Recently, having overcome the ostracism towards a type of formulation considered excessively individualistic and abandoning the schematisms of industrial prefabrication, the most up-to-date currents have oriented themselves not only towards the recovery of the great Finnish modern season, but also towards markedly quality research. Two are the driving forces, protagonists among other things in a lively debate: Helsinki and the northernmost area of the Gulf of Bothnia. In the capital, strong of an international primacy based on the lesson of A. Aalto, the exponents of the ” Oulu school ” at the university of the same name have challenged a lack of attention to ” regionalisms ”, that is the most traditional indigenous buildings.
On its behalf, the center responds by calling H. Deilmann, Aalto’s disciple and collaborator, to complete the Essen Opera House, and inviting R. Erskine to erect a suburban nucleus 60 km from Helsinki. The Essen Opera House dates back to 1959-64 and represents a sort of ideological manifesto of the master’s thought: the nine staggered and interpenetrated levels in a sinuously expanded envelope, inaugurated in 1989, constitute a full-blown homage to the “ technology of use ” conjugated with the typical Aaltian humanizing tendency. In Malminkartanu, Erskine reaffirms, in the houses characterized by spatial-volumetric variations (1970-87), a lexicon perhaps not as spectacular as that of Essen, however undoubtedly marked by a clarity mostly free from vernacular typifications.
On the other hand, in the last decade, the leardeship of R. Pietilä (b. 1923), marginalized for a long time due to the innovative radicality of his experiments, has slowly established itself. Also in the latest works, such as the project for the presidential residence in Helsinki, the Finnish embassy in New Delhi (1963-85) and the splendid library of Tampere (1978-86), Pietilä, with his wife R. Paatelainen, say goodbye now like the most original Scandinavian designers, they do not deny neither the initial neo-expressionist poetics nor the belief in a strong landscape integration, concretized not by mimesis but by contrast.
According to topschoolsintheusa, the small Finnish building in New Delhi stands out for the rigorous functionality of the drafts, which however appear unnerved by the angular and broken sequence of the brilliant canopies, while the library can be defined as the masterpiece of the atelier: imaginative, visionary, new in contents and forms, it is a monumental block with an antigeometric perimeter, almost informal, developed on a computer-designed spiral layout. Inside, a single, vast vaulted space spreads over two floors containing the natural history museum, the institute for adult education, laboratories, classrooms, services and four specialized libraries.
At first a tributary of Pietilä, then, after a yielding to postmodernist rhetoric, perched on national-romantic positions, the Oulu school is currently represented by L. and A. Louekari. In their Mikonkari recreational complex in Lohenpyrstö they have managed to purify the material balance of R. Steiner’s Dornach from the gloomy Central European atmosphere to establish, in the variously inclined natural wood surfaces, a cordial, “ light ” note, in full agreement with the ‘around. With this same perspective, J. Leiviskä operate with the elegant parish in Vantaa, all played on vertical rhythms, and G. Grotenfeld, author of numerous wooden constructions, including the holiday home near Juva, where the complicated ” geometric disconnection ” alters, according to deconstructivist forms, the single-family system. Also in Oulu, but in a marginal position with respect to the colorful university, built after 1968 as part of a policy of capillary interventions on the territory, I. Okkonen and M. Rotko (one of the creators of thestudent campus) have erected (1983) a double crystal pyramid (the greenhouses), attached to a low service building for studios and laboratories, with an eye – catching high-tech component.
Index of the hodgepodge of ferment in progress, two diametrically opposed examples: the House of City in Helsinki, by Jauhiainen-Nuuttila (1982), sober and modern, and the community headquarters in Kainuu, by Koiso-Kauttila (1984), surreptitiously evocative for a portal with twin columns.
