Fine finnish.

FINLAND

By Roger Connah. London: Reaktion Books. 2005. [pounds sterling]16.95

Finland has had a reputation for fine modern architecture for over a century. Roger Connah's latest book on the subject sets out to explain why, during the twentieth century, such a small country has made such a large contribution. Connah divides history broadly into decades, an approach that (apart from the '70s) works quite well. Chapters usually begin with a political, economic and cultural summary of the period they cover--welcome analysis of the climate in which the buildings were designed too often ignored in architectural history.

Though preoccupations changed from decade to decade, Connah believes that there are certain characteristics that are common to the architectural culture of the whole twentieth century--and much earlier. One of these is sisu--inner strength or guts, developed over the centuries as part of a national culture that traditionally had to deal with foreign occupation and an extreme climate. Nationalism is another key element in Finnish culture, fostered by a language that is incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Yet since the late nineteenth century, modernism (in every sense) has been an essential part of the national mental make-up. Like some other countries that won independence from the great European empires around the end of the First World War (particularly Czechoslovakia), the nation's psyche emerged as a product of creative interaction between a desire to shake off the undemocratic past, and a yearning for roots. As Connah points out, Finnish architects evolved a variety of restrained Modernism that became identified with national character.

Yet the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by Aalto, who was far from being an austere Modernist. Rema Pietila apparently used to say of Aalto that he was like a great tree in the forest under which the shade was so intense that few dared to approach. When the tree was felled, a huge clearing opened; few knew what to do. By the end of the century, Aalto, having been attacked by the generation of '68 for wilfulness and folksiness, was rehabilitated as 'a critical humanist' by some of the very people who had derided him in the first place. His legacy was again to be stirred into the national architectural recipe.

Connah suggests that this concoction is, at least partly, devised and guarded by a relatively small group of Helsinki-based architects who have commanded the architectural museum, the professional magazine Arkkitehti, and generally run the national brand--people like Juhani Pallasmaa, Marku Komonen, Marja-Riitta Norri, Arno Ruusuvuori and others whose work has often appeared on these pages. Connah suggests that they have contrived to suppress dissent and ruthlessly pursued the programme of relating Finnish culture to Modernism. Why, he asks, are Pallasmaa's phenomenological views on placemaking and human dignity repeated so often in national discussion? He suggests that national self-censorship and 'lack of courage' are part of the answer. It might be because Pallasmaa is right.

Other talents are marginalised he says. He may be correct. But judged in a humanist balance, many of the positions opposed to the Helsinki school are no more than second-rate rebellions that follow international fashions. The pop PoMo-esque buildings of people like Kai Wartiainen and Jyrki Tasa scarcely have enough substance to deflect the main current. Pietila never grew into the Aalto figure as some hoped when the great tree fell--his architecture was simply not profound enough.

Connah is not an architect, and he rarely engages with the phenomenal presence of the buildings he mentions. And he sometimes goes a bit haywire when he tries to describe them in objective ways, for instance of a project by Revel he says it 'was suspended by steel bars drawn to the facades from elevator towers'. His prose sometimes hovers between demotic and didactic, and the book suffers greatly from lack of illustrations of many of the works mentioned (particularly the less well-known ones). In calling for change from national Modernism, Connah seems to be motivated by nothing more than formal concerns, not human issues. Yet, until he comes to contemporary controversies, his book (the first in the publisher's Modern Architecture in History series) is a thoughtful, inclusive and wide-ranging survey of a very rich national architectural culture deeply imbued with sisu.

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