Published in 1/2024 - The Heart of the City

Project Review

Hidden in Plain Sight

Essi Oikarinen

The lighting poles in Helsinki’s Senate Square have been designed with exceptional attention to detail, even though no one is actually supposed to notice them.

On a winter’s evening in the Senate Square, it is unusually dark for an urban setting. Lanterns glimmer in the middle of the vast square around the statue of Tsar Alexander II, but otherwise the only light is on the paths around the edges of the square. It was perhaps somewhat like this in the city a hundred years ago – except that the facades of the surrounding institutions would hardly have been softly lit.

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The refined atmosphere is a result of the latest lighting scheme for the square, the conception of which began already in 2013. The curvy globe lamps from the 1980s, the latest iteration of the many Senate Sqaure lighting schemes, gave way to a yet another ideal, when a separate design competition was decided for the new light poles in 2018. Nowadays, the focus is on illuminating specific elements rather than entire areas, explains Marjut Kauppinen, the City of Helsinki’s Lighting Manager. The vision was that “in the dark, one could perceive the spatiality of the square rather than individual peculiar light sources.”

There were numerous requirements for the poles: they had to illuminate the street as well as the facades of the surrounding buildings, and they had to be sturdy enough to carry the power cables of the tram lines. They would also have to fit electricity points for events and telecommunication base stations. Even though the lighting poles had to harmonize with the historical environment, they were not to compete with, for example, the colonnades or mouldings of the Neoclassical buildings.

Futudesign’s winning lighting poles branch out at the top into cusps that direct the LED light onto both the walking routes and facades. The only symbolic gesture of the ultra-practical form is its sectional shape, a Greek cross, which, according to the designers, is a reference to the floor plan of the Helsinki Cathedral. At the same time, the cross shape makes the pole’s stem slenderer and lighter, and it can also be seen as an optimization of strength and material use.

The lighting poles bordering the square evade the gaze, especially during the dark hours, and operate more like theatre technology behind the scenes: in one of Helsinki’s most popular tourist sites, the classic square’s grand silent performance has been placed centre stage. ↙

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