Viljo Revell’s Toronto City Hall, 1965

         The few civic buildings of the period were marked by an idealistic unpretentiousness which did not, however, exclude artistic expression related to the function of the building. All in all, it looked as though orthodox functionalism had been developed in a more psychologically and geographically successful direction. This picture was soon to be shattered, however. Why? Some reasons may already be clear, though from the historian’s point of view we are still very close to events.

Ideological labyrinths

 The leading architects of the 1950s had at the time adopted the socially oriented ideology of functionalism, but because of the war they had to wait for commissions in vain. The ideological situation after the war was confused. The concepts of collectivity and individualism became blurred in the machinations of international politics. The world’s first socialist state had banned functionalism, yet it began to win a foothold in the cradle of capitalism, the USA. Biological mysticism replaced the machine culture, vitalism the mechanistic view of nature.

         Aalto was the most important interpreter of the new ideas, and his fine buildings gave power to his words. Aalto’s thinking, which stressed the individual right from the start, and his close relationship with America, Frank Lloyd Wright’s individualistic concept of democracy, and Jeffersonian anti-urban thinking may well still prove one key to the architectural ideology of the period.

         In the 1940s societal arguments began to give way to philosophizing about the inner nature of architecture in the debate between architect. Unnoticed, a picture began to form of an architect who was apolitical, or above politics. The idea of the servant of society was, of course, still valid. The ideological change merely gave the concept a new meaning.

The emergence of criticism

By the end of the 1950s, Finnish architecture had taken on features against which we angry young men of the 1960s rebelled. The main emphasis of architecture shifted to civic and commercial building. Revel won the Toronto City Hall competition; Aalto went to work for the “German miracle” in Wolfsburg and, with his Vuok-senniska church, started a period of expressive church architecture, with its many large-scale competitions. A typical planning feature of the time was a complex of cultural and administration buildings called a “monumental centre”, the kind that was at the end of the 60s branded the very bastion of technocracy and the élite culture – in brief, bourgeois hegemony. At the same time as this boom in civic building, the developer worked out their concrete panel systems – the straightjacket of today’s environment. The role of architects in this work of development was almost non-existent.

         The new role of architecture was, of course, a result of economic developments. Patriarchal capitalism – which could well produce a Käpylä Garden Suburb, Sunila or Tapiola – started to pave the way for iron-fisted monopolies. The angry

1974

Kirmo Mikkola 

Architecture: Its Ideals and Reality

The architect today is clearly losing status. There is a lack of confidence between him and society, and the architect’s own self-confidence is shaky. The result is a deterioration in motivation and professional security. From half a century of development, the rationale of efficiency is all that is left of modern architecture. With this, technicians business men and politicians are building an environment which is at the same time destroying its own psychological and biological conditions. The business world uses architects more to underline its own status than to create a good working environment. Architects are also used as a kind of scenery builders. The monuments they design are used as fallacious proofs of respect for culture or social-mindedness. We have drifted far from functionalism’s dream of a democratic architecture.

The background

Externally, the background to Finland’s post-war reconstruction was roughly analogous to the premises from which continental functionalism developed in the 1920s. There was an immense need for housing, which was further increased by the halt in building caused by the war. Legislation promoting subsidized housing production was passed, and large developments gradually got under way. The problems of reconstruction had already been studied during the war on the initiative of architects, and the Association of Finnish Architects had taken an important step by setting up its standardization institute. The idea of elastic standardization proposed by Alvar Aalto pointed the way for Finland’s post-war architecture rather as Le Corbusier’s Domino did for the functionalists of the 1920s. Aulis Blomstedt’s modular studies created the basis for industrialized building. In the early 1950s as big housing reform competition was arranged, with a special construction technology series, and Revell, Ervi and Siren, for instance, studied the problems of prefab building in practice. But at the same time there was an anti-mechanical and anti-collective reaction to features conducive to socialized building production. This meant that architecture hid its head in the sands of romanticism, and in urban planning this led to the illusion of individual and mid-nature housing. The conflicting goals of Anglo-American anti-urbanism and continental functionalism were, however, reconciled in a quite harmonious synthesis in the most important experiments of the early 1950s, the first stage of Tapiola and the Otaniemi campus.

House Thorsbo by Kirmo Mikkola

Architecture’s breakthrough in terms of knowledge 

Architecture is not sufficiently well equipped with knowledge instruments for it to accomplish the tasks that pile up on it. Straightforward methods that hark back to a combination of techno-cultural strategies and supplementation strategies do not genuinely favour the opportunities architecture can offer. Returning to the design synthesis used formerly does not succeed except in limited individual cases. Architecture suffers from knowledge and procedural crises.

         The error has been particularly in the fact that there has been no pause to begin thinking about and developing a knowledge tradition for architecture as a whole. People have given in too easily to development optimism. In other word, there has been too great a rush to identify current information on technical practice with information about architecture. Too much trust has been placed in information being superseded and previous experience being written off.

         An impenetrable wall has risen between the concepts of rationalist and humanist architecture. Each side becomes obsessed with its own special view-points and differences in phrases to such an extent that in Finland different schools speak almost in different tongues. It is only in the very last few years that we have begun once again in strive to reach a more universally applicable way of understanding. It becomes clear that architecture cannot survive – retain its importance – simply on the basis of collected information. We have to take research into knowledge principles into account as well. Thus we will presumably have to confess that a whole series of question of knowledge theory that are characteristic of this field are part and parcel of architecture.

         Knowledge analysis is a matter of returning bit by bit to the problems that belonged to the sphere of art and architecture in historical times.

         The description of content – what we are talking about is precisely the field of contemporary architecture – must be carried out in a revealing manner, using the most efficient concepts available. The demystification of the 1960s was a complete condemnation of “the old”. The critical approach of the 1970s is already constructive:

         To illuminate questions about the character and nature of architecture;

         To clarify important ideas about the whole, the parts and proportion;

         To examine impartially the importance of art and culture to the community;

         To develop a general theory of environment space in which the space occupied by the building is linked with other spatial factors.

It is thus possible to show that contemporary architecture is not yet ready in any way. It is only halfway through its development

         This generation has to try and obtain a beer overall picture of the reserves of ways and means that exist in architecture. This information is vital in trying to street techno- culture building, which has no grown to worldwide proportions, in a direction that is more favourable to people.