Instrument of light.

For the many foreign architects visiting Helsinki since 1984, a visit to the northern suburb of Myyrmaki has been essential. There, for the last decade, architect Juha Leiviska's luminous church has stood parallel to a railway line (AR June 1987). Now, with the completion of a new church in Mannisto, a suburb of the eastern Finnish provincial capital of Kuopio, those seeking the zenith in Leiviska's work will have to travel further.

Mannisto is a housing community to the north of the city centre. Its population had outgrown the existing parish church and sought the design and construction of a new. one, to be located nearby and to include parish centre requirements of a fellowship hall, day care and pensioner facilities. As with most church commissions in the last 20 years in Finland, the Lutheran authorities worked in conjunction with the Finnish Association of Architects to organise a competition for the church design. An invited competition was held in 1986 -- Leiviska's first prize was informed by the strategies and spatial orders confidently executed at Myyrmaki in 1984.

The structure, context and orientation of the new church's site proved to be ideally suited to Leiviska's predilections. At Myyrmaki, the adjacent rail line provided the impetus for the use of a strong protective wall which then ordered a linear sequence of progressively larger spaces in both plan and section. The church in turn opened out onto a small park. At Mannisto, Leiviska saw opportunities of bringing a similar order to an equally difficult site. The new church sits at the intersection of two wide and well-travelled roads, on a broad, gently graded east-facing slope backed by a series of rather bland five- and six-storey housing blocks. Leiviska has set the church and parish centre well back from the main north-south, boulevard, stringing the spaces in a line against the western edge of the site in the shadow of the housing blocks. While the housing does not force the same protective wall used at Myyrmaki (in fact, Leiviska set out very much to be a generous neighbour) its edge condition and the slope of the site at that point create the ordering site-specific line the architect sought. The design is cut back into the earth at this high end by a full level.

Leiviska has divided the massing of the worship spaces and fellowship hall from that of the parish centre to place the more diminutive spaces to the north against the backdrop of a housing block, leaving the crescendo of the planes enclosing the bell tower and church proper to stand clear against the crest of the slope, The roof terrace, accessible directly from the service road paralleling the western edge, reinforces this distinction of programme and volume by delineating and binding each to the other, allowing the vertical planes of Leiviska's tectonic language to rise dramatically from a defined horizontal plane. While the church and parish centre are accessible through a secondary entrance and stairs from the roof terrace, the spaces open up primarily to the east and south facing downhill, where Leiviska has layered the remaining unbuilt portion of the site with landscaped terraces low retaining walls and planting leading down to parking areas along the main boulevard. in the 1986 competition, Leiviska also planned two additional public buildings of similar stepped profiles and materials to continue the line of building along the western edge.

As with many Finnish churches, both historical and recent, the bell tower at Mannisto stands free of the sanctuary as a landmark visible above the surrounding tree line. Rising 30 metres above entrance level, the tower's pinwheeling planes of red brick and whitewashed concrete grandly summarise the dynamism of Leiviska's fundamental structural approaches. The red brick is a return to a colour and contrast palette used before Myyrmaki, at the St Thomas Church in Oulu. The vertical force and density of the tower's planes is countered by the delicate grilles and screens which enclose the bells themselves. On the exterior, the spatial consequences of these formal attitudes are not yet completely evident, but the overlapping and shifted brick planes that enclose the building create deep contrasts between light and shadow and break down the scale of the building's volumes.

Behind the bell tower, the three entrances on the downhill side -- into the church, the fellowship hall and into the parish facilities -- are signalled by an L or T shaped canopy or balcony. Inside is the aula, a generalised multifunctional spatial idea drawn from traditional Finnish farm courtyards, both corridor and reception area, a field of movement which also contains the figural elements of worship hall and parish centre. At Mannisto, the aula is an irregularly edged interior -- for Leiviski it is usually an edge shaped by the echelons of rooms bordering it -- a space which widens for points of entry, exit and stairs and then narrows to channel movement into and around rooms. The aula places the services (kitchens, lavatories and storage) against the retaining wall, and the hierarchically, and functionally more important spaces for worship, reception, administration and community activities are brought forward to the light on the exposed downhill side.

The foreshortened main worship space, 395 square metres with seating for 400, follows the lead Leiviski established in earlier church designs, whereby the distance between the narthex and the altar is shorter than the width of the space. The worship space is thus virtually square in plan, with a tiered choir and organ to one side and an adjacent fellowship hall on the other; this becomes part of the main space through a three part telescoping wall, providing for overflow seating on major occasions. The foreshortening has the dual effect of allowing Leiviski to introduce a cross-axis into his slim building volume and to acoustically reinforce the liturgical importance of the delivery of the sermon in the Lutheran ceremony. Furthermore, the worship space has been skewed 15 degrees off the building's orthogonal geometry. This simple tactic activates the sanctuary and its attendant spaces in plan and section, lengthening the internal axis of the nave (even while holding the altar to the outside wall) and providing for passage around the worship space to the other areas of the church. Most importantly, the angle of late morning sunlight as it strikes from right to left behind the altar is dramatically increased.

Enclosure all along this eastern facade is effected through staggered lengths of concrete walls sheathed in brick. The voids between them and the incisions in the roofs are enclosed by glazing set into steel frames. Leiviski makes use of doubled layers of glass in these voids; in the sanctuary, these do not function as openable windows, but rather as transparent walls which further reflect the passage of light. At the altar end, the architect placed non-structural vertical planes in front of the window walls to double the deflection of light. The overlapping layers of the dropped ceiling planes, even while concealing mechanical and electrical systems, also are held away from contact with the eastern facade, revealing the concrete beams underpinning the roof and spanning in both directions. The separations and stepping of the staggered walls are more frequent on the south-eastern exposure. Direct eastern sunlight is blocked out and only admitted through the steeply pitched roof windows above the altar end. To capture late morning light (the hours surrounding the morning service), there is an evocation of a similar effect which animates the altar end of Erik Bryggman's 1940 Resurrection Chapel near Turku.

A final stepping out of the series of angled walls draws one up a set of stairs into a balcony, again an expansion of space and form over the earlier Myyrmiki design. The balcony is suspended above the worship space, held free of nearby walls. Leiviski has set within the upper atmosphere a constellation of his lamps, white discs and golden reflectors floated at various heights.

Again as in Myyrmiki, in Mannisto Leiviski productively collaborated with an artist in the design of a colour scheme and art work to complement the interior of the church. Markku Paakkonen was selected from a separate competition. Working with Leiviski's design, he devised a system of controlled grids of colour to be applied directly to the vertical planes surrounding the altar. The colour grids are of tones of yellow, purple, blue, green. As light strikes against them, the reflected tones wash back against the walls on each side in an aura of soft colour. The total effect is magical, even in the dimmest of natural light, and goes one step further in blurring the edges of walls, roof structures and ceiling planes.

The collaboration of artist and architect only heightens the intended effect of Leiviska's, design: to become, as Finnish architectural historian Nils Erik Wikberg phrased it, `an instrument of light'. Leiviska's artistry is not only in the transformation of space into an uplifting, meditative experience through the diffusion of light -- it is, as importantly, in the economy of means with which he attains his end.

An attention to light informs every one of the spaces in the church, from the sanctuary to the day care rooms, and equal attention has been given to the surfaces, textures and details of each space. The utter simplicity and care with which he applies whitewashed wooden grilles, screens, louvres, and panels to adorn otherwise bare walls of brick and ceilings of concrete is soberly instructive.

Leiviska's church in Minnisto, both container and modulator of light, is one more step towards the ideal sacred space, part of a clear-sighted progression in a lifetime of work resonant with the lessons of the medieval master builders and Balthazar Neumann, of Bryggmann and Aalto, of simplicity and light.