Markku Komonen, editor of Arkkitehti from 1977 to 1980, had set up a practice with Mikko Heikkinen in 1974 and their breakthrough work is the prize-winning entry, Heureka, in the 1985 architectural competition for the Vantaa Science Centre. Komonen’s definition of architecture is ingenious: he does not deny the apparent demise of Modernism but neither does he give in to the populist notion (in Finland) of going over to being a supporter of Postmodernism, or as Komonen himself puts it, “Neo-Nationalist-Romanticism”.31 He wants to build a new Modernism and to do it in a thoroughly Finnish style: using few words but by means of greater practical achievements – High – Tech Constructivism.

         This high-tech constructivist frame of reference can also be attributed to Juhani Pallasmaa who, during the 1990s, rises to become the leading figure in Finnish architectural debate and undoubtedly the Finnish architectural theoretician most highly though of abroad. Pallasmaa was head of exhibition at the Museum of Finnish Architecture from 1968 to 1972 and Director of the Museum from 1978 to 1980 and was professor of principle and theory at the Helsinki University of Technolgoy from 1992 to 1997.

         In Pallasmaa’s essay, Modernism is constructed anew; the old triangle of man, culture and the environment is turned on end and architecture becomes an existentialist project of man in the spirit of the phenomenological view of architecture called for by Christian Norberg-Schulz since the 1960s. The new question set for architecture concerns purification and the return of architectural autonomy. This, says Pallasmaa, is possible in the following way:

         One way of achieving architectural autonomy and ‘purification’ is paradoxically to question the utility and practicality of architecture. The second is a kind of archiving, a survey of the experiential basis for architecture. The third is to return the language used for expressing architecture to the pure language of architecture, to images that are characteristic of architecture. The fourth is to detach oneself from the superficial value of the new, from fashion and the myth of individuality and focus on the poetry of the everyday, the ‘other reality’ behind the everyday.32

As we enter the twenty-first century, the circle is closed. The crisis of Modernism, critical regionalism, the pluralism of the culture and ideology of the Postmodern era, the unshakeable belief in the giving of architectural form as an art and the question of a universal language of architecture are bringing the Finnish architectural debate back to its roots, to a new interpretation of the question of the “fundamental form of the time, the fundamental form of a nation”.33

This, surprisingly enough, provides an excellent foundation for Reima Pietilä, for whom “architecture is a general form and solution developed by a designer”.24 He has already outlined a general chart of his own design doctrine in Arkkitehti and come to the irrefutable conclusion after a tricky, and for Pietilä typical, play on words: “a building cannot be a typical representative of architecture, but is always an individual case”.25 Defined thus, the debate about the existence of architecture now turns towards individuality rather than the universal applicability proposed by Blomstedt and the constructivist inspired by him. According to Pietilä, individuality means above all, architecture that is geographically, ethnographically and culturally local.26 Regionalism thus defined becomes Pietilä’s mission in the Department of Architecture at the University of Oulu, and with Pietilä’s professorship an alternative emerges to the architectural debate that has revolved around the Helsinki University of Technology and dominated Finnish architecture: this eventually becomes known as the Oulu School. From Pietilä’s standpoint, research is necessary, analysis is necessary and systematic approach is necessary, but authenticity is necessary, too.

         Kirmo Mikkola who, during the years of political upheaval in the latter half of the 1960s, becomes the undisputed figurehead of the young, radical generation of architects, defines authenticity in a crucially different way from Pietilä, however. For him, authenticity means understanding the characteristic nature of architecture as a synthesis of design, technology and economics in the spirit of Aulis Blomstedt, but in such a way that it is always linked with the prevailing political reality. Architecture is part of the society that surrounds us: architecture shapes society just as much as society influences architecture. Thus, high-quality architectural reflection is not a matter of insignificance, it is a matter of the wellbeing of large groups of people and, at best, the promotion of citizen-orientated democratic discussion about society. The gulf between Pietilä and Mikkola is so deep that the concept of ideology is given a completely different interpretation by each of them. For Mikkola, ideology means primarily, communicating the role of the architect and taking a clas-conscious, socio-political view of architecture. In Pietilä’s opinion however, ideology is an extremely dangerous concept, since with it, “architecture can be made into an identification mark of something that cannot be authenticated”.27

         The question of architectural form or the attempts at right or wrong that lie behind architectural aesthetics remain unresolved and so the architectural debate since the 1970s remains in a state of tension. The style of “pure architecture” derived from constructivism and its variations becomes the predominant style in Finnish architecture; other approaches such as the 1980s colourful Oulu School along with its critical writing about boxy architecture, or the austere but atmospheric architecture of Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen, are marginalized as passing phenomena or ephemeral experimental phases in the work of individual architects or architectural practices.28 The image of a united modern Finland threatening Post-modernism could also be said to be almost deliberately reinforced, one example of this being the international symposium on “The Future of Modernism” held on the Gulf of Finland on 22-24 August 1980.29 Additional backup comes directly from abroad, when Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History is published in 1980.30 With it, Finland rises to become one of the most important countries in the world for modern architecture along with France, Spain and Japan.

CIAM group in founding the new international journal Le Carré Bleu, which had its head office in Helsinki.19 Blomstedt also offers new potential and a fresh, modern and rational explanation to the idea long held to be too romantic, of beauty that pleases the eye, by combining architectural dimensions with human dimensions, architectural harmony with the harmony of musical intervals, and thus architecture with the age-old natural philosophy of Pythagoras and the universal logic of nature. The long-awaited Modernism has now been realized but the promise of modern architecture has been greater than the results that can be seen in the surroundings. Finnish Modernist architecture receives a shot in the arm from Blomstedt, insofar as architecture now becomes a matter of carrying out a huge synthesis, and architects become “the last profession of synthesists in a specialized world”.29 Juhani Pallasmass, one of the leading figures in the emerging constructivist view of architecture, writes enthusiastically in 1966 in a biting criticism of the architecture of Reima Pietilä, which favours rather more free-form themes from nature: “Art and architecture are not a matter of subjective arbitrariness, but of arranging forms in a complex and high-quality manner.”21 Blomstedt becomes a leading rationalist and constructivist figure, and the right angle becomes the norm for the new architecture, directly related to the laws of nature.

         The reflections of Osmo Lappo, Reima Pietilä and Kirmo Mikkola bring their own perceptive views to this arrangement of ideas. In 1968, the era of student revolt begins and in Finland too, the students in the Department of Architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology take to the barricades with red flags flying on behalf of democratic study environment and a curriculum that takes on social problems.22 Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is reviewed in Arkkitehti and the time of heroic modernist monuments is briefly over: attention focuses on international politics, social inequality, the decay of western society, scientifically based design and criticism of the élitist concept of architecture personified by Alvar Aalto.

         The architecture Osmo Lappo, known as a pragmatic and sensible designer, takes over the job of professor of public building design at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1967, never doubting he will have to face up to criticism from the younger generation of architects. He turns the still topical question of flexible dimensioning and human scale away from form-giving towards the practical design and building process. More fundamental than the argument about the best possible system of architectural expression is the question of multiple use and adaptability in buildings. There are obvious points of contact with the thinking of Christopher Alexander, after all Lappo approaches architecture as a matter of logic in resolving the problem between the information given at the start and the final result, not as a psychological problem besetting the creative artist. However, whereas Alexander exhorts architects to think about the image of the starting point and concentrate on careful and precise research into the requirements set for the design, Lappo trusts the professionally skilled architect and the splendid culture of Finnish architecture. For him, architecture is above all a matter of serving the public: “of creating people’s entire living environment, of giving form to all those spaces where human activities take place”.23 Thus, Lappo in his interpretation turns Blomstedt’s rationalist architecture into a rationalist design approach, which suddenly no long excludes the artistic quality caught up in the rumbling scientific-techno-political revolution.

Finland it was not permissible to turn one’s gaze to the past, one had to step forward boldly on the chosen path. In Wickberg’s analysis, style therefore becomes more than just a way of arranging architectural elements based on everyone’s aesthetic taste; it becomes a symbol born of inner necessity to every nationally important civilization of the new age with pretensions to great art. It is for precisely this reason that in architecture, Wickberg urges the reader to be obedient to the fundamental programme indicated by the creators of the Modern Style; they were visionaries who created the ethos of modern Finland and made it progress.16

         As we come to the 1950s, Finland is rewarded for her logical and unbroken line on the path of Modernism. Finland becomes a world-famous land for design, and Finnish skills in joinery, glassware, furniture design, textile design and architecture are suddenly in demand as paradigmatic pioneers. In 1952, Finland concludes her war-reparation payments to the Soviet Union and the Helsinki Olympic Games are held complete with their Coca-Cola advertisements, exotic sportsmen and women and their international atmosphere. It is clear that at last, Finland is having a banquet year in the midst of its own culture.

         Joy and pride can be seen at last in the architecture debate, too. The Museum of Finnish Architecture begins operations in 1956 and Arkkitehti is given an overhaul. It starts aiming to be a comprehensive cultural journal which, in accordance with the view enthusiastically pursued by Aalto back in the 1940s, will increase the links between architecture and accelerating design; in 1953, a separate series named ARK begins to be published four times a year to deal with these themes. Both Wickberg and Aulis Blomstedt rise to the top of the architectural debate because of their knowledge of culture and their sparkling dialogue; so ecstatic is the euphoria that both of them refer fascinated to the same Le Corbusier quotation from 1936: “architecture is state of mind, not a profession”.17

         In this light, Blomstedt’s 1958 inaugural lecture “The Problem of Architectural Form” represents an exciting policy definition. It defines architecture as being like other areas of art and industrial design, but nevertheless as an autonomous art form that is a law unto itself. The key question for Blomstedt is one of relationships: in the same way as the organization of the planets is based on the mass of the heavenly bodies and the forces of interaction between them in accordance with precise physical laws, so architecture too is based on harmonic relationships. Architecture is not just a matter of artistic design, but the art of proportion, where as well as aesthetically refined spatial forms, it must have its own logic defined by mathematical precision. The architect’s place in society is, as Blomstedt puts it in a lecture given in Oslo in 1956, “the place of the intellect”: the architect’s intellectual work takes place precisely in the area of harmony.18  The harmony, the comprehensive synthesis, that Blomstedt is reaching for is nevertheless only possible through systematic measurement and mathematical relationships, as the Canon 60 system that he developed himself around 1960 demonstrates.

         Topicality and growing criticism towards Alvar Aalto’s absolute authority and position of power, plus a growing dissatisfaction with the overall quality of the built environment derived from mass production, suddenly makes Aulis Blomstedt an extremely interesting theoretician in the climate of the 1960s. He represents a new kind of internationalism, after all he had been involved in 1958 with the Helsinki

flexible, adaptable, production-efficient and economic, industrial solution that would speak a universal language of architecture.

         The idea of a universal architecture and how to define it remains a bone of contention in the architectural debate in Finland from that day forward. For Nils Erik Wickberg it is a question of style; for Aulis Blomstedt it becomes an aesthetic problem of a systematically dimensioned language of form. In Osmo Lappo’s writing, the question goes back to a humanity-serving system theory by way of a Vitruvian whole, and for Pietilä in 1973, the universal language of architecture harks back to original sources in the spirit of Aldo Rossi: to a city, an experience and an expression of Man’s existence. Kirmo Mikkola takes the question towards the trinity of art, technology and society, Markku Komonen towards the themes of rationalist structuralism in the second half of the nineteenth century, until Pallasmaa brings the topic right back to the themes of Saarinen, Blomstedt and Pietilä: a form of art which arouses peoples’ memories and through them an archetypal understanding of the basis of existence. As Pietilä writes in 1967, the Finns talk about twentieth-century architecture “as if it were the one and only thing, as if there were just one correct and indivisible architecture”.12 In this way, according to English architectural critic Roger Connah, twentieth-century Finnish architecture forms an “essence mythology”: to talk of meta-architecture and teasing out the meaning of architecture flees further and further from the illusion of a common Finnish reality.13

         For this very reason, the contemporary reader lost in multiculturalism and the pluralism of cultural values may see Nils Erik Wickberg’s conept of architecture as extremely confusing, as he ties architecture, the spirit of the age and the idea of Volksgeist so tightly together. For him, the art of each culture express the set of values of that particular culture, natural conditions and social mores. 14 From Wickberg’s standpoint, architecture is in some way separate from the other arts; it is cleaner, freer and nobler, and it develops continually according to the law of its own autonomous evolution towards an ever more touching and refined perfection. In Wickberg’s mental landscape, Finnish culture is an inalienable part of the western Hellenic culture tradition, so architecture too is tied above all to western tendencies. By the same token, architecture can never be to the taste of the wider public or in accordance with the demands of business. Wickberg was Finland’s leading expert in restoration and the history of architecture that convinced him to believe in the inevitability of Modernism. For him, architecture was the expression of time and culture, so having entered the modern era and adopted the modern way of life, a change in architectural style must necessarily follow. Correspondingly with earlier styles, Modernism is, thus, an inevitable phase in Western cultural evolution.

         Another cornerstone of Wickberg’s thinking is the idea of architectural “style as the manifestation of an ideal based on a principle”.15 According to Wickberg, the architecture of the 1940s had to rely on the sensitivity of great artists, on their ability to interpret the reality around them, on the uncompromising logic of architecture, and on the opportunities architects are given to lead the whole of society towards better and more peaceful times through their unfathomable art. Like Aalto, Wickberg remained an untiring supporter of Modernism and human functionalism; in 1940s