Published in 2/2025 - Housing Reform
Prospects from the Troughs
If there is a silver lining to be found in the current downtrend, it is the fact that it at least offers us an opportunity to evaluate the results of the latest construction boom critically, writes Kristo Vesikansa.
Finnish housing construction is currently experiencing its deepest slump since the recession of the 1990s. According to Statistics Finland, only 21,105 new homes were built in Finland last year, which is to say that the production had nearly halved from the previous year. These are the lowest statistics in 30 years. An upward swing is not on the horizon anytime soon – construction companies are still trying to unload thousands of unsold dwellings, and new permits were granted last year for less than 15,000 units. The situation is not helped by the current government’s policy of cutbacks in state-subsidised housing production, the very same lever that tided the construction industry over the darkest years of the 1990s.
The downhill trajectory in construction is bound to be reflected in the employment rates of architects. At the beginning of this year, almost 400 architects were already unemployed or laid off, which is to say some ten percent of the professionals in the labour force and over a third more than last year. Fortunately, we are still far from the disastrous figures of the recession years of the nineties, but the change has been dramatic, seeing as, for years, the field grew accustomed to nearly 100% employment rates and the main concern was whether there would be enough professional designers to go around. The situation is particularly tough for the new graduates who have not been able to accrue much work experience during their studies due to the tightened graduation deadlines adopted at universities.
If there is a silver lining to be found in the current downtrend, it is the fact that it at least offers us an opportunity to evaluate the results of the latest construction boom critically and to come up with means to avoid the mistakes made during that period in the future. Housing construction in the 2020s has been marked by the pursuit of maximal efficiency when it comes to both plot ratios and the floor plans of individual dwellings. This has resulted in far too many shaded deck yards, deep-framed double-loaded corridor blocks and dwellings with no kitchen that only have windows facing in one direction. We asked five experts for their thoughts on the tools with which we could create a better environment once housing construction starts to recover from the slump.
If there is a silver lining to be found in the current downtrend, it is the fact that it at least offers us an opportunity to evaluate the results of the latest construction boom critically.
The current lull would be well-spent by launching varied housing development projects, surveys and ideas competitions – the field is now inundated with professional designers who would, for once, have the time to immerse themselves in such undertakings. Regrettably, signs of such activities have been scarce. Who could take the lead in promoting this type of development work?
The articles included in this issue open up perspectives on precisely these types of potential developments in our field. Communal housing is a theme that has been packed with great expectations and explored in various development projects over several decades, and yet it has remained an extremely marginal phenomenon in Finland, in contrast to our Nordic neighbours or many Central European countries. Tatu Heinola analyses in his article the ways in which an architect can take the special needs related to shared living into account in designing homes, while Annika Taipale introduces us to two experiments that have been conducted abroad in which communal housing has been used to support the integration of immigrants and to alleviate loneliness among seniors. Tarja Nurmi writes about projects combining housing and working that Berlin-based architects have managed to complete in their city, and Tuuli Kanerva examines the typologies that fall between detached housing and multistorey apartment buildings.
One of the well-established developments in housing construction has been the Housing Reform competitions which have been arranged in Finland with various focuses since 1953. They have resulted in a handful of transformative housing projects implemented in, for example, Helsinki’s Hermanni and Herttoniemenranta districts, but the broader impact of these competitions has been related to their role as catalysts of new ideas. For instance, the yield of the inaugural 1953 competition included the standardised terraced houses by Heikki and Kaija Siren that meander through the terrain, as well as the sweeping design of the seemingly endless ribbon-window building by Viljo Rewell and Eero Eerikäinen, both of which left their mark on Finnish suburban development in the 1950s and 1960s. Many promising ideas have, on the other hand, remained completely unutilised.
The latest Housing Reform competitions were held in 2018–2019, and out of the seven projects that won first prize, three have so far been completed, although one of them was built in a different location than was originally intended. We asked Jyrki Tarpio, a respected researcher on housing, to assess how the objectives defined in the competition briefs have been met and realised in these three projects. In his article, he also examines two further apartment buildings that are featured in this issue, which were built in the Oulunkylä districts as part of the Re-Thinking Urban Housing Programme by the City of Helsinki. The latter two are a representative pair as regards the development trends on offer: one has taken flexibility and adaptability to an all new level in Finland through various technological innovations, while the other seeks novel avenues for solid brick walls and natural ventilation, which were, for a time, thought to be irrevocably a thing of the past. It remains to be seen which approach will eventually lead the way towards the future of housing. ↙