Selina Anttinen

Tim talks to Selina Anttinen, founding partner of Anttinen Oiva Architects with her husband Vesa Oiva. So successful have the practice been in their native Helsinki, from designing the main library of the University of Helsinki in 2008 to leading the reimagining of the city’s central harbour with the Katoleina Pier project, finished this year, you may not have heard of them. Until now.

 

 

Podcast transcript

Selina Anttinen: Hi, I’m Selina Anttinen from Anttinen Oiva Architects. We are a Helsinki based architecture office. 

Good day to you Superurbanists. Something a bit new for you this week. Something a little bit out of the ordinary. Someone you may not have heard of before. I really love Helsinki. I’ve been there several times recently. And when I’m there, I always take the opportunity to see work by Anttinen Oiva Architects, whether it’s their Kaisa-talo –  the main library of the university of Helsinki, which was completed in 2012 or the housing from Sompasaari from a couple of years ago, or the new headquarters of Stora, the timber company on Katajanokka Pier, standing on the border of the ferry harbour and the, old city of Helsinki, redefining both. Their work is always engaging and I’m always grateful to my friend Markus Lähteenmäki for introducing me to them. Why are they so engaging? I’m still trying to find the words for that and to help me do so, so I spoke to Selina Anttinen who with her husband Vesa Oiva founded the practice that has been so successful in their native Helsinki, they have not needed to work anywhere else. And that’s probably why you may not have heard of them until now. So I spoke to Selina about the culture that founded them and sustained their practice and about Helsinki. The city that they are from. 

Perhaps you could tell me about the competition that gave birth to your practice. 

Selina Anttinen: So there are two stories, the first one was open architectural competition for a small Finnish town but I think the more famous story was the second competition we won, and that for the Helsinki University Library I think it was the first time that they organized the competition as they did, that there were maybe 20 offices that got in by lottery, that you just needed to put a coupon, no references, and then 10 offices with references, and those were the big offices with references as university buildings and so on, and we had no References of that scale or size or context or anything.

It’s in a very historical part of Helsinki Building now and we won the competition.  

Tim Abrahams: Let’s go back. I need to break down this competition. So there was a lottery component? 

Selina Anttinen: We used to have Open competition. Anyone, even students of architecture and even non-architects can participate actually. Nowadays it’s required that you need to be an architect.

 But the idea was to give the opportunity for younger offices as well and older offices that don’t have that kind of references and you just needed to put a coupon with your name. You have the right to practice your profession in your country. 

Tim Abrahams: And then they pulled 20 out of a hat. 

Selina Anttinen: I don’t remember, now, the exact numbers, but it was something between 10 and 20. It was an invitational competition, but not based only on references. And that happens nowadays as well, that if you fulfill the minimum requirements and everybody gets the same points for invitational competition.

So after that, they just decide by lottery or certain rules who gets what. But that was one of the first ones. Only one established office that got in by references was given a prize and all the others were rookies in a way, the ones that got in by lottery.

Tim Abrahams: That’s really interesting. So what year is this? 

Selina Anttinen: 2008. That was when we started our office. It was the biggest university library in Finland and situated in the very heart of the old university center of Helsinki. So that was a big and demanding commission. And I think we have been following a little bit similar path since we have been doing lots of projects in our hometown in Helsinki. 

Tim Abrahams: Forgive me if I think one of the things about the competition system is, it’s unfortunately quite alien to British society or, and to other societies too. Although the idea of a competition is somehow in there, everyone competes to try and win it. But when you have a competition, it’s quite good to have rules for a competition. 

Selina Anttinen: So jury members: there are always two individuals from the Finnish Association of Architects. So that are practicing architects and they have knowledge for that kind of commission. I have been a member quite many times as well and it’s a really nice opportunity to talk about architecture when there are different professionals and different parts of society around the same table. In that case as well, they were good jury members in that competition. 

Tim Abrahams: They certainly were they chose you. We must commend them! 

Selina Anttinen: I have been commending them afterwards so many times!

Maybe it’s obvious for everyone, but we are competing with quality of architecture, that it’s not the price.

Usually we don’t call them architectural competition, if price is, for example, if the price of building or price of commission is related. So they are purely talking about architecture or function or related or city planning. So it’s quality competition always, when we talk about architectural competition or city planning competition, and then there are rules.

They are ideas competitions and the competitions that are aiming for realization of a project in a building, actual building. So there are two types of commissions or competitions usually. But now I think it’s getting a little bit more diverse because there are different ways of building and processing the actual building.

Tim Abrahams: Different contracts, different forms of, like, relationship. 

Selina Anttinen: But we still talk a lot because we have a great tradition of open architectural competition and that gives the voice for those that don’t have any context for the construction field in a way and that gives to us as well because architecture should be part of all the society.

We should have many languages for architecture and then these open invitational architectural competitions are great because they are anonymous always, so you don’t know who’s behind and only the architectural language matters. If you are not good to sell your project or good to explain it, it doesn’t matter. It’s purely about the presentation of architecture and about the quality of architecture. 

Tim Abrahams: Now you’ve been on competitions, you’ve been on a jury. And you say it’s anonymous, you must know who. You must go, I think that’s probably such and such 

Selina Anttinen: That’s what comes to your mind, at first sight. But primarily, when you see the proposals, you don’t think who’s behind because that’s irrelevant for me. Actually, I had never been thinking about it, even when we open the envelopes at the end it might surprise or not surprise. But I usually haven’t been guessing who’s behind it because it doesn’t really matter. They are all equal behind the proposal: that it’s more about the architecture and the architectural language.

I think that people usually ask that kind of question that I am always guessing who’s behind and it’s that that. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s not the job to guess, it’s the job to assess. 

Selina Anttinen: Like its surprisingly not interesting. 

Tim Abrahams: This is very true. This is very true. What’s actually interesting is the architecture.

So perhaps you could just… to go back to the University of Helsinki. The library. Yeah. University of Helsinki. Just to make sure we’ve got the name correct. And what was it that won that competition for you, do you think?

Selina Anttinen: I think it was how it fits into its context, cityscape-wise that the architecture and the, how do you say, the image, not the image, but the contextual image in a way that the language of architecture in that specific case.

And what has been really nice afterwards is that. It has been unifying people in a way that many people have this criticism about contemporary architecture, even modern architecture in Finland, still that conversation about how new buildings should look .

And I think there are many people that don’t usually like contemporary architecture that have found that it’s a good way to make an infill project in a historical setting; a multi layered context. So I think that was the thing that unified the jury as well, that it felt right. It was back then quite bold, maybe say, a courageous work, but afterwards it has melted into the cityscape in a way that people still quite often, maybe even once a week, someone comes to tell that I really like to spend time, because our university libraries are open for everyone in Finland so even if you are not studying at Helsinki University Library you can spend time there and there’s a crossroad through the block as well that you can go. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s a beautiful project now anyone who comes to Helsinki it should be one of the things you go to because it’s not just a great building in itself it’s a great way to experience the city the places it takes you from and two are fascinating as well it’s a lovely part of the city.

So you win the competition and suddenly you have to create a practice pretty much to deliver it, so will you go from the two of you? 

Selina Anttinen: Yeah. So I’m running the office together with my husband Vesa Oiva. And we studied as well together and we worked in previous practices together as well. And it has been a good way of sharing ideas. So we started the office and we basically hired people that had knowledge of an experience of demanding infill projects in the city centre. Older experienced colleagues.

So we had a really nice team and many of them are still working at the office because the library is already more than 10 years old. So that’s the critical moment that it starts to bore people and that then after some decade it starts to rise again.

But I think that it has been nice because that people still find it ageless that we are aiming for this architecture that could unify people but as well time in a way that it’s a little bit aside always that it’s not super accurate or I don’t know. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s been timeless is the phrase that you use.

Selina Anttinen: Timeless is maybe the idea. So I think it has tested the time already quite nicely. 

Tim Abrahams: But then, To be timeless also includes the future as well.

Selina Anttinen: Yeah. the flexibility. I think that’s the core question of architecture. Balancing between identity and flexibility that we should allow maximum freedom for future users in a way that architecture is always reciprocal in a way that we shape buildings and people shape buildings and then it goes vice versa.

Our approach is very contextual and of course, in many layers the physical context and the technical context and the cultural context But the other idea is the future proof design and the idea that people can have self expression in architecture. We should create freedom and liberty for as well the user’s self expression and then the functionality as well that the building should allow the future [00:10:00] needs that we don’t know yet. And I think in Kaisa library there’s a certain balance about maximum flexibility and then still contextual identity and that’s something We keep on searching the right form and shape and size for that in different contexts. we have seen grids that are only flexible at some points, there’s too much of them in a way that people need to have some differentiation in between the areas and places and some genus loci and then we should aim for freedom. So that’s it. Somewhere there lies the beauty, in between. 

Tim Abrahams: But there’s also a formal element, and I notice in your field, in your architecture, of gesture towards the future as well. There’s a– it’s not a purely contextual language that you’re using.

But I suppose that’s my opinion.

Selina Anttinen: Tell me about it. 

Tim Abrahams: I think, I suppose it’s the aula, the circular form. Although the circle is used very often in classical architecture, I don’t know, there’s just something about the relationship. The geometries of your architecture are not simply lending themselves to pure context. 

Selina Anttinen: No, imaginary context always as well, that it’s the way we see the places. And I think that’s the added value as well, that there’s some sort of vision that touches the context that makes people to see the places. in a new way, and that’s very much about Kaisa Library and maybe the building that we visited yesterday as well, about how the new buildings can open up new perspectives in the sites and situations.

And Kaisa Library, it’s a very deep building, so the building span is deep, and we need to get the natural light, which is quite diverse in our northern circle. And then the circulation is always around the lights in a way that the light makes people easiest the circulation and orientation into the building.

So the idea about introducing this series of different voids into the very core of the building, that was the idea that makes the building very intuitive as well. And we can talk about beauty of forms as well. That’s another case and that’s as relevant as functional issues.

But when there’s movement. then the free form is quite good to that in a way that it allows and gives the signal that this is the place where the circulation happens and this is the main axis and at the end of both of the axes there are recognizable city views. So it was the idea that how to make the big building.

It’s 30,000 square meters in many floors and connected to the metro station. So how to make it easily accessible for everyone that visits the building . So the formal language comes from both sides in a way. And then it’s just reflected in the facades; that it cuts the voids into the facades.

But the scale of the voids follows the cityscape because it’s very – in a Helsinki scale – it’s a very busy street scape or different, two different street scapes. And one is more quiet than the other one which is more, more busy. And the boldness or bigness of gesture comes from the contextual condition.

It should be intuitive in a way that people find it appropriate when they visit and they don’t know anything about architecture.

So somehow the scales and forms and the figures; they fit the context in a way that it’s easy to understand and use and it feels appropriate. Even though it could be in contrast. I don’t know if I answered your question. 

Tim Abrahams: You certainly did. How long did it take and what was the practice when you finished that project? 

Selina Anttinen: It was five years. And I think we were about 15 people. We were for quite a long time, around 15. It’s an atelier sized office in Finland that we had for that project and then we have been pretty busy. Following a little bit the same paths that the urbanization and concentration of people in the metropolitan area has kept us busy so we have been working quite a lot in our hometown and in this quite demanding historically layered, preserved context is so I think that’s in a way the Things we do and we have been growing slowly mainly through competitions, but then the players have been coming back as well and we have been continuing to work together so now we are around 30, 35. 

Tim Abrahams: Nice size. 

Selina Anttinen: Yeah. We were a little bit bigger few years ago because of course, the projects they make the office bigger and smaller at times So you need to adapt and sometimes you have the busiest phase of a drawing at same time in many projects So then you need to have the flexibility, but we have quite nice collegial culture in Helsinki that we people come from another office for a while to help another office and so on.

So I think it’s quite a nice practice because the ideas and conversation and the collegial spirit is shared somehow. So now we are again a little bit smaller,

Tim Abrahams: So just to go back to it, interesting that we were talking about the second competition. The first competition was city planning. Perhaps you could tell me about that project and the city planning master planning work that the practice has done. 

Selina Anttinen: Yeah, we did even more master planning. I think it’s very much related to housing that there has been this urbanization that has been growing the demands as in every European city and there’s a lack of housing and housing markets.

Tim Abrahams: If I could just interrupt, except here you’ve been building.

Selina Anttinen: That’s the idea that if we want to introduce something else that already exists, you need to start early because housing is very slow. to evolve. And then I think it needs to have this common ground with clients as well, that you test certain ideas and you develop them further.

And especially if you want to make some contextual language, you need to be already there when the city plan is made. So quite often, this is maybe more than a master plan, a detailed plan that we did because it was an old existing Kaserne area. Quite a beautiful park-like area. 

Tim Abrahams: What kind of area was it?

Selina Anttinen: Kaserne, old army, back in the 19th century. So there were all these existing red brickll. Is it Kaserne? 

Tim Abrahams: Barracks. 

Selina Anttinen: Barracks. Barracks, yeah. 

Tim Abrahams: Barrack Barracks. Yeah. 

yeah. Kaserne is the German word. 

Selina Anttinen: Barracks. Okay. And they were mainly now used for housing as well, so it was an infill project, but it was, again, for this already historically layered area. But that’s something that we have been continuing to do as well in housing. I think we are quite often involved already in the city planning phase, or very early detailed planning phase . Those competitions are actually the ones that the client is already involved when we go to the actual building planning and I think that’s the best part because then you really get good ideas and then we call them plot allotment competition maybe that the city is selling the plot and then there are different groups of competitors and architects together with Developers or whatever kind of client you have behind you.

Tim Abrahams: It’s been a part of the experience of going around Helsinki is you suddenly, you drive across the bridge and you’re in a lakeside environment and you’re have we left? Oh no, there’s more city again. 

Selina Anttinen: Where’s the city? 

Tim Abrahams: And so it’s, I suppose it’s a kind of, a way of maintaining that or bringing that experience, making it more unified or sharing bits of the landscape in the city and the city in the landscape.

Selina Anttinen: In Nordic cities we have lots of diversity and how to increase that when we are increasing the density or even keep it at the same level so that’s I think the landscape architecture is the word of this decade in a way that is the way to Make cities livable and interesting and to have this relationship between a built environment and a landscape architecture.

I think that’s what we have been very good at in Modernism, that the relationship between the built and natural landscape is quite diverse, and it’s part of our knowledge, in a way, to make even new and surprising combination of those. But we always have landscape architects in our team, and they actually calculate self declaring factors.

In a way, they are just numbers, and when you have done it once or twice, the anatomy is revealed in a way that you know what is big. And I think what is good; that it shows the hierarchy of things that we used to mix things that are small and big. And I think it’s the value hierarchy that we need more in decision making in architecture and in society in general, that we talk a lot about small things when the big things matter and they are very difficult to have a mutual language for.

 We have different consultants and engineers and life cycle analysts and different kinds of programs for multi optimizing. I think that it happens in almost all the offices. But the question is how to make progressive goals and only when it’s difficult, it matters.

In my opinion, if it’s too easy to fulfill, then we don’t really make the change. 

Tim Abrahams: There we go. So. With the University Library, we’ve talked about some of the city planning. It’s interesting you talk about the contextual part of your practice, whereas again, I always pride myself on being able to pronounce foreign words, but in Finnish, I just give up.

It’s sompa the, a housing project of yours, which I saw last time, which is a kind of the new development, sompa, sompasaari, 

Selina Anttinen: Sompasaari,

Tim Abrahams: I’ve got the first syllable anyway, Sompasaari, which is, that’s not contextual. You’re literally creating a new language for a new part of the city. Could you tell us a little bit about that area and the evolution of the language that you created?

Selina Anttinen: The new housing areas or new city annexes that have been built in the last 10 years; they are mostly old industrial parts of the city. As almost everywhere in Europe, the harbors have moved away and the industrial functions have moved away. And then we have lots of dog lands, old industrial days, no greenery, no existing other values.

But beautiful seascape often and they are quite often connected to the existing city center. And I think we have in Helsinki. We have several of those areas and they don’t have existing conditions beside the seaside and then a little bit polluted land in a way. And of course, we have climate and the seasons and the context of height of Helsinki in general, when [00:20:00] building.

And in the case of Sompasaari, it’s part of the Kalasatama, like fish harbor area. There is actually, the contextual part, there’s a really beautiful old power station there, which, I hope, will be kept as a new landmark for Helsinki, it’s very difficult, but it’s called Hanasaari, it’s a beautiful landmark building.

Tim Abrahams: It’s stunning. 

Selina Anttinen: I think that was as well in a way our contextual inspiration that it has this very beautiful simple modernistic language and use of materials but then I think in this case when you are trying to create new identity for new areas you have different kind of toolkit and there was an existing detailed plan already so we follow and broke that a little bit, didn’t follow them all the way but then I think it was the identity of housing and identity of home and ideas about making the domestic environment recognizable and mixed in, inside one specific plot and trying to create diversity.

We have quite a few typologies in urban housing in Helsinki as the market has been running fast: developing new ideas and new typologies hasn’t been really there so much lately. But what we have been really good at is to integrate different social backgrounds.

That’s, I think, one of the best parts of Helsinki’s new neighborhoods and in one block. There are always different kinds of ownership. So they’re market based housing, owned, and then there are social housing and then there are these quality price controlled housing and all those together create variety.

And the contextual idea about the roughness of the existing dockland and the industrial neighborhood somehow would be visible in the end result as well.

I don’t know. You tell me. Is it there? 

Tim Abrahams: Yes, it’s there. I mean, it’s very interesting because there’s a road that you come in on. This is an impressionistic rather than literal experience. There’s one road and on one side there’s your buildings and on the other side there’s the kind of luxury white ones 

There’s few buildings of the last 10, 10 years that I’ve seen which have the immediate sense of it being a part of a city. It’s new and it’s newness is legible and it will be legible until the magic 10 years, which you’ve described. But it’s convincing.

And that’s just on an urban scape which is, important actually, I went around it with our mutual friend, Markus Lähteenmäki, and we wandered through and the porosity of it and the variety of scales and the shared landscape, the shared space, which you can share even if you’re a British architectural journalist wandering through.

It was very, we went, we didn’t go in, which would have been nice to see the variety of domestic scales, but yeah, it was hugely impressive and One of the reasons why I’m here talking to you now. 

Selina Anttinen: Oh, good. It’s so nice to hear. I think it’s, and we had really good landscape architects there as well, so I think the courtyard is impressive in a way and I think the idea was as well to introduce a surprising scale, that you have the small scale, less of domestic architecture and the recognizability of the landscape. and how it relates to the seaside, because there are beautiful sea views on both sides, or two sides of the block.

But then as well, the bigness of this bold, all the industrial areas, so how to mix those scales in surprising a new way that creates new identity. So I think it’s somehow when listening to you, I think that we have somehow succeeded in that. And then to create as well as the typological and spatial diversity that they are I love the apartments and apartments in several levels and apartments with yards in the very condensed city centre.

That’s nice as well to use the outdoors and have your own private space on the ground floor because it’s not in a commercial center. So most of the first floor. Spaces apartments as well and they have little yards both on the street side and their courtyard side and then some of that is this quality priced controlled housing, which is in a way that you apply, they are reasonably low price, but a good quality. Usually there are different kinds of families that need to have certain square meters and a certain number of rooms. And usually you get a little bit less in Helsinki that you pay for in the way, as in every housing market, I think in Europe. You get what you need, but that’s just about it. Usually this housing is something that you are happy to get. If there are many people that would have the same apartment, then they have a lottery or queuing number or something. And then there are the family apartments that have two big courtyards in the middle with cherry trees and then high living rooms and lots of light and French balconies.

So many qualities that you don’t usually have in this priced housing. And I was thinking that it would be so surprising when they first go there and they think that, ah, we got a little bit more than we waited for, because that’s very unusual in the housing market.

Tim Abrahams: But there’s an element of surprise. 

Selina Anttinen: Yeah, I hope so. 

Tim Abrahams: Just to ask you a question which is almost more sociological or economic. I’d like to know a little bit about the client for that project, but also more about how the housing market is changing in Helsinki and to try and understand who’s delivering it. How is that changing? 

Selina Anttinen: Now it’s really slow. There was this big boom for maybe the market was going with I don’t know overlaps. I dunno, too fast in a way. There was this boom of 10 years that it was really paid for that people took loans that were cheap. And then they’re buying, buying many apartments and renting them out, which led to a situation with lots of studios and people didn’t really live in the apartments that they owned.

And that was really maybe putting down the quality of housing because they were made for investors and not for people in Finland where it’s a very high percentage of people that actually own their apartment. That’s very special part of Finnish culture that overall in Europe, I think it’s much more common to live in a rental. In Finland, people usually live in owned apartments. And this boom of the market lately, last maybe 10, 15 years, really encouraged people to buy several apartments with loans and then rent them out. We made far too many, too small studios in Helsinki and that’s not sustainable for the future as well if certain areas are too homogeneous.

But I think historically we have been really good in Helsinki that it’s mixed in every block that there’s social housing there’s different mid Ownerships in a way that there are different ways that you can buy your own apartment And that’s something I think we talk about fairly little And it’s something that we should be much more proud of.

But the housing market has been in crisis for maybe one year now. I think all the privately owned projects are not going further at this moment. And they’re building more social housing, but the politicians are considering new alternatives for this quality priced home that you get a little bit better quality for less money. And I think that we are waiting for the new answer for this. And as a designer or architect, I think it’s really sad that if we don’t have that possibility anymore, because that’s the best quality of our recent architecture, the quality price controlled houses. 

Tim Abrahams: When you say that there’s more ownership in Finland than other European countries. Perhaps we should possibly qualify that the mechanisms of ownership are quite unique in Helsinki.

Selina Anttinen: It’s housing corporations. 

Tim Abrahams: You don’t necessarily own the apartment you own stock in a housing corporation, which allows you access to your home. You are almost buying part of the stock to get the house, which suddenly creates a sense of collectivity.

Selina Anttinen: Yeah. In one housing corporate cooperative, it’s always one ownership type. But still that creates a sense of it’s a common decision making as well for the housing. So all the owners, they decide together when they need to do renovation of, or if they want to have different kinds of garden planning or whatever are the everyday needs in, in that housing cooperative. So I think that’s special.

And then what is special as well is that we don’t have so much of the shared living alternatives in the historical housing stock, but also not in contemporary housing markets. So we don’t have these common living alternatives that a group of people would share a flat, like, for example, in Switzerland.

There’s lots of this kind of development lately that in Finland, we call Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa. It’s called “it’s my house and my rules” and you own your own private space. And then you have your rules within the housing cooperative that’s still it’s your world in a way. That’s something that we try to develop because there’s lots of people that don’t necessarily want to live alone In and there’s more and more of our single households in Helsinki and of course some of them need to have their own private space, but then we are thinking about new alternatives and in some of our most recent housing there are these Common Rental Apartments that you can decide with a group of your friends and then you rent in a new housing cooperative. The flat is designed such that they each one have this neutral room which is a little bit bigger and with its own lock on the door and then you have a shared bigger kitchen and bigger living room and then some auxiliary spaces: the bathrooms and so on. So that’s something that we try to develop in the new areas because it’s diversifies the needs of people 

Tim Abrahams: To leap from that to the building that we saw yesterday. Please, can you tell us a little bit about that building, which is in a very prominent position in Helsinki. Perhaps you could just describe the site. 

Selina Anttinen: We have been focusing on mass timber, constructions and architecture and this is one of the examples. And the site is very precious. It’s part of a Helsinki historical seafront and called national landscape. It’s funny name, but maybe underlines the importance of the place in a way 

Tim Abrahams: That’s a description of the heritage quality which comes with certain rules. 

Selina Anttinen: And there are many heritage qualities. It’s next to the big cathedrals of Helsinki and presidential palaces just behind. And there’s this Alvar Aalto 60 sugar cube, a modernistic masterpiece that has been very controversial among Helsinki people, the architecture, but that used to be the old Enso goods site and head [00:30:00] office, the forest industry company.

And they are the ones moving to this new building that we have designed. Then there are anchor tenants that are a hotel and Stora, a Nordic forestry industrial company. One of their big product is mass timber CLT and LVL, but their headquarters have always been made out of concrete or stone. They needed a new head office, but there was a big invitational competition four years ago with five competitive teams. The site is really precious and it’s part of the site that is developing inside the very center of Helsinki, that used to be the ferry harbor and industrial harbor.

And now this is the first building to open up the gradual transition of that area into an open public space. It will take 10 years and there’s lots of things that need to be done. For example, as the sea level rises, so we need to build a seaside bank again and lift it up one and a half meters.

And that’s something that we did already with the building. But I think it’s the biggest mass timber building. And what is special about it, is the whole structure is mass timber, that it’s only four stories high because it follows the requirements of that preserved city area.

Tim Abrahams: What’s the red brick building behind there? It’s beautiful.

Selina Anttinen: It’s an old customs building, I think. It’s one of its kind. It used to be a harbour on the next side, the ferry harbour and the industrial harbour on the next side. You have always passed the building and noticed that it’s a very beautiful building, but people never had the ability to look at it. And now I think it’s very beautiful when you walk out of our building and you see all the beauty of that existing building. 

Tim Abrahams: And also from the wonderful roof terrace you’ve created on the fourth floor, you’ve got the whole harbour on one side, but then actually looking back to the city, you can suddenly see that the customs building architect has looked at the large Orthodox church behind it and has picked up little details and is having a conversation with that building in a way that I’d never really noticed before. 

Selina Anttinen: And I think the rooftop terrace is really good for observing the dialogue in between the buildings because there are some things that I have never noticed before because we haven’t been able to look at the old historical city from that angle and that’s the fantastic thing about new architecture that you need to be careful about what you introduce, but you have so many possibilities to have new perspectives and views for people that happened with Kaisa Library, but I think especially here when the southern harbor is under development now for 10-15 coming years, so I think this is a very good opportunity.

Nice viewpoint for watching and understanding architecture and the historical rules and who broke the rule and what happened then and what kind of dialogue buildings are having with each other.

Tim Abrahams: I tell you who broke a lot of the rules, Alvar Aalto broke a lot of the rules.

Selina Anttinen: He started it. 

Tim Abrahams: I mean I’m a huge fan of his work, I can understand why that, actually your building really helps tie it in because it actually sits quite, previously it sat slightly awkwardly. 

Selina Anttinen: And I think it was always a little bit higher than the rest of the buildings that were behind it. And I think the most controversial part was that there was a really beautiful building before. So that’s what people remember. So that’s part of the criticism that it was done in the period when they took down the historical buildings more than nowadays.

And that’s always part of the conversation. But it was definitely not meant to be alone there. And there were lots of extension plans of that building that are in the country’s book collections, quite nicely documented. That’s interesting to read, these different alternative futures and which one is the one that at the end appears there. I think there has been so much conversation . There are 600 proposals for the Architecture and Design Museum, which is under judging there in the neighboring block. So I think we have lots of alternative and our building is the first one to state one opinion or have it solid there. 

Tim Abrahams: There’s a sign of the way it’s going to develop. It’s very interesting you bring up the Architecture and Design Museum, which would be on the opposite side of the habour to your building. Oh, please, can you pronounce the name of the building?

Selina Anttinen: Ah, Katoleina Kallaituri. That doesn’t have a name in English, actually. It’s got 

Tim Abrahams: The only translation I’ve seen is Katoleina Pier. but it’s very interesting where the Architecture and Design Museum is located, that’s a site which was where the Guggenheim proposal was in the 2010s, wasn’t it? 

 

Selina Anttinen: Yes. That’s the site. So there has been lots of conversation and talk and  proposals already there. And now there was this competition about the master plan behind it. And now the open architectural competition for the architecture and design museum.

Tim Abrahams: A lot of, the way in which the conversation around the Guggenheim happened was, very interesting because the conversation was well, here’s all these different alternatives to it and then actually “no”. 

Selina Anttinen: There were beautiful proposals for the Guggenheim, but I think at the end it was that Helsinki people didn’t want to have the Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki, in a way that it’s not, it was not about architecture maybe at the end, it was more about the content. 

Tim Abrahams: And the mechanism to deliver it, and who would be paying, and who was taking the risk.

Selina Anttinen: It’s very demanding. The building site as well is next to the sea and with all the historical foundations and then of course I think there are certain parts of the city that need to have a long dialogue before there will actually be something built. 

Tim Abrahams: So the 623 proposals for the architecture and design competition that have been published yesterday, I think they all went online. I don’t know what’s the etiquette? Can I ask you whether one of yours is in there? 

Selina Anttinen: No comments. I’m respecting the culture, the funny heritage of our anonymous culture that we don’t publicly say. Of course we talk with our colleagues if we did it or we didn’t, but we don’t publish the idea that we have done or and actually you cannot publish your work before, before you The competition has ended, then you will be rejected.

That it’s supposed to be anonymous. It’s not just some rule, it’s an actual rule. 

Tim Abrahams: But it’s interesting because one of my questions was going to be, you answered it, is is it the competition culture, is it legal or is it cultural? And it’s a bit of both, isn’t it?

Selina Anttinen: Yeah, we have rules. And they have developed during history. The very important thing about it is that it’s always public, that when we are, and it’s part of maybe the building rules in Finland, and how to develop the land use, that there should always be proposals that you can compare, that which are the alternative possibilities, and the open dialogue, and then they always write the report.

And there’s the justification that when you go back in the archives, you know what were the ideas, the values back then, how did they make the decision, what was the architectural points that were appreciated back then. And you can trace back the long history of architectural competition, because if you don’t have that, you don’t actually have the history in a way, or the knowledge about that.

It’s really interesting to see how different people, with different juries, made certain kind of decisions, because that tells us so much about society and the values when you go back there, that of course you can see them in the building as well, but sometimes the variety behind the actually realized building is large and there were so many different streams behind the actual realization that it might be that already the one was outdated and they were really bold and more progressive proposals behind or that we know as one of its kind and all the others already represented the past world. 

Tim Abrahams: Very interesting. We started off talking about competitions. We’ve ended up talking about competitions. Thank you so much. 

Selina Anttinen: Thank you, Tim. 

Tim Abrahams: Thank you. Brilliant. 

Selina Anttinen: Lovely to talk with you. 

Tim Abrahams: Thank you. 

I’ve traveled a lot for my work. I work as an international correspondent, a Contributing Editor to Architectural Record and it takes me to many different places. And one of the things that I enjoy about that process is coming across people like Selina Anttinen and Vesa Oiva. Anttinen Oiva Architects collectively. Because they illuminate something wonderful about the place that they come from. 

It’s very interesting, the culture of competitions in Helsinki, to me, it annoys me when people deride the sheer wealth of different projects, say, that the Guggenheim competition prompted or this year for the Architecture and Design Museum competition in Helsinki, the latter of which received over 600 entries. 

I saw one so-called critic going through what he decided were the worst entries and just laughing at them, failing to understand or not wanting to understand that this open call is part of the democratic cultural Finland: a means of exploring the wider ideas behind the form of architecture, rather than the closed shop of the invited entrants and a series of blocked off discussions, which should be out in the open. What I love about Anttinen Oiva is that they embrace what they call this imaginary context by which I think is perhaps better translated as the context of the imagination that building’s also contained in their formal language. There’s something about the use of the aula, the curve, the circular space that suggests another order of context and a context of the imagination.

I wanted to bring them to your attention, but I also wanted to bring the culture of architectural competitions in Finland to your attention. I also wanted to highlight the fact that here is a system of housing in which ownership is high, but other forms of tenure are also integrated. That’s why I travel: to learn. 

 Bye-bye. 

 

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