social moralizing in a verbalized pathos which was as powerful as the plastic expression to which it was objecting. The alternative was considered to be an anonymous, aesthetically controlled, logical mathematical, and consumer-oriented architecture utilizing the knowledge provide by interdisciplinary search and the full potential of technology. Emphatically technological system architecture was preceded by a return to the sources of functionalism. At the beginning of the 1960s Aulis Blomstedt and Aarono Ruusuvuori had a major influence on their students at the School of Architecture.

         Debate about the architect’s responsibility gradually spread to the global scale and to the brave new world of futurology. At the level of architecture, Mies van der Rohe assumed the role of prophet, and on a wider scale the ideas of Archigram or Buckminster Fuller were eagerly taken up. The result was rather paradoxical: on the one hand, architecture absolutism (the revolutionary youth of 1968 called this “design fascism”) and on the other, anti-architecture!