JS Sirén and the Finnish Parliament House
Johan Sigfrid Sirén (1889–1961)
Johan Sigfrid Sirén (or JS as he was always known) was born in 1889 in Ylihärmä, which was amongst the vast plains and meandering rivers of Ostrobothnia in Western Finland. In this region of the country, at that time, life was simple to the point of austerity, the Calvinist Lutheran religion was observed consistently and restraint was a way of life (Figure 25).
FIGURE 25 Johan Sigfrid Sirén, Credit – Museum of Finnish Architecture.
Young Johan was the only surviving son of a mill owner – apparently an educated man, who died when Johan was still young; he and his mother moved to Vassa where she was able to earn a living as a weaver. An artistic child, Johan sketched and painted from an early age (with many of his excellent early drawings having survived), and it was during his teens that he decided to pursue a career in architecture, which of all the fine arts, he thought, is the most likely to provide him with a regular income.
In 1907, he graduated, top in his year, from the Vaasa Lyceum School and moved to Helsinki, where he commenced his architectural education at the Helsinki Institute of Technology. His fellow students included Eric Bryggman (1891–1955) with whom he shared a flat and who would become a fellow Nordic Classicist before going on to become one of Finland’s leading modernists; WG Palmqvist (1882–1964), the future designer of a number of Helsinki’s major commercial buildings; and Kaarlo Borg (1888–1939) with whom he would later enter into partnership. From the start of his studies he also worked in a number of architectural practices, including the office of his professor Gustaf Nyström (1856–1917), both to help finance his studies and to broaden his architectural experience.1
After receiving his diploma (with distinction) in 1913, Sirén worked for Jung and Fabritius for four years ((1879–1946) and (1874–1949) respectively). Jung and Fabritius were a successful medium-sized practice in Helsinki who enjoyed a considerable variety of work, thus considerably broadening Sirén’s practical experience. During his time with them, their portfolio included a number of villas, apartments, a hydroelectric power plant and the new head office for the Ahlstrom Corporation in Noormarkku, all of which were executed in either a traditional Classical style or a restrained National Romanticism (much influenced by Lars Sonck (1870–1956) for whom Jung had worked).
In 1917 the practice was dissolved when Fabritius decided to abandon his architectural career, and Sirén, having considered his options, decided that the time had come for him to found his own practice. He turned to his friend Kaarlo Borg (1888–1939), and with Urho Åberg, they founded their own new architectural partnership in Helsinki. JS married Sirkka Syrjänen, a fellow artist, in that same year, and in 1918, their only son, Heikki (1918–2013) (who was himself to go on to become a highly respected Finnish architect), was born.
As with so many other young, contemporary architectural practices, the workload consisted of a considerable variety of projects including villas, apartments and offices which paid the bills, alongside speculative competition entries for major public buildings, which if successful would provide the transformation of the practice both commercially and, more importantly, for the aspiring young architects – in terms of their professional reputations. The partners generally led their own projects with Sirén responsible for most of the competition entries. During this period Aberg oversaw a major extension to the offices of the Helsingen Sanomat newspaper (1919) (to the original building by Gesellius, Lindgren and Saarinen of 1904), while Sirén designed the elegant black granite memorial to the German War Dead with sculptor Gunnar Finne (1886–1952) in the Old Church Park in Central Helsinki (1920), the Kolmiotalo or Triangular House building in Oulu (1923), in yellow render with a concave elevation to the park, and the large brick apartment block on Runeberginkatu in Central Helsinki (1924) with its elongated bay windows, steeply pitched roofs and gables. Their architecture at this time was an extremely restrained, indeed rather insipid – Classicism in which large areas of brick or coloured render above rusticated ground floors were relieved by occasional Classical motifs or details. Sirén’s commitment to developing a new Classical architecture however was clear, and looking back, in a lecture given in 1950, he recalled his ‘profound desire to guide developments back into the channel from which they had diverged after a long period of chaos’.2
Of all the architects who were to contribute to the Nordic Classical Movement, Sirén was one of the few to consistently pursue Classicism throughout his entire career. While expensive international travel and thus direct contact with ancient Classical architecture was initially denied to him, he was well aware of ‘the Orders’, their history and correct application, both through his formal architectural education and through his interest in nineteenth-century neoclassicism of which there were so many outstanding examples throughout Scandinavia.
Sirén’s competition entries from this period showed that he was capable of much more. His unsuccessful competition entry for the Helsinki University and Administration Buildings in the Meilahti area of the city of 1919 was characterized by rigorous axial planning in which blocks of office accommodation were organized around formally landscaped courtyards and piazzas. Their form predates and anticipates his design of the later Parliament House with great stone blocks of accommodation carved out to provide courtyards and into which grand colonnades are recessed. It shows the influence of German Classical architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), in the handling of the buildings mass and composition and of Camillo Sitte (1843–1903), the Austrian architect and urban designer, in the relationships between the buildings and their integration into the existing city fabric.
If built, it would have provided a much-needed series of civilized new public and private urban spaces within the growing city, though framed in a particularly severe architectural style. His unsuccessful competition entry for a hotel in Bergen of the same year adopted a similar approach, albeit on this occasion with the introduction of arched openings, which were to reappear on the ground floor of the parliament building behind its vast colonnade.
By 1921, he was finally able to afford to make his architectural pilgrimage to Italy and travelled with his former fellow student and equally enthusiastic fellow classicist, Martti Välikangas (Ch 11), at last visiting Rome, Pompeii, Florence, Sienna, Bologna and Venice, sketching, photographing and absorbing the work of the ancient and Renaissance masters throughout Bella Italia. By now, Sirén was a committed Classicist but the work of his partnership continued to oscillate between a severe late National Romanticism, which seems to have gained a second wind with the first images of Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall, which was then under construction, and Sirén’s equally severe Classicism.
On his return from Italy in 1922, Sirén, with Borg and Aberg, entered a further series of architectural competitions including the Lislami Town Hall (National Romantic) in which they were placed second, Sukeva Prison (Classical) and the competition for a new Regional Museum at Vassa in Finland, on the Gulf of Bothnia (National Romantic), which they won. Unfortunately, their winning entry, which was a reworking of several elements of Stockholm City Hall, was not constructed (Eino Forsman, 1879–1958, finally designing and building the museum in a restrained Nordic Classical style in 1927).
By 1923, the practice still awaited their first major public building commission, when the most important architectural competition of the new century in Finland was launched – for the design of a new Finnish Parliament building, which would commemorate, celebrate and support their newly independent nation (which had so recently, finally, broken free of centuries of Swedish and Russian rule in November 1917). The competition was held in two stages – the first, in 1923, was to propose an appropriate site for the building in Helsinki, and this was won by Hilding Ekelund (1893–1984), who proposed the site to the west of Mannerheimintie which was eventually used (with Sirén, Borg and Aberg in second place). In 1924, the competition for the building design was announced, attracting almost every aspiring architectural practice in the country. Sirén designed the partnership’s entry, which drew heavily both on his previous Classical scheme for the university nearby in Meilahti and on Ivar Tengbom’s Stockholm Concert Hall, which was then under construction. Tengbom’s use of a pale blue render for the main block of the building, rather than stone, against which was set his soaring entrance portico, gave it a lightness which was typical of the emerging Swedish Classicism, in contrast to Sirén’s Germanic sources. Schinkel however provided the plan and section (rather than, as often suggested, Asplund’s Stockholm City Library, on which construction was just commencing at the time of the competition) with Sirén drawing heavily on his Altes Museum in Berlin (1823–1830) in which a central circular domed space is flanked by courtyards and fronted by a long colonnaded entrance within a pure rectangular plan.
Sirén’s building was beautifully and elegantly planned however, and the judges had no hesitation in awarding his firm first prize – ‘judged by the jury to be both monumental, beautiful and carefully worked out in detail’.3 Poor Hilding Ekelund’s design for the site he had proposed was placed second – a fate which dogged him throughout his career – but if he was disappointed, he must have been quickly joined by Sirén’s partners when Sirén, who had clearly designed his partnership’s entry, was offered the commission alone – which he accepted, resigning from the partnership. Having supported Sirén commercially, while he designed the partnership’s competition entries over many years, with very limited success up to this point, a little bitterness would have been understandable.
Sirén proceeded immediately with the development of his detailed design, and construction started in 1926 with completion achieved five years later in 1931 at which point his new Parliament building was hailed as one of the most significant examples of Nordic Classicism in Scandinavia and the most important new building in Finland. It was an extraordinary achievement for a relatively young architect with little experience to successfully deliver a significant public building on this scale. Not only was the overall planning and design of the building elegantly resolved, but the quality of the detailed design and craftsmanship achieved throughout every space within it was outstanding. The building occupied Sirén fully for almost six years and is reviewed in detail below.
With the completion of the Parliament House, Sirén’s professional position was transformed from struggling partner in a small Helsinki practice to unofficial Architect Laureate for Finland. He succeeded Oiva Kallio (Ch 8) as Chairman of the Finnish Association of Architects and, shortly after, became Chairman of the Society of Crafts and Design, Chairman of Advisers to the State on Architecture and a member of the (rather quaintly entitled) City of Helsinki Facade Committee. In the year of the Parliament buildings completion, 1931, he applied for the position of professor of architecture at his Alma Mater, the Helsinki Institute of Technology and, despite a rather audacious application from the 33-year-old Alvar Aalto, was appointed. From this point on throughout the remainder of his career, he was to combine teaching with running his architectural practice, and his professorship was to provide him with both a status as a leading architect, as well as access to a number of academic commissions over the next few decades.
While the public reaction to the completion of Parliament House in 1931, largely fuelled by national pride, was almost entirely positive, its architectural reviews were mixed. The Stockholm Exhibition had taken place the previous year with Gunnar Asplund and a group of other Swedish architects redirecting Scandinavian architecture once more – this time towards Functionalism. In this context, Sirén’s great granite monolith seemed to look backwards, rather than forwards to the Functionalist’s vision of a new, modern, brighter, healthier, more egalitarian future.
It also soon became clear that Sirén had no intention of joining Asplund, Aalto, Lewerentz and Bryggman in a switch to Modernism and that, while his future buildings might be stripped of almost all ornament, they would always remain Classical at heart.
Having focused almost exclusively on the Parliament House for seven years (his only other commission during this period being a small wooden Folk School for the village of Vuohtomäki in Pyhäjärvi of 1926), Sirén’s office had no other work and entered the market at the height of the Depression. His new status however gave him a distinct advantage, and he soon began to win further work for his team. His first new commission was for commercial offices at Kasarmikatu 42 in central Helsinki, which were completed in 1932. If this was Sirén’s attempt to further restrain his Classicism in response to what he regarded as the new fashion of Functionalism, it is a failure. Two almost identical facades turn a street corner with vertical rectangular office windows set almost flush in a rendered facade above a largely glazed ground floor of shops. His next attempt, however, was hugely successful.
In 1935 he won the competition for the design of a new office building for the Lassila and Tikanoja Company in Central Helsinki (1935–1937). By this time, most of his contemporaries who had helped to develop Nordic Classicism had either abandoned Classicism forever for Modernism (such as Asplund, Aalto and Lewerentz) or, less successfully architecturally, attempted to somehow combine Classicism and Functionalism (such as Kallio and Valikangas). What Sirén achieved in the Lassila and Tikanoja building (and later Tengbom in his Swedish Institute in Rome) was to deliver formal Modern buildings, which also enjoyed the harmonious proportions of Classicism. The Lassila and Tikanoja building is one of the most successful new office buildings of the 1930s in Helsinki – a uniquely sophisticated design with neither the cliché’s of early Functionalism, nor any remaining hint of Classical motifs or decoration.
In lieu of the nautical styling and ribbon windows (which by the late 1930s were appearing on white rendered buildings across most of the Western world), Sirén produced a coolly reserved composition of rendered frame above a black granite base into which were punched deeply set vertical windows. There is no attempt made to express the structural frame of the building, and the composition is a subtly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals, rather than yet another horizontally banded piece of ‘Funkis’. This remains one of the most elegant office buildings in Helsinki, only equalled by Aalto’s later contributions, and would achieve critical acclaim today were it to appear on the streets of London or New York. This design, more than any other, helped to establish a new view of Sirén, both as designer and teacher, as ‘a sophisticated conservative’.4
The year 1935 also brought his first commission from the University in Helsinki for a major extension to the Carl Ludvig Engel’s original University Main Building of 1832. Controversially, Sirén proposed and the university accepted that the new building should be in exactly the same style as the original, which caused much outrage amongst his fellow professionals, but nevertheless continued to construction, being completed in 1937. The year 1936 brought the commission for a villa for Ilmari Turja in Kulosaari on the outskirts of Helsinki, which bears a remarkable resemblance to Alvar Aalto’s earlier timber Casa Lauren of 1925. The year 1938 brought a further competition win for the new Lutheran Temppeliaukio Church in Central Helsinki. Sirén’s design owed much to Elsi Borg’s (his former partner’s sister) Taulumäki Church in Jyväskylä of 1929, with its unusual stepped tower, but construction was abandoned in 1939 with the outbreak of the Winter War (with the church finally being constructed by Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen in 1969 and now known as the Church of the Rock).
In 1938, Sirén began working on the design of his own summer villa Maison Bleu which was built at Barösund, on the coast west of Helsinki. This was organized in two wings, linked by a covered way, with each wing axially planned, much in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright’s (1865–1959) early prairie houses. The year 1939 brought an office for the Varma insurance company in Tampere (a watered-down version of the Lassili Building), which was completed in 1941, and a further commission from the Helsinki University for a new main auditorium. Considering that almost all his contemporaries were now producing Modern architecture, Sirén’s design was quite extraordinary with speakers dais backed by a full-height Corinthian colonnade, reminiscent of Hack Kampmann’s auditorium for the Glyptotek in Copenhagen of 1906.
His conservatism (or continuing commitment to Classicism, depending on your viewpoint) meant that, as Professor of Architecture at the Institute of Technology, his approach was in conflict with the Functionalism to which most of his students were either sympathetic or already committed. He saw himself as an exponent of a ‘Practically Academic Classicism’,5 while the younger generation of architects whom he was teaching were bewitched by Functionalism, Le Corbusier and soon their own Finnish Master, Alvar Aalto. By all accounts he was respected and indeed even feared by his students6 but was regarded as old-fashioned and largely out of touch with contemporary architectural developments.
Despite stressing the fundamental requirements of architecture as he saw them – functionality, striving for clarity and simplicity, the relationship between a building’s internal spaces and external expression – the question of style remained, and just as the Parliament Building had established his reputation, so too did it forever link him to the past through its monumental Classicism. Despite the unpopularity of his approach, Sirén’s philosophy remained constant, namely that ‘the all round education of every architect should include perfect familiarity with these (Classical Orders), for they are part of our great European intellectual heritage from which the whole civilised world’s sense of proportion and form has grown and developed’.7 This was precisely the view of architectural education, which the revolutionaries of the Bauhaus had overthrown in the late 1920s. Having initially regarded Functionalism as a passing fad in the 1930s – ‘Once again we hear the same old chorus that always strikes up here at roughly 10 year intervals; Style is dead – long live style’,8 – by the 1940s, he was teaching that architecture was above style – ‘ultimately, stylistic expression is only skin deep – for the soul of the individual artist operates at a much deeper level – and that is the quality of the expression that decides the value of a work of art’,9 but his continuing commitment to Classicism remained and his students remained unimpressed.
In his lectures, he had something of an obsession with the architecture of churches, which he regarded as both the architect’s most demanding and important task, and all his students were set church design projects at some point in their studies – ‘The reason why our curriculum for the moment includes such a huge (though possibly not lastingly long) amount stems from the importance and topicality attributed to the church here in Finland.’10 Sadly, he never had the opportunity himself to design a sacred building. His competition-winning Classical design for the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki (mentioned earlier) was abandoned, and indeed one of his last competition entries in 1945 was for the Meilahti Church in Helsinki, which the historian Malcolm Quantrill described as having ‘a rigidity of formal design on which Aalto had already turned his back by 1927’.11
Sirén continued to practise during and after the war; his Laboratory of Chemistry for the Institute of Technology both commenced and completed in 1944. With its symmetrical plan and central entrance it had many similarities to Oiva Kallio’s Pohjanmaan Museum in Oulu of 1931, and indeed, after the Stockholm Exhibition, both architects were ploughing the same Funky Classical furrow. In 1946, Sirén unsuccessfully entered the Varkaus Town Hall competition with his son Heikki, with a design which featured his, now standard, rows of large vertically proportioned windows in a rendered facade. Heikki set up his own practice in 1949 with his wife Kaija Tuominen (1920–2001), and so it was JS Sirén alone who entered and won the competition for Lauttasaari Primary School in 1951. His design consisted of a loose orthogonal grouping of buildings, linked by colonnades, enclosing an external courtyard finished in render below a shallow metal roof, much in the style of typical Nordic Classical apartments of the 1920s, although now devoid of any ornament.
Throughout the post-war period from 1944 until 1955, Sirén worked on numerous designs for a new house and studio for himself. It is unfortunate that his final design of 1955 remained unbuilt as it marked a return to the restraint and elegant proportions of the Lassili Building. Organized around an enclosed internal courtyard, it is in many ways a much grander version of Oiva Kallio’s version of the Roman Atrium house – Villa Oivala of 1924, as befitted a distinguished architect and Professor of Architecture. The planning is organized around several axes once more, but it is the elegant three-dimensional form of the building which shows Sirén at his best. Low, mono-pitch metal roofs slope in towards the court, creating plain rectangular external wall planes, through which are punched a series of elegant bay windows and wider openings. Like Tengbom’s Swedish Institute in Rome of 1938–1939, it was to represent a successful culmination of his search for relevant Classicism in the age of Modernism.
Sirén retired in 1957 and was succeeded by Aulis Blomstedt (1906–1979), the younger brother of Pauli Blomstedt (ref), who by then, much to the relief of his students, was an avowed Modernist who was fascinated by building systems and standardization. Sirén died in 1961 at the age of seventy-one, having remained true to the ideals of Classical architecture throughout his life. In a lecture in 195012 he looked back on the Nordic Classical Movement which had so inspired him:
When Classicism swept over and through the Nordic countries in the 1910s and 20s, it had its own ethic, dictated by its inner need. Partly, but only minimally, this was the romantic force of ‘Italia la Bella’, which has repeatedly proved able to exert the power of its aesthetic values over new generations of architects and artists. But most urgent and pressing of all, there was doubtless a strong need for a purge, a longing to shake off the uncertainties and confusion of recent decades and find greater order and more lucid aesthetic values. The ideal of purity was the dominant aim.
Like so many architects before and since, Sirén revelled in the ancient lessons of Classicism, its pure geometries, its ideal proportions, the perfect symmetry and play of axes and cross axes. He also understood, like the best other Nordic Classical architects, that the grace and good manners of the architecture of Italy made not only fine buildings but also fine towns and cities, which had the potential to provide a setting for a civilized urban life.
A few years later, shortly before his death in 1961, he summed up his view of his life even more succinctly: ‘That’s how it always is; we architects come to this bleak and rocky land, busy ourselves here for a couple of years or more in conditions reminiscent of a total shambles, and hope to leave behind us a piece of the nation’s cultural history.’13 With his Finnish Parliament House, he certainly achieved that aim.
Finnish Parliament House
Sirén won the commission for the new Finnish Parliament House in 1924 in unusual circumstances – moving from second to first place in the competitions and appointed individually, rather than in the partnership, in which he had entered the competitions. There is no doubt, however, that the winning design was Sirén’s and not his partners and that, symbolically and architecturally, his design was the outstanding entry of the second competition.
This was to be Finland’s most important building, an emblem of the Finns’ newly won independence, a symbol of their new democratic government – its funding, construction and craftsmanship – an achievement of national proportions, which was designed to send a message to the world and to the rest of Scandinavia, in particular, as an assertion of the country’s new status. It was also a key building within Helsinki, and Sirén had recognized this in his design: ‘The main principle of the composition was to create a compact, cohesive mass which will act as a powerful focal point in the townscape and be the centre of attention in the open square to be created later.’14 Regrettably, the open square was never created (despite numerous proposals over the years by Sirén himself), and the building thus still lacks an appropriate urban setting such as that enjoyed by Asplund’s contemporary City Library in Stockholm. Such is the power and gravitas of the building, however, that nevertheless it couldn’t help but make its presence felt within the city.
FIGURE 26 Finnish Parliament House Plan, Credit – John Stewart. 1. Hall of State 2. Assembly Chamber
FIGURE 27 Finnish Parliament House Section, Credit – John Stewart.
Following the confirmation of his selection, Sirén was commissioned to further develop his design, and the jury funded his travel to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berlin to study other parliament buildings. His competition design shows a solid, rendered rectangular block, fronted by a Classical portico in dressed stone, very much in the style of Ivar Tengbom’s Stockholm Concert Hall (1923–1926), which was then under construction. His final design however (on which construction started in 1926) has little remaining of Tengbom’s ‘Swedish Grace’, having been replaced by a design of such extraordinary strength, solidity and severity, that it looks more to Berlin than contemporary Stockholm for inspiration, with Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum (1823–1830), which he would have visited on his recent travels – a likely source. Finland may have just become an independent democracy but Sirén’s revised design suggested that its new status was permanent. While Tengbom’s dramatic blue cube of a concert hall in Stockholm largely reflects the festive nature of the building, there is no mistaking that Sirén’s granite block in Helsinki has a much more serious purpose.
As Sirén developed his detailed design, the originally rendered rectangular main block and all the other external elements of the building were now clad in a light red Finnish granite from Kalvola, which gives the building its monumental and imposing character (Figure 28). While its external expression was transformed, the basic plan and arrangement of principal spaces of his competition entry remained largely unchanged. The plan, as at the Altes Museum, was a pure Classical composition – aperfect circle within a rectangle – with two inner courtyards flanking the circular assembly chamber and providing natural light to the internal spaces, which wrapped around the drum of the chamber itself. In plan and section, the assembly chamber was dominant, rising from the first floor to a great dome and clerestory drum, which flooded the new debating chamber with light.
FIGURE 28 Finnish Parliament House Colonnade, Credit – Mark Goodwin/Parliament of Finland.
As with so many Nordic Classical public buildings, the processional route was an important element of the design, which Sirén himself acknowledged: ‘The determined enhancement of some focal point or climax in the floor plan calls for preparatory effects, a gradual build up towards the extremely powerful effect that we want to achieve.’15 The interiors throughout the building are exquisite – consistently sophisticated and elegant – extremely dignified but without the overwhelming weight of the exterior. It is almost as if Sirén knew that, although early in his career, this would, in all likelihood, be his major work, and he poured all his imagination, care and attention into every space and detail. The entrance hall has an almost subterranean quality to it with a heavy coffered ceiling and little natural light, suggesting that it carries the great weight of the principal spaces above and raising one’s anticipation regarding what lies beyond and above. One is drawn to the daylight flooding down the white marble staircases at either end, which lead to the Hall of State above. Here, over plain plastered walls, glass chandeliers hang from a ceiling of decorated timber beams above a patterned marble floor; this is as much the architecture of a Finnish manor house or castle (such as the banqueting hall of Kronborg – 1571) as it is of ancient Rome (Figure 29). This space shimmers and almost floats above the ground-floor entrance, bathed in light from the full-height windows behind the colonnade, from which we look out across the city.
FIGURE 29 Finnish Parliament House Hall of State, Credit – Mark Goodwin/Parliament of Finland.
The restraint, order and calm of the Hall of State prepare the visitor for the centrepiece of the entire complex; it is a space to draw breath before moving on to the climax of the route. After the scale and grandeur of the exterior and the stately procession from Entrance Hall through Hall of State, the Assembly Chamber itself is remarkably restrained with purity of form and simplicity of materials, providing a dramatic contrast to the granite, marble and painted wood of the previous rooms.
Here plain rendered walls surround a ring of Corinthian columns, which support the undecorated cupola with clerestory drum above from which light floods the space completing this Spartan aesthetic (Figure 30). Beyond the columns, the space is ringed with two levels of galleries (allowing the public and press to scrutinize their newly elected politicians), and these stop on either side of the speakers dais, which provides the focus, bang on axis, in this perfect circular space. Unlike combative legislative spaces, such as the British House of Commons (Charles Barry 1840–1870), here the seating is arranged in circular rows which radiate out from the speaker to suggest a common national purpose that is above party politics.16 It is almost as if the exterior of the building is Finland’s assertion of independence and nationhood while the Assembly Chamber is an important and yet unpretentious space, where the country gets down to the practical business of government in an appropriately Calvinist setting.
FIGURE 30 Finnish Parliament House Assembly Chamber, Credit – Mark Goodwin/Parliament of Finland.
The quality of the interior spaces never slackens – the Speaker’s Corridor, behind the chamber, is dominated by a row of coupled Doric marbled columns, which divide the room in two and suggest a space for plotting and planning rather than swift movement, and all the corridors and committee rooms maintain the same high standard of proportion, form and detail which Sirén set himself.
This is a total work of art in which Sirén designed everything, including light fittings, tables, chairs, benches, handrails, door handles, window stays, mosaic floors and carpets – even the clocks throughout the building and the Assembly Chamber ballot boxes. For six years he worked on almost nothing else and supervised every aspect of its construction; the details throughout are exquisite – nothing jars; every element is beautifully resolved, thus creating a series of calm, refined interior spaces from which this new democracy has governed itself since the building’s completion, almost one hundred years ago.
Externally, the building appears to have been carved from a solid piece of Finnish granite with the fourteen-column colonnade, which Sirén moved within the overall mass as the design developed, acting more as a stone screen to the entrance elevation than as a traditional, pronounced entrance portico. Above the colonnade, he introduced a series of bold circular openings, which are cut through the stone frieze and interspersed with slim panels, which align with the columns below. The great flight of stairs below the colonnade are partly enclosed at either end by what look like the doorways to two Egyptian tombs complete with battered walls, which further add to the feeling of solidity and permanence, which was clearly Sirén’s goal. Despite the almost overbearing mass of the building, the details, from the column bases to the rusticated entrance doorways, are beautifully crafted, elegantly resolved and often highly original (with a few mannerist twists even creeping into the details of door and window surrounds in the courtyards and wings of the building).
Like many of the buildings of Nordic Classicism, the Parliament House took many years from competition win to completion, and by the time of its inauguration in 1931, Functionalism had already largely replaced Classicism as the predominant architectural style throughout the Scandinavian countries. Its completion was therefore greeted with a mixed response – huge enthusiasm from the public, who took great pride in their new institution, but a more measured response from the architectural profession, as noted by Simo Paavilainen: ‘Sirén‘s Parliament House was to be the main work of 20s Classicism in Finland, though in fact it was not completed until after the breakthrough of Functionalism. For obvious reasons, professional architects greeted it with somewhat contradictory feelings.’17 Alvar Aalto, then a young Finnish architect, was torn between architectural criticism and national loyalty. Elsewhere, criticism was less restrained with one (Functionalist) critic from Sweden, Gotthard Johansson, calling the building ‘a rose-red Egyptian tomb’18 which he claimed he longed to get out of, but this was very much the messianic view of the recently converted, who ignored the sheer architectural quality of much of Sirén’s achievement. Hilding Ekelund, particularly considering his own disappointment at losing the commission, was remarkably balanced in his contemporary assessment: ‘This is not the right time for a critical assessment of its architecture: such criticism could well be unjust, due to the unusually rapid shifts in ways of thinking that have taken place since it was designed.’19
As the years have passed since its completion, the architectural consensus has changed little, and Malcolm Quantrill, once more, assessed its contribution to the development of Finnish Architecture in his Finnish Architecture and the Modernist Tradition:
The design selected for execution represented something of a setback to the evolution of modernism in Finnish Architecture. Rather than being an expression of the new freedom of the Finnish people it represented a return to the classical formality of Helsinki’s origin under the Czar, but without the freshness and charm of Engel’s designs. In spite of some experimentation in the detailing – the capitals to the interior columns are a fine example – the overall effect is heavy and pompous,20 but he goes on to give Sirén full credit for the quality of the interiors: ‘where the magnificent sequence of rooms, the balanced and highly finished interiors and the skilful, carefully pondered use of materials are the work of a master’.21
Despite the many changes in architectural style since its design and completion, the public’s appreciation of Sirén’s building has never faltered and the building has recently been completely restored to celebrate Finland’s centenary. The Finnish architectural historian, Riita Nikula, confirmed its central role in Finland’s cultural landscape, explaining that
the visual expression of our independent fatherland and on the parliamentary system on which it is founded is totally identified with the austere cube of parliament house: there is no question about that. The polished architecture of its granite front and colonnade and the sequence of ceremonial rooms that lie behind them form the setting for all our most important political events. Through press and TV pictures, they are familiar to the entire nation down to the least detail. As MPs votes are cast, the circular assembly chamber which forms the nucleus of the building is truly the pulse of the nation.22
Timeless Classicism indeed!