Six journeys into architectural reality.

'The aim of the work of the architect is not a detached object but a part of a whole. The completed building and the more extended environment are ... sketches to be completed by users.' Marja-Riitta Norri's essay collages perceptions of the need for a multi-referential architecture which searches for authenticity and humanity in the post-modern world.

In the afterword to his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco suggests a way of speaking of important, serious and weighty matters without giving an impression of naivety or pathos: by resorting to quotation, appealing to a definition of the matter in hand made during a time of innocence. Eco's example is a man who loves a cultivated woman, and who must express his feelings indirectly: 'As Liala would say, I love you desperately.' By referring to a literary model, he avoids ridicule and adds an ironic touch suitable to the spirit of today while, at the same time, his message is conveyed to the intellectual lady he loves. Eco has given an example of his own straight-speaking by commenting that he would rather be a citizen of Sarajevo than of the Italy led by Silvio Berlusconi's government.

Architecture is, by its nature, a social genre of art. Its realisation demands large-scale social resources, labour and materials. Place, time and social situation form both the context of building and the limiting conditions of design. A working architect does not have an autonomous position in relation to the surrounding world: instead, he must work in constant dialogue with the users and makers of his buildings. This engagement divides architecture from the so-called liberal arts: a painter, for example, can, if he wishes, make totally subjective choices. In some exceptional commissions, architecture approaches free spatial art, but even then it has its public dimensions.

For this reason architecture is, basically, a serious matter. It affects everything: the built environment is part of everyday life. And in speaking of architecture, one cannot avoid the great, central problems of ethics. They are best approached through examples, through what has earlier been said and written. As the architect Aulis Blomstedt wrote: 'If you wish to find what is new, seek out what is oldest'.

Directions for the next millennium

Ten years ago, Italo Calvino prepared a series of lectures for Harvard University, a project that was interrupted by his death. The title of the series was 'Six Memos for the Next Millennium'. Each lecture deals with a quality, a value, which Calvino wished literature to convey to the next millennium. They are: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency. In Calvino's hands, as one may expect, these qualities receive unconventional content and meaning.

It is natural to draw architectural conclusions from Calvino's work, since his approach strongly recalls the working methods of the architect. His starting points which, he has said, developed as visual images in his mind - defy many of the conformities of human life, the demands of gravity, physiology and general behaviour. Calvino adapts these impossibilities to the starting points of ordinary life, creating for them a seamless reality which functions according to the rules of everyday convention - for example, the incredible, un-earthly life of the main character of The Baron in the Tree.

Lightness, for Calvino, means conquering gravity - and this has a direct connection with the continual juggling with the laws of gravity engaged in by architectural building. The composer Paavo Heininen has spoken in an interview of 'conquering the gravitational force of tradition'. But the aim of lightness can also refer to the architect's struggle with the ballast of surrounding reality. The sensation of heaviness, the resistance caused by the rigidity of the surrounding world, recalls an encounter with the petrifying gaze of Medusa. Just as Perseus, according to the myth, avoided being turned to stone by looking at Medusa through a mirror, the weight of the world can be conquered by assessing it from a different standpoint. The fixed state of the world can be divided into small, fragile, constantly moving parts. All is flow. The perception of qualities, the understanding of their meaning, takes place through polarities: '...the idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well'.

Exactitude refers, in Calvino's categories, to clear form, multiplicity to the diverse possibilities for the interpretation of content, the surprising whole created by discontinuities and unpredictable changes. The polarities of form can be found in nature: the flame, a regular form created by constant motion, and the crystal, an unchanging structural principle. According to Calvino, these opposites are combined in the city in a tension between geometric order and the complexity of human life. Sverre Fehn has compared poetic and architectural structures: in both, everything unnecessary must be removed in order that the essential may emerge. The tension between clarity and multiplicity, the interaction between form and content, the crystallisation of a rich content of thought into a simplified form, is the basic question of architecture. 'Things must be said as simply as possible, and no more', runs one of the crucial rules for good writing. 'In regard to human constructions, ugliness, "badness" as such, is not most feared, but emptiness, that is to say, lack of identity, lack of focus...,' writes Adrian Stokes.

Of Calvino's millennial qualities, quickness signifies economy of means of expression, the use of simple components to achieve a rich content, the adaptation of rhythm to the passing of time in such a way that every new part arouses expectation of a continuation. It is an understanding of effectiveness identical with that of the theses of architectural form presented by a group of Helsinki architects, under the leadership of Keijo Petaja, to the board of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne in Paris in 1954. In these theses, form and content are juxtaposed as equal starting points in human constructions. Beauty is seen as a constructional principle in nature. Form and beauty are manifested in proportion, and perfect beauty of proportion is often the result of a simple mathematical relationship. Thus beauty also expresses effectiveness. Quickness, for Calvino, has nothing to do with the hurry that constantly overshadows the work of the architect - his motto is festina lente, make haste slowly.

Calvino demands of literature a visual quality. Correspondingly, the recognition of all the senses can be demanded of architecture, taking as a starting point 'the individual at his weakest', as in Alvar Aalto's Paimio sanatorium. The newest technology was adapted to the needs of the hospital's users; the wards were filled with softly curving, hygienic furniture and noiseless washbasins, stretcher patients were stimulated by the white ceiling of the entrance lobby, on which the yellow of the floor was reflected ethereally, like pollen. Thus architectonic choices that appear technically insignificant - details and colours may be of great psychological importance to users. They express the architect's proficiency in relating the parts to the whole.

Nils Erik Wickberg writes: 'The clean, the clear, the mild ... A delicate fineness - a snow crystal, the network of veins of a transilluminated leaf - is as authentic a reflection of the eternal as the lava that petrifies after a destructive eruption. Tenderness is the innermost essence of all culture - for culture does indeed mean cultivation, care.' In his lecture at the first Alvar Aalto symposium, Colin St John Wilson referred to Adrian Stokes' definition of the task of art: to reconcile the profound conflict between two childhood experiences, realise a simultaneity of unity and difference, a synthesis of the Freudian 'sea of emotion' and the feeling of separation from the environment. The acceptance of opposites demands an approach that is now known as fuzzy logic - in opposition to black-and-white, either-or modes of thought.

The advantage of a fuzzy world-view is an acknowledgement of the relativity of things, whose starting-point is common sense: opposites are not mutually exclusive. The universe takes shape as a whole in which everything affects everything else; the phenomena of life are processes in a continuous state of change. Every change in the environment is connected to a larger context, and affects it. Fuzziness also has its limits - it does not form a sufficient frame of reference for the making of fundamental ethical and moral choices.

The fuzzy, 'grey' mode of thought has a strong foothold in Japan, where new products based on fuzzy technology have already been in development for some time. The capacity to accept diverse things at the same time seems to be a characteristic of the Japanese tradition - religions, for example, are not strictly differentiated, but are closely entwined in everyday life.

Toward interaction

What Calvino may have meant by consistency remains an enigma, for he left only the title of that lecture. Consistency may be considered as, for example, a code that links art with reality. In one of her writings, the Australian philosopher, scholar and feminist Elizabeth Grosz examines Plato's conception of the chora. The chora is an omnipresent element that unites the worlds of ideas and objects, itself without form, but which can be thought of as feminine in nature because it has the capacity to accept ideas and ripen them into forms and shapes. 'Chora then is the space in which place is made possible, the chasm for the passage of spaceless forms into a spatialised reality, a dimensionless tunnel opening itself to spatialisation, obliterating itself to make others possible and actual.'

The professional activity of the architect involves a continual making of choices, taking of stands. The designer does not live in a vacuum, art is not divided from fife as a separate, autonomous kingdom. 'An architect transforms reality', Alvaro Siza has remarked. The Swedish composer Anders Eliasson has also spoken of the necessity of authentic contact with reality, with reference to the capacity of contemporary technology to transform the acoustic characteristics of spaces electronically from one extreme to the other: a normal rehearsal room can be made to echo like a church. 'All this directs people away from the true and the authentic in their existence.' When architecture abandons authentic experience and embraces scenography, it also undoubtedly loses some essential qualities. What, then, is real?

The writer Leena Krohn has, in her work, pondered the nature of reality. In a volume of essays entitled Tribar, she sketches the differences between people and machines, which are becoming increasingly intelligent: computers conquer the world. There is, nevertheless, one clear and permanent distinguishing characteristic: 'Artificial entities do not fear and do not feel pain as in animal life. Because they know nothing of physical pain, they do not know moral suffering: sorrow, compassion, contrition, forgiveness. They are mental states of the soul which not only influence human thought but also create it'.

The architect cannot start from nothing in shaping reality. The measure of reality is the individual. In addition to concrete functions, buildings and cities express the aims and cultural will of their societies on a general level. At the same time they record the aspirations of different periods, both good and bad. 'The city is built of the relationships between space and past events', writes Italo Calvino. The definition encompasses the basic message of all urbanism and city architecture. The aims of the content and the motifs of the form-giving process are shaped by interaction, following the real needs of society and culture, whether or not they are generally recognised. The designer combines elements of the past and expectations of the future.

In the borderlands of opposites

The Industrial Revolution and the urbanisation that followed it made housing the central social problem of last century, and various models were developed and experimented with in the attempt to find a solution. The Modernism of the early part of the century sought salvation in machine production and standardisation - the concept of the standard, in those days, had a positive content; Aalto, after all, called one of his early blocks of flats a 'standard apartment building'. There was a wish to harness the entire architectural field in service of social tasks: Aalto felt the Villa Mairea to be a laboratory of design for the testing of models for more extended housing production.

Polarities have been the motor of the architectural history of this century. New movements have always presented an anthithesis to the strongest predominant situation: many slogans which, in their own time, had a clear content and function, appear ridiculous or incomprehensible when divorced from their context.

Today it is difficult to believe in the naive optimism with which, at the beginning of the century, architects regarded machines and industrial production - like Le Corbusier, comparing the Athens Acropolis he admired to the latest models of car, rejoicing in the possibilities opened up by technology for building 60-storey skyscrapers and calling his designs for apartment blocks machines for living in. The enthusiasm for technology was reflected out as far as the edges of Europe: the Helsinki rush hour can never have been portrayed as enthusiastically as in the young Elsi Borg's perspective illustration for Oiva Kallio's plan for the city. centre. On the other hand, the architect Kirmo Mikkola has drawn attention to the fact that Le Corbusier's machine metaphor did not refer merely to engineering technology, but returned the concept of machine to its Classical meaning: a device based on both skill and craft through which limited resources can achieve a great effect: deus ex machina.

Machine production also raised the question of style and working method. In his search for a morally correct style, John Ruskin fixed on the Gothic, because the original builders of the style were craftsmen. Classical forms, on the other hand, which have made regular appearances in the thematic world of European architecture - most recently, almost unrecognisably, in the Post-Modern use of Classicism - were built by slave labour, following strictly pre-ordained rules. It was thus impossible for the work process to include creative adaptation. Ruskin also condemned factory work, for the same reason. The medieval ideal, a working community of free artisans, formed a model for the designers' and craftsmen's workshops that were set up all over Europe at the turn of the century and a little later - the Bauhaus, too, began as one of these, shifting to industrial design later.

The repudiation of machines, however, does not of itself solve the aesthetic problems of contemporary production. 'Art and technology - the new unity', the functionalist principle condensed into a slogan, is an ancient one in practical building. Available technology creates the conditions for form-giving, which responds to general needs and the nature of art at each particular period. Today still greater demands are made of technology: we expect to find means by which building can be attuned to natural and social resources.

The aesthetics of industrial production were examined by the functionalists and, even before them, Adolf Loos. In his book Ornament and Crime, he explained the motive for making art as eroticism. The first ornament created by human beings, the cross, is a symbol of the sexual act; the horizontal and vertical lines correspond to the female and male figures. If the scribbling of such ornaments could be understood among primitive people, twentieth-century people who decorated public walls were completely degenerate. This repudiation of ornament was, it is true, influenced by a technological optimism about development as the inappropriateness of craft methods became increasingly apparent in the conditions of expanding industrialism.

Ruskin, too, had demanded that all ornaments should be consequences of the function of buildings, and not expressions of an unconnected need for ornament. The slender external buttresses of Gothic cathedrals, for example, serve a practical purpose while at the same time forming a kind of filigree ornamentation. A Constructivist movement that is still vigorous, High-Tech in its various manifestations, uses structures and equipment in a similar way, both for their functional purposes and as 'ornament'. The entire Functionalist school of thought nevertheless has its roots in eighteenth-century France, in the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Abbe Marc-Antoine Laugier believed that a house should be built in such a way that not a single part could be removed without it falling down: '... the only permitted elements are the column, the joists, the foundations and the smooth wall. If these parts are placed and shaped correctly, nothing else is needed to complete the building'. The same mode of thinking is expressed in a lecture given in celebration of the centenary of the Helsinki Technical University by Auguste Perret shortly after the Second World War, in which he defined the means available to orthodox architecture. 'He who conceals a load-bearing column commits an error. He who builds a false column commits a crime.' Of the recognised masterworks of modern architecture, very few would come through Perret's criteria with flying colours; for architecture is not, in the first instance, about obeying rules. In studying architecture, however, there is a place for learning rules and following them: it is only when one has mastered a particular way of making that one can successfully break its conventions.

In search of the authentic

But when, with a year or so's distance, one examines the range of building of the past decade, it brings to mind nothing so vividly as the compartmented bags of the peddlers who still plied the Finnish countryside in the 1950s, bags stuffed full of knick-knacks, in which every pocket was filled with junk gaudier than the last: hair-pins, postcards, garters, buttons, baubles, trinkets. In the 1980s, designers were undoubtedly able to encounter new creative experiences - everything, it seemed, was permissible. The contrast with the previous decade was extreme - then, designers had struggled with the extreme rationalisation of mass production. In the 1980s, architecture was a great carnival, a violent reaction to the dismal scene that had gone before. It was not an entirely superficial phenomenon, but contained genuine liberation from ossified design taboos.

Carnival means liberation from reality for a fleeting moment: if it becomes permanent, it contradicts itself. An architectural carnival is a paradoxical phenomenon. The products of architecture are intended to be lasting - a continuous liberation from reality is impossible.

Historical architecture often exploits illusions: symmetry is achieved using false windows, an impression of a particular material through a painted surface, ruins by building them, and so on. In creating such illusions, the designer was able to use his professional skill and imagination to transform reality, to make good use of scant resources, so that the building became more than a sum of its parts, a richer whole than was promised by its material preconditions. In the superabundant conditions of today, special effects and reproductions receive a different content: they become ersatz architecture, which serves commercial objectives and expresses its cynical attitude to history. They do not transform reality into something nobler - rather, they do the opposite: they strip unique monuments of value in demonstrating that anything can be duplicated, and used for any purpose whatsoever.

The experience and memory of humankind are laid down in layers in the physical environment, concretely and graphically. Every new part of it exploits ancient forms, materials and ways of making. Building is, at base, a sign of hope, a sign of society's belief in the future, a gesture forward in time.

The new is born only through the use of new technical inventions. But the art of building does not, nevertheless, consist merely of the copying of the old, but in creative adaptation, reinterpretation. For example, the only Finnish invention in the field of building is said to be the buttress structure of the wooden churches of the Gulf of Bothnia, which was developed on the basis of local shipbuilding skills in the sixteenth century. The seeker after superficial novelties is - particularly in a remote corner of the globe such as Finland - always unavoidably behind the times, blowing on the embers of themes that have long since flared up and died down in the international media. In the case of real architecture, on the other hand, time loses its significance: its eloquence is that of authentic feeling, with the power of original vision.

William Curtis writes: 'In a sense every artist is an "eclectic", since he draws on many past examples to define his true manner, yet there is still a vast difference between the superficial assemblage and the authentic work. The strength of the latter lies in its greater formal presence, in its power to move through the action of forms, spaces and proportions, in the fitting expression of a significant content, in the submission of details to the vitalising Gestalt at the heart of the work'. The definition brings to mind the dynamism of Alvaro Siza's architecture, which is at the same time strongly connected to its context, or the restful monumentality of Rafael Moneo's buildings, which is in harmony with human proportions. Similar impressions can also be felt in Juha Leiviska's buildings, which are naturally connected with their temporal, spatial and social starting points, emphasising the best features of their surroundings while at the same time expressing their own strong identity through spatial variations and reflections of light.

'You'll never reach the past by running after it, but if you manifest the present you'll get a dialogue with the past', Sverre Fehn explains. Most fascinating of all are sites where old and new are juxtaposed, layered and interleaved. Included among them are urban environments that live their present and their history simultaneously. But juxtapositions can also be found in individual buildings. Among the most impressive are the constructions of Carlo Scarpa in Castelvecchio, Verona, immaterial sculptural pedestals, airy suspended walls and bridges, and pathways that lead from one space to another as if expressing the unity of two different universes or modes of existence. Without Karljosef Schattner's sensitive emphases and extensions in the townscape of Eichstatt and the interiors of its old buildings, the town would merely be one among many; now, the new strata raise the value of the historical environment. Sverre Fehn has built the Hamar museum inside and around the ruined outbuildings of a episcopal palace. The rough old walls, left in their ruinous condition, are juxtaposed with the highly finished new parts of the building, which appear to float in open space. The sturdy walls breathe history; their reality is a thrilling and eloquent interaction between past and present.

The acceptance of ruins, of unfinished structures, did not form part of human conceptions of beauty until Piranesi and the rediscovery of Classical remains. Today people are interested in ruins perhaps because they reveal the anatomy of the building; in their imperfection, they stimulate the imagination, in contrast to the new environment, whose building is made ever more ready in ever shorter periods of time.

Sigurd Lewerentz's two churches, Bjorkhagen and Klippan, contain all that is significant in architecture. Without a single historical reference, in them time stands still, the past and the future are combined. Space is at once archaic and completely modern; an atmosphere that affects all the senses is born of the roof-vault, which was inspired by the bottom of a boat, the earthiness of the proportions, the peasant asceticism of the details, the considered generosity of the use of materials.

'Authenticity is a fundamental quality', claims Vittorio Gregotti, 'this doesn't mean you cannot be falsified but you have to be falsified in an authentic way.' Modern building technology has changed the uses of traditional materials. A wall that looks as if it is made of blocks of granite is, in fact, concrete: the illusion of granite is achieved by sheets a few millimetres thick on the surface of the wall. But a mental image of the feel and behaviour of the material is left behind, and affects expectations of how buildings and their parts should look. Each material - stone, wood, brick, steel, concrete - has its own characteristic nature, which can not only be seen, but also felt and heard.

Charting fields of vision

Louis Kahn approached the task of the architect like this: '... the artist has the following privilege: he does not need to take gravity into account, or the other phenomena of real life. The artist expresses his relationship with nature and teaches us through his vision and his relationship with humanity. The sculptor shapes space with objects that express his relationship with nature. The sculptor does not create space, but shapes it. The architect creates space.' At the same time, he recalled the invisible limits of architecture: by reaching for them, one learns to understand what they contain within them. In the best case, 'a building has its beginning in immeasurability, passes through the measurement of the design process, and emerges finally into architectural immeasurability'.

Sverre Fehn has remarked on how the irrational belief in life after death resulted in the extremely rational, elegant structures of the Gothic cathedrals. The catalyst for real architecture is feeling, experience. The difficulty is to preserve the initial idea until the end, to interpolate the feeling into the completed building. Frank Gehry has spoken of one way of ensuring that the spontaneity of the original idea feeds through the entire process of design and realisation: 'I make many sketches but I never do finished drawings ... In my early days I used to do very finished drawings. But I found they were dishonest. The drawings were always better than the buildings and I would trick myself into thinking that the buildings were better than they actually were. That's why I have engineers to make the drawings. Engineers' drawings are usually unspirited and tell the truth. That forces me to concentrate on the finished building.'

An architect's decisions are not the result of chains of logical reasoning; the design process does not proceed rationally from given starting points to its inescapable conclusion. The result may well have been affected by unconnected impulses, stimuli, which do not have a direct causal relationship with one another.

The aim of the work of the architect is not a detached object but a part of a whole. The completed building and the more extended environment are only a beginning, promises; it is as if they are sketches, to be completed by the users with their own activities and social relationships, in connection with their environment and, in the best case, growing to be one with it as time passes. The architect's drawing or scale model is a working tool, not an end in itself. Projects that remain on paper may have a strong influence on the internal development of the field. But just as a building derives its meaning from its relationship with its surroundings and its users, the architect's drawing receives a comprehensible meaning only when it is examined as part of the work process, as one phase in the continuum of design.

Dispassionate seeing is the architect's most important capacity. In the Mise au point written during the last weeks of his life, Le Corbusier compared himself to a sharp-eyed ass: 'I am an ass, but an ass that has an eye. It is an ass' eye which has the capacity for sensation. I am an ass with an instinct for proportion. I am and remain an impenitent visual'. In a slightly earlier text, he condenses the thought processes of the architect as follows: 'The key is: to see... / To see / observe / regard / imagine / invent / create.'

Le Corbusier was a seer: from his surroundings, he gathered into his sketches and photographs ideas which, having matured for a time in the architect's unconscious, leapt forth in his design work, renewed and transformed. Seeing, understanding and experiencing - and their difficulty - are also addressed by Milan Kundera as he compares the infinity of space to the 'endlessness of the father'. 'The individual lives between the chasms of endless greatness and endless smallness.' 'Everyone has passed by his own work, for perfection must be sought from within, and we never quite reach our goal.'

Return to the beginnings

The second book of Vitruvius' De Architectura begins with a description of Deinocrates, a Macedonian architect who wished to speak to Alexander the Great. Deinocrates succeeded in attracting the emperor's attention through his appearance: he oiled his body, covered himself in poplar leaves and a lion's skin and equipped himself with a club. He had a unique idea to present: Mount Athos was to be shaped into the figure of a man who would carry in his left hand a large fortified city, while in his right would be an enormous goblet into which mountain streams would gather before flowing on to the sea.

The influence Deinocrates achieved through his idea was out of all proportion to the practical difficulties its realisation would have presented. The emperor gave the architect an ambitious task: the building of the city of Alexandria. The story indicates the depths to which, as much as 2000 years ago, a practitioner was forced to stoop in order to gain the opportunity to realise a practical design.

The contemporary reality of building does not correspond to the ideal. The formation of the environment takes place for the most part in opposition to Vitruvius's principles of commodity, firmness and delight. The influence of the architect extends, at best, to only a fraction of the total volume of building. Is there anything still left of the original artistic and social goal?

Kenneth Frampton, whose encouraging visions are based on a detailed analysis of the problems of consumer society and the current state of architecture, has suggested a scheme of action within whose framework forward-looking, socially and artistically ambitious aims can be set for design and planning of buildings and the environment. Through architecture, models could be created, exemplary solutions of a high aesthetic, functional and social standard which, even as special cases, could point the way forward for progress, offer alternatives for the construction of communities. These model solutions would arise naturally in real building situations, but development could also be influenced by ideas.

Bringing building into line with the tolerances of nature and the environment is one of today's most difficult challenges. Recognition of natural resources in community structures has, of course, long been studied, although from a perspective that is not relevant to the concerns of today. The pioneers include Buckminster Fuller, whose starting point was an idea that already seems old-fashioned: the techno-utopia. He developed enormous geodesic domes to cover, for example, Manhattan: thus energy loss would have been minimised. Fuller visited Finland in the 1960s, when he gave a lecture at the Jyvaskyla summer festival. According to eye-witnesses, he drew an enthusiastic young crowd, enough to fill the university's largest lecture theatre, who sat as quiet as mice throughout the exhaustingly long presentation even though the simultaneous interpreter was unable to translate any more of the complex narrative than: '... now he's talking about some kind of bucket...'.

Ecological building does not, nevertheless, require the direction of a guru or a shaman. Building uses a great deal of raw materials and energy. For this reason, it is associated with many fundamental problems concerning the exploitation of nature, which can be dealt with on a purely rational level. And when new buildings are erected, they should be durable in time, both technically and aesthetically. These aims look obvious on paper, but in practice the opposite is true.

The Nordic countries are rich in the most ecologically economical material of all: wood. Julius Natterer has drawn attention to the characteristics of wood in the natural cycle from the point of view of building: a growing tree is able to capture large amounts of carbon dioxide. When it is felled, on the other hand, it is best to store it for about one thousand years, for a felled tree captures oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. The most effective way of storing felled wood is by using it in building.

Ecologically sustainable building and building materials must be examined from many angles - possibilities of recycling and re-use, dispersal through the processes of nature, energy required to process, technical durability and so on. It is still more difficult to define a distinct phenotype for ecological architecture. Ecological functionalism is not a style, any more than the original functionalism was supposed to be one.

In the last analysis, the criterion of the quality of the environment is individual experience. Aalto writes of a Swiss friend who lived a hard life, who compressed his personal attitude to art in the words: 'Entweder fuhle ich oder fuhle ich nicht' (either I am moved or I am not moved). The work of the designer is a constant empathy with the lives of other people. The built environment is not a disposable commodity, and Vaclav Havel's comment about the state of contemporary theatre in has country applies equally to the makers of architecture: problems arise when the makers of art take themselves too seriously and do not do their work properly.

This essay is based on earlier articles and lectures by the author:

'Ensi vuosituhannen arvot uusin silmin (arkitehtoninen tulkinta Italo Calvinon teoksesta Six Memos for the Next Millennium)' ('The values of the next millennium through new eyes [An architectural interpretation of Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium']), Helsingin Sanomat 22 October 1992

'Tilan ja menneisyyden kaupungit (arkkitehtoninen tulkinta Italo Calvinon teoksesta Nakymattomat kaupungit') ('Cities of space and the past [An architectural interpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities])', Helsingin Sanomat 11 August 1985

Speech at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Architecture Department, Tampere Technical University: 'Arkkitehti 2000+; visio' ('The architect 2000+; a vision'), 7 September 1994

Essay, 'Julkisivun takaa' ('From behind the facade') in the anthology Todistajan katse ('The gaze of the witness'), edited by Leena Krohn and Eila Kostamo, WSOY 1992

Lecture at the Kungliga Konsthogskolan, Stockholm, 5 April 1995

Other sources:

Umberto Eco: Matka arkipaivan epatodellisuuteen (Travel into hyperreality). WSOY, 1985

Leena Krohn, Eila Kostamo (ed.): Todistajan katse: kirjoituksia kirjallisuuden ja taiteen etiikasta ('The gaze of the witness: writings on the ethics of literature and art'). WSOY 1992.

Article by Eija Wager, Ilta-Sanomat 1994, week 35

Aulis Blomstedt in aforismit ('Aphorisms of Aulis Blomstedt'), collected by Juhani Pallasmaa

Italo Calvino: Nakymattomat kaupungit (Invisible Cities). Tammi, 1976.

Paroni puussa (The Baron in the Tree). Tammi, 1994/1960.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Jonathan Cape, London 1992.

'Tradition painovoiman voittaminen: Paavo Heinisen haastattelu / Overcoming the Gravity of Tradition: An Interview with Paavo Heininen'. Eeva Kilpio, Arkkitehti 7/1984

'Henkisen sisallon rationalismista: Sverre Fehnin haastattelu / About the Rationalism of Spiritual Content: An Interview with Sverre Fehn'. Marja-Riitta Norri, Arkkitehti 4/1986

Colin St John Wilson: 'Alvar Aalto and the State of Modernism / Alvar Aalto ja modernismin tila', in Alvar Aalto vs. the Modern Movement / ja modernismin tila, ed. by/toim. Kirmo Mikkola. International Alvar Aalto Symposium, Rakennuskirja Oy, 1981

Sankaruus ja arki: Suomen 50-luvun miljoo / Heroism and the Everyday: Building Finland in the 1950s. Toim./ed. by Riitta Nikula, Suomen rakennustaiteen museo 1994

Nils Erik Wickberg: Tonfall. Soderstrom & Co., 1976; 'Havittaa ja uudistaa / Destroy and Renew', Arkkitehti 1983

Bart Kosko: Sumea logiikka ('Fuzzy logic'). Art House, 1993

Elizabeth Grosz: 'Women, Chora Dwelling'. ANY Architecture New York, Jan/Feb 1994

Interview with Anders Eliasson, Helsingin Sanomat 1993

Leena Krohn: Tribar, WSOY, 1993

Kirmo Mikkola: 'Rationalismin perinne / The Tradition of Rationalism', Arkkitehti 4/72; 'Nykyarkkitehtuurin synty ja kuvataide / Art and the Birth of Modern Architecture', Arkkitehti 6/73; 'Suurten utopistien perinto / The Heritage of the Great Utopians', Arkkitehti 5/74; 'Arkkitehtuurin aatteet ja arki / Architecture: Its Ideas and Reality', Arkkitehti 8/74; 'Funktionalismin ideologia / The Ideology of Functionalism', Arkkitehti 1/78; 'Arkkitehtuuri kansakunnan kohtaloissa / Architecture in the History of the Nation', Arkkitehti 5-6/78

Kenneth Frampton: Modern Architecture: A Critical History. Thames & Hudson, 1980, 1985, 1992

M.-R. Norri: 'Modernismin kasvualusta Potemkinin kaupungissa / Origins of Modernism in the Town of Potemkin', Arkkitehti 6/84

Auguste Perret: 'Aineksia rakennustaiteen teoriaan' ('Elements of architectural theory'), Arkkitehti 9-10/49

'Eurooppalaisesta regionalismista: keskustelu Vittorio Gregottin kanssa / On European Regionalism: A Conversation with Vittorio Gregotti. Sebastiano Brandolini, M.-R. Norri Arkkitehti 3/1987

Louis Kahn, exhibition catalogue, toim. (ed. by) Juhani Pallasmaa.

Suomen rakennustaiteen museo / Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1977

'Tilojen yhteentormayksia rakennetuissa luonnoksissa: Frank Gehryn haastattelu / Collisions between Spaces in Built Sketches: An Interview with Frank Gehry.'

M.-R. Norri, Pekka Suhonen, Arkkitehti 5/86

Casabella 631-532, January-February 1987: Le Corbusier

Milan Kundera: Naurun ja unohduksen kirja (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). WSOY, 1983

Vitruvius: De Architectura; translations into English, German and Swedish

Timo Kauppinen's account of summer events in Jyvaskyla in the 1960s

Julius Natterer In Rakennuslehti, March 1995