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Published in 1/2025 - Urban Landscape
Yet Another Monument?
The various development phases of the South Harbour in this millennium do not draw a very flattering picture of the ability of Helsinki’s urban planning machinery to solve such a tangle of problems, writes Kristo Vesikansa.
[He] considered it important to emphasise what a dominant place this was, and how eminently important it would be for the city’s appearance to arrange the currently cluttered plot by means of terraced structures and a crowning monumental building as a backdrop to Badhusgatan.
It was with such eloquence that Arkitekten, this journal’s predecessor, described in 1911 the efforts of Helsinki’s city planning architect Bertel Jung to “architecturally regulate” the South Harbour’s dockyard area. At that time, the Nordic capitals were competing on who could build the most impressive city hall, and Jung saw the plot used by the shipyard as an opportunity for Helsinki to rise to the challenge. In the illustrations, a city hall with a majestic tower rises near the current Olympic Terminal, which from its magnificent terrace dominated the views over the South Harbour.
The plan that Jung developed over several years remained, however, a flight of fancy, as has been the case with many other ambitious building projects around the South Harbour. Generations of architects have tried their luck at reconciling the classical urban landscape created by J.A. Ehrenström and C.L. Engel in the early 19th century, their desire to leave their own mark on it, and the everyday activities of the port with its passenger ferries, freight trains and trucks.
The various development phases of the South Harbour in this millennium do not draw a very flattering picture of the ability of Helsinki’s urban planning machinery to solve such a tangle of problems. Attempts have been made to open the waterfront to the use of the city’s inhabitants, alternately with individual construction projects, such as the Information Centre for Architecture, Building and Design, a hotel designed by Herzog & de Meuron and the Guggenheim Helsinki, and alternately by seeking an overall vision through consultancy work or ideas competitions. When none of the approaches have yielded results, the city has allowed its most valuable waterfronts to be populated with a variety of temporary structures. There are some successful achievements, such as Verstas Architects’ Helsinki Biennial Pavilion, but the official national landscape would already deserve more sustainable solutions.
The official national landscape would already deserve more sustainable solutions.
A more permanent solution of this kind was sought for the western edge of the harbour a few years back through an investor-driven quality and concept competition, with the planning continued on the basis of the winning proposal. For this issue, we interviewed the area’s planners and architects and invited five experts to share their views on its development. It is hard to find much to criticize about the moderate in height, low-carbon and high-quality architecture business district, but as many of our commentators point out, the chosen implementation method has wasted the opportunity to build something more exciting on the waterfront than a row of office buildings and hotels.
The success of Makasiiniranta largely depends on the presence of attractive public buildings on both sides of the commercial blocks: a new museum of architecture and design on the north side and the Helsinki Art Museum or similar institution on the south side, in the current premises of the Olympic Terminal and Port of Helsinki. In this issue, we present the proposals selected for stage two of the international competition for the museum of architecture and design, along with comments from experts. Whereas the “crowning monumental buildings” that followed Jung’s ideals proved successful in the Guggenheim Helsinki competition ten years ago, the spirit of the times – in addition to economic constraints – is now guiding the process towards a significantly more restrained outcome. The available material does not provide an opportunity to analyse what kind of museum concepts the proposals are based on, but we will certainly return to the topic in the autumn, when the winner of the competition has been announced.
While the development of Makasiiniranta has been the subject of heated debate, the first significant addition to the urban landscape of the South Harbour in three decades has almost risen by stealth on the opposite shoreline: the Katajanokan Laituri office and hotel building. The wooden building presented in this issue continues one block further east the light-coloured building frontage of the Market Square, hiding behind it the red-brick harbour milieu. The second project to be presented, the new building of the South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences in Kotka, is linked to the Satama Event Centre that was presented in the Finnish Architectural Review last year, complements with a generous touch the open landscape of the Kantasatama harbour. Tampere’s Näsi Park Bridge, on the other hand, can be seen as a domestic application of the international trend of transforming disused transport infrastructure into green and recreational areas for the use of a city’s inhabitants.
Other articles in this issue provide a broader outlook on urban landscape planning. The writings deal with the difficult equation of urban density and biodiversity loss, urban metabolism, child-friendly cities, urban fallows, new forms of public art, and the presence of political protests in urban space. ↙