Good wood.

The exhibition From Wood to Architecture at The Museum of Finnish Architecture presents 17 recent buildings in Finland, many by young Finnish architects unknown in the international architectural arena.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Wood is the oldest building material known to man--the earliest known wooden artefacts date back some 14 000 years. As two thirds of Finland is covered by forests, it is hardly surprising that timber is the national building material. And as climate change becomes more of an issue, builders are increasingly encouraged to build more ecologically. Wood, a renewable and natural material, has an important role to play with respect to climate change policy and programmes, since its use helps reduce greenhouse gases: the carbon stored in wooden buildings is kept out of the atmosphere. A well designed, well kept timber building lasts hundreds of years and if it needs to be demolished the wood components can be recycled and reused.

Although its use as a structural and cladding material in Finnish construction has declined considerably over the last forty years, wood is now experiencing a revival, with new opportunities for structural use and surface treatment. This is reflected in the From Wood to Architecture exhibition in Helsinki. The buildings featured employ wood in a variety of ways, traditional and innovative, painted and natural, from glued timber and laminates to solid logwork, but always with inherent elegance and clean lines.

From Wood to Architecture is housed in one large room moderated by a dividing curtain of hanging planks of wood that you can touch and smell (and, if so inclined, swing) as you work your way round the numerous large-scale photographs, explanatory texts and models. The buildings exhibited include Heikkinen & Komonen's cultural centre in Kuhmo which has an asymmetrically sloping turf roof growing heather and lingonberry, the Karsamaki shingle church by Anssi Lassila, built using eighteenth-century methods, a luminous chapel in Turku by Matti Sanaksenaho with a timber structure clad in copper, and the lookout tower in Helsinki by Ville Hara composed of a strong but light meshed shell structure of timber strips (AR December 2003). There are also several villas in coastal or lakefront settings, and an annex for the University of Oulu Department of Architecture by Claudia Auer and Niklas Sandas.

Among the larger projects are the Finnish Forest Research Institute in Joensuu, which is the biggest office building in Finland, and the Sibelius Concert Hall in Lahti by Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka, both of which have loadbearing timber structures. Timber is an excellent material for long-span structures: the tensile strength of birch compared to its mass is higher than that of ordinary steel and far superior to concrete.

Appropriately, one of Finland's best-known wooden buildings is on show in the next room. The exhibition Returning Home

Sibelius's Ainola (with the same exhibition dates) features Ainola, an artist's villa built for the composer Jean Sibelius in 1904 by his friend Lars Sonck, who, like Sibelius, played a leading role in the development of Finnish National Romanticism.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

From Wood to Architecture until 4 September 2005, Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, Finland. www.mfa.fi

Photographs (clockwise from top left): Jussi Tiainen, Jussi Tiainen, Matti Sanaksenaho and Kimmo Raisanen.