Most of the great men in history have loved cats : Churchill, Newton (inventor of the cat-flap), Dickens, Abe Lincoln, P,G.Wodehouse. By contrast, many of the villains have hated cats , or preferred dogs: Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin.

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….

as follows (architect, project name, location, year of completion):

Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka:
Sibelius Hall concert and congress centre, Lahti, 2000

Kari Järvinen and Merja Nieminen:
Laajasalo church, Helsinki, 2003

Anssi Lassila:
Kärsämäki wooden church, Kärsämäki, 2004

Reijo Jallinoja:
Kierikki stone age centre, Yli-Ii, 2001

Mikko Heikkinen and Markku Komonen:
Juminkeko centre of Carelian culture, Kuhmo, 1999

Claudia Auer and Niklas Sandås:
Department of architecture annex, Oulu, 2003

Ville Hara:
Korkeasaari lookout tower, Helsinki, 2002

Niko Sirola:
Cafe Carbon, Helsinki, 2000

Mikko Kaira:
Misteli day care centre, Vantaa, 1996

Jyrki Tasa:
House Into, Espoo, 1998

Kristian Gullichsen:
Holiday home Gullichsen, Hiittinen, 1993

Olavi Koponen:
Villa Långbo, Kemiö, 1994-2000

Erkki Kairamo and Aulikki Jylhä:
Villa Aulikki, Hiittinen, 1995-2003

Ulla Rahola:
Interior restoration of St. Olaf’s Church in Tyrvää, Vammala, 2003

Matti Sanaksenaho
St. Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel, Turku, 2005

Antti-Matti Siikala
The Finnish Forest Research Institute, Joensuu, 2004

Hannele Grönlund
Studio Silja Rantanen, Karjaa, 2001

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!