lwsdm

(Rating 4/5)
ISBN: 952-5195-20-1
Language: Finnish/English
Publisher: MFA

From Wood to Architecture presents 17 projects from around Finland which use wood in different ways. Wood is perhaps the fundamental building material of Finnish architecture and recently has enjoyed a new life being used more and more again not only in traditional ways but also as this book shows in modern uses as a tecnical product, eg glulam beams, cladding or premade insulated panels, and the projects here show off almost all of these uses in recent Finnish Architecture. The exhibition, accompanying the book runs for only a few more days but the book adds four well written essays about wood more on which I will write another time. The book is excellent with the summer houses and the Kärsämäki wooden church in particular the pick of them.
Note I can’t locate this book for sale at amazon.co.uk or .com. Go to mfa website to order, the text is both in english and finnish.
photos of exhibition and press photos below (here for full size)
For a full list of the 17 projects see below….
(more…)

A wise old man once told me, if you’re looking for someone to have sex with, you live in the city; if you’ve got someone to have sex with, you live in the suburbs. Sometimes I think it may be as simple as that.

the article this quote is from is actually about density in cities and what role it plays in the life of the city. But I couldn’t resist te quote.

(from kottke.org)

For the Architect or product designer it can still be quite hard to track down products on the web if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, but one website materialexplorer is really useful. You can search by type or property (if you want something soft and fluffy for instance!) or how about trying to track down those funky tiles that mvrdv used in their last project, then just type in the arcitects name. Only a couple of problems, you have to register, and the database doesn’t appear so large at the moment. I think they are specialising in new materials and definitely better for product and interior designers. The registering is not all bad either, you can build up a neat folder system of materials, forinstance for differet projects. A really nice idea well executed it will become more and more useful as more products are added. Check it out.

photos left to right are;
sensacell an interactive led surface mountable almost anywhere.
liquidfloor walk on the tiles, the liquid inside moves and swirls around.
plywall element by Finnish designer Jouko Kärkkäinen.
vectogramm for transferring images onto sheet materials (concretes, mdf, plastics) by means of milling technology. This is so cool!

We went to the Olympic stadium on the last Friday of the 2005 World athletics championships. The Venue of Helsinki and the stadium was a last minute venue after London pulled out, and although they lost money they also didn’t do much in the away of upgrading the stadium beforehand. I was reminded about this when I read a piece about it in axis of aevil so I thought I’d post something about it. Most people going there must have noticed the flaking paint round the windows and worn away veneer on the timber cladding. I thought that it was a refreshing change to acknowledge the age of the facility and not bankrupt the country for the sake of the national image (see this article on the greek olympic debacle).The stadium also is really nice and the style for me recalls an earlier less professional sporting age now sadly long gome. After the games there have been some calls to build a new stadium or upgrade this one which seems a bit of an odd choice of where to spend the money if it may not be used properly. See also the original Hesingin Sanomat article.

Photo above by me (I got three before the batteries went)of 1952 Olympic stadium designed by Yrjö Lindgren & Toivo Jäntti renovated by Markku Aalto 1994.

Update

bbc article also found re greek stadium

The web is full of new things to sign up for, some more or less usefull. This is my favourite for a long time though…You can sign up here to be a zombie extra in ‘the best dutch zombie movie not yet made’. Technically I think you’ll actually be a German-football-hooligan-nazi-zombie but well you will get to look like your face is melting and walk really slowly with your arms outstretched on a beach moaning so who could say no?

Or maybe you prefer to blast some zombies instead in your favourite architectural creation, so you may find me this weekend shooting zombies in Villapro. (from Thingsmagazine)

Zaha Hadid has been in the press this week in a very interesting article both about her and her office. She is up for the 2005 Stirling Prize, and the bets are already going on. Have your say who will win at archiseek. Early betting here and for some further gossip on Hadid (inded any other starchitect too!) go to the gutter.

A design district has been ‘launched’ in Helsinki. That there was one already is self evident by just walking through that bit of the old town. You can download the pdf from the finnishdesign website although not from the english side! I have been noticing the same thing as Darren that finnish websites are often badly laid out. I know that you may be thinking its just a moan from a non finnish speaker but isn’t the whole point of the campaign to attract visitors into the design boutiques of Helsinki? A finn is probably going to know about it all already.
One really different shop to go to has got to be Secco which is all about recycled products!

Something pertinent to me in this quote I feel…

Any architectural project takes five years; no single enterprise - ambition, intention, need - remains unchanged in
the contemporary maelstrom. Architecture is too slow. Yet, the word “architecture” is still pronounced with certain reverence (outside of the profession). It embodies the lingering hope - or the vague memory of hope - that shape, form, coherence could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily.”

-Rem Koolhaas (in content)

A good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Current Finnish Architecture is Jussi Tiainen’s photography.
He has photographed almost all of the best current architecture around in finland. Some more of his work is posted here.
You can look at his books here.

photo by Jussi Tiainen of Metla House

About this site
I thought make a post to introduce this site. lwsdm is me Lewis Martin a scottich architect living in Helsinki, Finland and this is my personal website. I came to live and work in finland about a year ago, and I thought I would make this website as much to inform myself but also for anyone out there. I’ve lived and worked in Edinburgh, Newcastle, London, Madras, Amsterdam, Helsinki.
You can check my other online profiles at
flickr. lwsdm
last.fm lwsdm
del.icio.uslewis