Kaupunki

With so many surfaces for my eye to caress, the city shows me something new each day and over time it reveals me to myself. What I once thought overwrought I now find beautiful and what I didn’t like or disagreed with has new resonance with me as I change and familiar things persist. The city and I are like lovers; by noticing things our intimacy grows and we possess one another. It shows me who I am and who I might be and who I am here.

Olen Työssä

Talvi

January 21, 2007

In spite of the sun’s rapid return winter has finally come. Helsinki is freezing and the bay has begun to ice over. I’ve never seen anything like it. The grey sea is indistinguishable from the sky and the big boats loom like distant shadows. All of the trees are frostbitten, dusted perfectly white atop their black trunks. The fishmongers still come to Kauppatori each morning but the bread lady doesn’t brave this cold and the souvenir sellers are fickle. It feels quiet and a bit sleepy except in the parks, where in spite of the bitter cold children with sleds and patient parents abound. There is a certain pride here in weathering the cold and it is not something that the Finns shrink away from—quite the opposite in fact. They see swimming in the ice as something that strengthens you and makes you better able to keep illness at bay and I’ve seen people more than twice my age out for a dip in the morning. The colors have all changed to soft pastels and compositons of white on white or ghostly fields of grey. But on a rare day when the sun shines it’s all blue and white.

Joulu

December 20, 2006

December has been unseasonably warm and well, dark. You can miss an entire day if you’re not watching for it and in spite of the eternal nocturne I can’t sleep. I wait until after 1:00 am to go to bed and find myself up searching for a book at 3:00 am. My shadow at noon is at least twice as long as I am tall and if the sun burns through the clouds it stares at you head on. Still any sun is welcome and everyone is out during daylight regardless of conditions. I’ve conformed to the Helsinki fashion of cladding yourself in reflectors, since so much of the day is night. The city is all dressed up for the holidays and in this bottomless darkness Helsinki sparkles.

The Christmas market fills Esplanadi Park and is bustling well into the evening. Everything you could possibly imagine made of wood is for sale there—one man makes the most amazing little birds with delicate wings out of one piece of wood that he then fans out by overlapping and hooking each piece onto the next. And the food! I can’t believe what I’ve seen!

Deepfried sardines, giant pancakes with berries and cream, cloudberry syrup and the most amazing honey…and of course, lots and lots of hot coffee. Everyone is very friendly and they’re happy to talk to you, barely pausing even after you tell them you don’t speak Finnish. Still somehow you can make sense of it. I pass through the market almost every day on my way to and from Juhani’s office just to peek into all of the little booths. Christmas in Helsinki is delightfully warm.

Matter & Form

December 13, 2006

Last night I heard Juhani Pallasmaa lecture for the first time. I was at his office working in the afternoon and he suggested that we ride together to the university so that we would have a chance to talk on the way. He has been preparing a biography on a late painter and close friend for an upcoming retrospective exhibition—a rushed project that has left him time for little else. As it turns out, this very thoughtful and meditative man is a rather aggressive driver. He seemed surprised that we made it there so quickly.

His lecture was on matter and form and from the first word I was spellbound. I’ll try here, as best as I am able to recount the highlights.

He began by recalling Bachelard’s distinction between the material and the formal imagination, explaining that where matter dominates things tend to become primitive and clumsy and unarticulated. Where form dominates they tend toward kitsch and sentimentality. He illustrated his point with two images; the first of Michelangelo’s famous Pieta, the second of his lesser known and unfinished Rondanini Pieta. He boldly called the former kitsch, explaining that marble too easily became skin, that one only saw the form; the matter had been lost. But the second unfinished Pieta had a tragic quality as a result of the unresolved struggle between the stone and the form that was only beginning to emerge from it.

He told us that Adrian Stokes, in his book The Image in Form, speaks of carving and molding. Carving, he said is subtractive and reveals what is hidden in the material while molding is additive and builds up the image. He said that thinking too is either additive or subtractive—an interesting idea that made me think of the epistemological shift from deductive to inductive reasoning. To these categories Juhani added a third: constructing. It is neither carving nor molding but is closer to the latter. This, he said is what architects do. Architects must go between carving out and building up as they imagine space and then configure its construction. He showed images of Indian temples cut out of solid rock and said that there was an extraordinary power in environments made of one material or where the material and form are so like the landscape that it becomes impossible to say where one begins and the other ends. I immediately thought of Mont St. Michel and of Lewerentz’s St. Peter’s. Juhani’s first example was Aalto’s Saaynatsalo Town Hall, made almost entirely of brick the winds around a small hill to the point of making earth indistinguishable from the structure. His second example was Lewerentz.

He continued, showing two images, the first of a modern functionalist home, the second a photograph of a ruined interior, burnt out and water soaked with vestiges of furniture strewn about. He explained that images of chaos, erosion or lack of order were evocative, that these poetic images open imagination, while commercial or political images ask only for complicity and effectively shut imagination down. He showed pictures of the interior of a chimney-less hut, reconstructed here in Helsinki inside the Finnish National Museum. It had become blackened over time by smoke and had very small openings for windows. He said in such darkness that light became precious—like a diamond, that the room approached the viewer and asked for interpretation instead of presenting a clear and complete image.

He recounted his own experience at the temple at Karnac where there was such a fusion of matter and space that his sense of self had simply vanished. Time there was the experiential dimension. Time he said is poorly represented by form—matter is about time. He recalled the Arte Povera movement where matter was radically reintroduced into art and then spoke of how his grandfather would read the forest in terms of the objects he would carve from the trees. This one having the perfect curve for the lip of a sledge, or that one for the leg of a chair.

He showed several images of containers made from weaving birch strips, fish traps made of twigs and of a fisherman’s wooden lunchbox, shaped like a boat and made to float, rather than take on water. He wasn’t suggesting that these objects were finer that those we could make today. He wasn’t lamenting the loss of craft. His point was to show how the form and the material worked in tandem and gave equal consideration to function and beauty. He finished by telling us that species do not survive by regression. “Sustainaibility” he said, “relies on refinement.”

He took the long way back to Helsinki, passing by Seurasaari on the way, before dropping me off at Kamppi.