The former State Railway warehouses are located on Töölönlahti Bay in the heart of Helsinki. Different plans for the area have been proposed for almost a century; the most important of these include Pro Helsingfors by Eliel Saarinen dating from 1918 and Alvar Aalto's city centre plans from the 1960s. The railway company vacated the premises in the late 1980s and new buildings are now rising in the area. The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma was completed in 1998 and the HQ of the Sanoma publishing company in 1999. According to the plans, the warehouses will be demolished to make way for the new music centre. Yet official planning has failed to pay appropriate attention to the quality of the warehouses and the activities they have facilitated. The planning machine has taken demolition for granted. We at Livady Architects are interested in broadening the sphere of discussion in order to avoid making decisions about the warehouses and Helsinki city centre based on false premises.
"Public space is not something essentially defined through 'space', but through 'public': the community. The city as a public space opens up wherever there is a dispute to be resolved, where the clash of different desires hangs over and penetrates into the space and connects some of the desires." (Rajanti 1999: 61)
Rome in the year zero; Helsinki now. The Antique and the Modern; an urbs and a small metropolis on the verge of the third millennium. Time is not a thread, and there are no inherent links between these two cities. Rome is hailed as the Eternal City, while Helsinki is judged relatively young by most people. In 2000, Helsinki was one of the European Cities of Culture, while Rome has hardly felt any need to apply for such a title. Rome has fountains and pine trees and all those roads.
Yet the very idea of an eternal city must be a misunderstanding. There is nothing less eternal than a city. A city is a moment. A city is something that hangs.
The city hangs in a dispute that remains unresolved. One of the topical disputes in Helsinki concerns the former State Railway warehouses on Töölönlahti Bay. It is unclear if such a trivial dispute can be compared to the sublime, violent one connected to the establishment of ancient Rome: Remus was killed in the crowd at the hand of his twin. Romulus became king, founded the city and named it after himself - only to be killed later by patricians one stormy night. Yet the dispute over the warehouses is also interesting, and to keep it open and up in the air may bear more significance than first meets the eye.
Following the trail of the dispute concerning the warehouses reveals something new about Helsinki, something that is not obvious, something that is only just emerging. Perhaps the seed of an urban community is germinating in the warehouses. Perhaps Helsinki has been given a public space in all its intrinsic complexity as if by accident. Perhaps Helsinki, the urban experience and the social reality, is changing. Public space is not something essentially defined through 'space', but through 'public'.
Let us start with the basics. What is it like to be in the warehouses? How does it feel?
There is something special about the site: the space, the old halls, the grass springing up between the stones, the sounds of the city somewhere in the distance... Although the rails have been dismantled, it is not difficult to imagine the clinking sound of wagons being joined together, men shouting, the steam and the smell of coal. And weighers warming by their stoves in winter in their tiny cabins, and fork-lift truck drivers so drunk that they bump into the door frames. This explains the damage to the frames at fork height.
Brave New Helsinki is growing around the warehouses. It is a booming city with expensive business palaces rising on its expensive plots. It is also a city of fancy cafés and cultural living-rooms.
All that is new in Helsinki is eager to assure its openness. The Museum of Contemporary Art has no thresholds, bringing art close and making it accessible. The glazed façade of the Sanoma HQ is likewise open and its corporate plaza invites everyone to drop in. A shopping mall is a street and a street is a shopping mall. Yet there are a number of codes in both shopping malls and museum cafés. You have to dress the right way, you must know how to conduct yourself, you have to be interested, you must fit in. In the warehouses, the codes are not equally clear: the place is neither fixed nor defined. This is what makes the warehouses unique, and every fully-developed city centre plot and finished 'public space' only adds to their value. Unbranded, undefined spaces, waste lands are being weeded out in today's Helsinki.
Cities are being turned into products, something that can be easily bought, sold and exchanged. Waste lands remain beyond this logic - for the time being. Waste land is something that you can experience, something with which you can gradually build a relationship, something which you can hug, a place where you can dance. The warehouses provide a 'waste land' with a form.
During its history, Helsinki has been a city of central power and image fabrication. The Senate Square was Russian Czars' visiting card; newly independent Finland expressed its faith in the bulky Parliament House; Olympics of 1952 were a national effort, to take some examples. People who live in Helsinki have always been somehow in a second row, when big development issues are at hand. At best, they have appropriated afterwards the new spaces and constructions of the power, as has happened for the Senate Square (Ilmonen 1999). In mid-1980s this relation started to change. New forms of urban culture and consumption started to enliven the gray and cold scene. Bars, cafes, new forms of media and popular events, which were mainly individual, grassroot initiatives, started to convert Helsinki to a more "European" city, to an alive and friendly city - to peoples' city instead of a city of power and control (Ruoppila & Cantell 2000).
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The warehouses have played a central role in this cultural change and reform. Thanks to their open and undefined quality, they have become the city's most popular and versatile venue for events. Their broad courtyard has provided a stage for a snowboarding competition and a Middle Ages festival; the halls have housed business promotion events and raves alike. A function that most people easily connect to the place is the flea market, which was the most popular in Helsinki between 1992 and 1998 with 400,000 visitors annually (April-October). The warehouses have become a place where citizens belong. People have found ways to use them and make them significant. The warehouses have become a symbol of bustling urban culture (Mäenpää 2000).
There is nothing strange about the popularity of the warehouses, as they are a textbook example of an ideal space for urban events. The new urban events of Helsinki in the 1990s found their way to a small number of centrally located venues, all characterised by ambivalence. Although these places are central to the urban structure and historically significant, they are simultaneously in the margin, either visually or in terms of meaning. Features connected to the spatial configuration of the city and meanings given by citizens - mental landscapes - are strongly intertwined on Töölönlahti Bay and the warehouses (Lehtovuori 2001).
The warehouses of Töölö goods station were designed by Bruno F. Granholm, the favourite architect of the State Railways, and completed in 1899. The warehouses became a synapse linking the railways to the street system of the city. Goods arrived from around the world and left the city for faraway places. During the Second World War, the warehouses provided temporary accommodation for Karelian refugees and storage room for their belongings.
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The cargo warehouses are a document of the industrialisation of Helsinki, a manifestation of the production flow of a city that industrialised at a fast pace. The form of the buildings was dictated by the aim of the maximum amount of goods passing through a minimally short route. The warehouses are a sieve, a space of flows. Moreover, they are a living document of work and work methods. Their façades are logical, systematic brickwork with their 630,000 hand-made bricks; the roofs are supported by hand-riveted trusses, manufactured by Peiner Walzwerke in Germany.
The features of industrial architecture contribute to the practical side of the event potential of the warehouses. They are well suited to mass events: external and internal spaces are feasibly connected; all spaces are highly versatile thanks to their rawness; there is plenty of covered outer area, and the size of the place can accommodate events of all sizes. Moreover, rents have remained at a moderate level because of the lack of heating and the rough overall appearance of the place.
The warehouses are a state of mind. They are a popular, significant venue for a variety of events. Their architectural and historical value is undeniable. Why do some people want to demolish them?
The professional planners of the city are used to thinking about the city from above. They can hardly be bothered to feel their way around or linger, preferring to let their gaze sweep majestically over the landscape. In his essay "Walking in the City" Michel de Certeau explains his experience about watching New York from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center:
"To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of 'seeing the whole', of looking down on, totalising the most immoderate of human texts." (de Certeau 1993: 152)
To see from a distance, as a whole, is something fascinating, intoxicating. City planning has turned this intoxication into a professional practice. According to de Certeau, planning transforms urban reality into a concept of a city, replacing the variety of a city lived in and its multiple agents by an anonymous, apparently rational subject, the city itself. This city-subject is then visualised in order to make it controllable and manageable, with the map and statistics as the most important tools. Although it is obvious that the visualised city is only part of the urban reality, planning only recognises as real what it has made visible by its own initiative. What remains without is essentially Other, 'sentiment' perhaps, or as Jouni Häkli puts it, "irritating noise" (Dear and Häkli 1998: 64). This logic of abstraction is becoming fatal for the warehouses. Planning only sees its own reality, instead of the reality of the city.
With regard to the Töölönlahti Bay area, the internal reality of planning is crystallised in the idea of a "green wedge", a land policy contract dating from 1986 and a notion of what is important in a city. In all these three respects, the warehouses are inconvenient or "in the way". They block the imaginary vista from the south towards the north and the desired water pool, occupying an expensive plot which the city could use to make money, and their versatile, alternative uses do not seem to fit into the official cityscape dominated by the Parliament Building. This is why it is in the interests of Helsinki city planners and many politicians to demolish them.
But is it really such a problem that something is "in the way"? The problems lie rather in philosophy than actual reality. The activities and significance of the warehouses are a manifestation of a city lived in, the Helsinki of citizens. If the city is regarded as constant change and happening instead of frames carved in stone, the picture becomes entirely different.
In late 2000, our team compiled a re-use plan for the warehouses at the request of Oranssi, an NGO best known for promoting alternative youth housing policies. Our research proved that it is easy to reinforce the prerequisites of current uses with minor actions. Excessive refurbishment and use of money would actually do more harm than good, turning a spontaneous sprout into an institution.
The central qualities of our proposal are openness and accessibility, and with regard to the extent of renovation, lightness, feasibility and economy.
Accessibility and visibility would be improved by removing unnecessary fencing, protective walls and level differences. The area between Mannerheimintie street and the warehouses would be made into a single, open surface. The wide eaves obstructing the façades would be replaced by lightweight awnings facilitating the easy change of appearance according to season or event. Appropriate lighting would be provided.
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The interiors, the courtyard and its extensions would form a coherent venue for events. The basic surfaces - the hall and platform levels as well as the courtyard - would be clarified. The level difference between the platforms and the yard would be retained, but the edges would be turned into seating stairs which would not require railings. The platforms would also be made broader and extended towards Töölönlahdenkatu street. The raw, open, quality of the yard would be retained. Movable bridges contributing to the adaptability of the space would be a new introduction.
The warehouse halls would be provided with light thermal insulation and windows and doors would be renewed, thus creating a semi-warm space. The renovation would be inexpensive and cause no problems related to either aesthetical or technical issues such as humidity. The sliding doors would be repaired so as to make them easy to use. Warm and technical spaces would remain at the ends of the wings, as today.
A renovation such as this would further contribute to the attraction potential and usability of the warehouses, making them a true, viable constituent of the new city centre.
"In a city you must always take what already exists as the point of departure: it is not possible to simply empty the table, start from scratch and create something entirely new on your own terms. A city that is a work of art or a monument is distant, self-absorbed and unsuitable for living." (Rajanti 1999: 15)
Any given space is a convergence of multiple elements and agents. Similarly, to experience a space or a city is a phenomenon of convergence. There are directions and intentions, yet no one has total control over what actually happens. Both spaces and experiences are related to skills and survival in the labyrinth of Daedalos, a change in time. Why can we not accept this reality in city planning?
The warehouses are a "proto-urban space" (Chora 1999). Their position in the minds of the people of Helsinki and Helsinki cityscape manifests something essential indeed about this city. The dispute over the warehouses is an expression of affinity, of love. Contrary to the claims of the Helsinki planning authorities, the demolition of the warehouses is hardly an uncontroversial issue, and definitely not inevitable. An apparent basis for seeking the convergence of elements in this case would be the dynamic dialogue between the Parliament Building and the warehouses, for example.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
A shorter version of this text is published in Connah, Roger (ed.) (2002). 40/40. Young architects from Finland. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. Translation from Finnish: Valtasana Oy.
Certeau, Michel de (1993). Walking in the City. In During, Simon (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, Lontoo: Routledge (pp. 151-160).
Chora (Bunschoten, Raoul; Hoshino, Takuro; Marguc, Petra et al.) (1999). CHORA Manifesto. Daidalos 72/1999 (pp. 42-51).
Dear, Michael and Häkli, Jouni (1998). Tila, paikka ja urbanismi - uuden kaupunkitutkimuksen metodologiaa. Terra vol. 110, no 2 (pp. 59-68).
Ilmonen, Mervi (1999). Helsinki's Senate Square as a theatre of memory. In Beyond the Visible. Urban Research in Helsinki. Helsinki: City of Helsinki Urban Facts.
Lehtovuori, Panu (2001). Public space as a resource for urban policy. Notes on 1990s Helsinki. In Czarniawska, Barbara and Solli, Rolf (eds.), Organizing Metropolitan Space and Discourse, Liber (forthcoming).
Mäenpää, Pasi (2000). Urbaani elinvoimaisuus ja dialektiikka. In Rakennustaiteen seuran jäsentiedote 3:2000(pp. 8-10).
Rajanti, Taina (1999). Kaupunki on ihmisen koti. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto.
Ruoppila, Sampo & Cantell, Timo (2000). Ravintolat ja Helsingin elävöityminen. In Stadipiiri (eds.). Urbs. Kirja Helsingin kaupunkikulttuurista. Helsinki: City of Helsinki Urban Facts (pp. 35-53)