Martti Välikangas and the Puu Käpylä Garden Town
Martti Välikangas (1893–1973)
Today, Martti Välikangas is one of the least known of the architects who contributed to Nordic Classicism, and yet in his day, he was recognized as one of its most important protagonists. Born in 1893, he was one of the generation of younger Nordic Classicists such as Alvar Aalto and Oiva Kallio, who later abandoned their Classical work for Functionalism in the 1930s. While the quality of much of his later work was variable, there is no denying the very significant contribution that he made to the development of social housing in Scandinavia, both as a Classicist and a Modernist.
Born in Savonia in Eastern Finland, where he grew up, he graduated from secondary school in 1911, when he moved to Helsinki to start his architectural studies at the Helsinki Institute of Technology (Figure 62). Martti and Hilding Ekelund were the outstanding students of their year and became lifelong friends and occasional collaborators, both graduating in January 1917 (just as Alvar Aalto arrived at the School of Architecture). Välikangas’s first appointment was in Yuzovka in Russia (present-day Donetsk in the Ukraine), where he was engaged on a workers housing project when the February Revolution erupted in St Petersberg. He stayed on until the October Revolution at which point he immediately returned to Helsinki. Once there, he worked briefly for the Brändö Villastad housing company (an early garden city project) and for the architect Gösta Juslén (1887–1939) before joining the office of Frosterus (1876–1956) and Gripenberg (1850–1925) in 1918, where he worked until 1920, when he entered and won the competition for the Puu Käpylä workers housing in Helsinki on the back of which he founded his own practice.1
FIGURE 62 Martti Välikangas, Credit – Museum of Finnish Architecture.
Puu Käpylä was an extraordinary commission for a young 26-year-old architect – 165 new houses, including their layout, landscape and individual house designs. It was to occupy him and, very soon, his growing team for the next five years, becoming a model for social housing in Scandinavia, an early example of industrialized housing production and the most successful public housing project of the Nordic Classical Movement. It is dealt with in detail below.
In 1921, funded by his first commission, he was at last able to afford to make his study trip to Italy. Armed with recommendations from Hilding Ekelund, he set off with JS Sirén (Ch 5) to undertake the tour, which focused on Italy but also took in Germany, France and even North Africa. His travels are well documented and indicate his particular interest in Italian town and city urban design including Sienna, Perugia and Gubbio, which he studied and recorded in great detail.
On his return to Finland, in addition to continuing work on the Puu Käpylä housing, he started to win further commissions and, within a few years, had established his reputation for social housing, both in the suburbs and in centre of Helsinki. One of the first of his city centre projects to be completed was at 14 Töölönkatu in Helsinki in 1924. This is a five-storey cream rendered Classical apartment building with deeply recessed arched windows to the ground floor and pilasters, which rise from the granite base of the building to the cornice at fourth-floor level at which point the fifth floor steps back to allow them to take three-dimensional form as columns, which are finally topped by amphorae. The building has the typical lightness and elegance of the best Nordic Classicism, and when combined with the his timber, Käpylä workers housing out in the suburbs, which was by then under construction, shows Välikangas’s considerable range and ability.
This was to be the first in a series of Helsinki city centre apartments in render, such as the Nyman building at 15–17 Eerikinkatu of 1926 and in Sturenkatu of 1927 (originally with an elegant spire – now sadly lost), and then in brick, such as the apartments in Porvoonkatu of 1927 and in Vuorikatu of 1928 (now demolished). Generally the rendered buildings were more successful than the brick with the seven-storey brickwork of the apartments in Vuorikatu, being particularly dark and overbearing, in the long winter months. Välikangas and his team were designing these projects at an extraordinary pace, and their output quickly became rather formulaic with arches to ground-floor shops, archways to inner courts, heavy bracketed cornices below steeply pitched tiled roofs and corner apartments advancing from the block to imply towers.
The year 1927 brought a more unusual commission – for the Athena Cinema in Helsinki (now the Orion). This was a new building type, which several of the Nordic Classical architects successfully undertook, with Asplund’s Skandia Cinema in Stockholm of 1922–1923 as the model with its exuberant interiors, which evoked the festive world of the piazza in which deep blue, star-studded ceilings replaced nocturnal Italian night skies. In the Athena, Välikangas continued the Italian theme with a staircase rather grandly adapted from Bernini’s Scala Reggia (1663–1666), which was flanked by columns and tapered towards the entrance to the auditorium, thus creating a false perspective (a device he was to later employ again in his competition entry for Temppeliaukio Church of 1936). The result is a beautifully executed, charming fantasy world in which interior spaces are treated as exterior and in which the grim reality of the depression years could soon be suspended for an hour or two.
By the end of the 1920s, Välikangas was established as a successful and highly respected architect with Puu Käpylä, in particular, attracting international interest, but as we have seen elsewhere, the mood was changing and the relevance of Classicism to the emerging modern world was being questioned, which eventually led to its final rejection in favour of the new Functionalism. Välikangas was an early convert and, after assuming the position of editor in chief of Arkkitehti in 1928, used his influence to promote the new architecture to his fellow Finnish architects. He responded enthusiastically to the new spirit of Modernism in his own work too, and his unbuilt streamlined Observation Tower of 1930 would, if completed, have placed him at the forefront of Modern design in Scandinavia. The white rendered ten-floor tower is an essay in early nautical Functionalism with its horizontal windows on the half-round tower staircase, tubular railings, floating first-floor cafe on a single piloti and, of course, obligatory flagpole, one of the early hallmarks of Funkis.2
Further new apartment commissions allowed him to give expression to his new architectural approach. The first two of these were the Pyynikki workers apartments in Tampere of 1931 and the apartments in Artturilinna in Helsinki of 1932, and in both cases Välikangas produced elegant modern rendered facades. As with his earlier Classical apartment blocks, elements are advanced from the main elevation and extended above cornice level to imply a tower (now each complete with flagpole). Despite the similarities of massing and composition, these are very successful modern apartments, albeit without the more dramatic architectural elements of the observation tower project. A further apartment building in Eerikinkatu, Helsinki of 1933, shows a bolder development of the corner block, now complete with ribbon windows, which turn the corner of the building, expressing the concrete frame within.
Up until this point in his career, the majority of Välikangas’s commissions had been in Helsinki, but in 1933, he undertook the first of a series of projects back in his home region of Savonia – mostly in Mikkeli, the largest town. These included an entrance kiosk for the Mikkeli Sports Arena Building in 1933, a new bus station of 1934, the Harju Chapel of1937, an extension to the Päämaja School (also of 1937), the Jama Commercial and Civil Defence building of1938, and a Savings Bank building of 1940 – all in similar stripped-down Functionalist style.
Since the early days of his practice, he had also entered a number of architectural competitions for new churches – firstly in Classical style such as his second-placed entry for a church for Käpylä of 1927 (very much the Italian basilica with detached campanile) – and then stripped down to the most elemental of forms in his impressive, though regrettably, unsuccessful design for Tehtaanpuisto church of 1930. Like his observation tower of the same year, this would have been a stunning building with the fashionable, free-standing campanile, now a simple elegant tower, and a remarkable interior which would have soared and been bathed in light below five shallow domes; this was perhaps Martti Välikangas at his best. The year 1936 saw another second prize for Temppeliaukio church, and then later that year, his design for the Harju cemetery chapel was selected and built, as noted, in Mikkeli. This is another simple rendered basilica but unfortunately, as a funeral chapel, lacked the dramatic vertical of the campanile of his competition entries to contrast with the horizontals of the chapel itself. His final church design for Kiokkala village church in 1954 was a simple, rather unambitious mono-pitched design.
In 1937, he was appointed Head of the Planning Department of the National Board of Building, where the focus was on social housing development, a role he combined with his continuing practice. In 1938, he was appointed, along with his friend and old fellow student, Hilding Ekelund, to design the Male Athletes accommodation for the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki. The aim of the project was to plan an entire new community, the first phase of which – some 600 apartments – would be used for Olympic Games accommodation before reverting to social housing. Just as Puu Käpylä had become the model for social housing in the 1920s, so too this new design in Käpylä by Välikangas and Ekelund set a benchmark for a new wave of Modern social housing throughout Scandinavia. As with Puu Käpylä, its success was as much about planning and landscape architecture as the quality of the individual buildings, and their strategy to retain as much of the natural, rocky forest terrain of the site as possible contributed hugely to its success. The housing itself is simple and restrained; four-storey blocks of white-painted brickwork with angled bay windows and balconies provide a foil to the surrounding mature fir and birch trees. As importantly as the buildings and landscape (and so often later forgotten in the UK, United States and elsewhere), this was not merely a housing development but a complete new community, and the provision of communal heating, shops, restaurants, saunas, laundries, schools, meeting halls, a library and a kindergarten were further key components in its success and considerable influence throughout the region. Construction started in 1939, and when the Olympics were cancelled shortly after, as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War, the city council decided to proceed with the project, eventually providing homes for 1000 local people. Like Puu Käpylä, the Olympic Housing, as it has become known, remains as popular and sought after today as it was on its completion.
The year 1940 saw construction commence on the new Turku Railway Station on which Välikangas collaborated with Väinö Vähäkallio (1886–1959) – an elegant simple, very successful design in which the gridded glass void of the entrance plays against the solid rectangular form of the ticket hall. His appointment to the National Board of Building was followed by his selection as chief architect for the Helsinki Workers Savings Bank, and this resulted in a series of bank building commissions through the 1940s and 1950s including the Säästöpankki Bank building of 1941and the very fine office for the Helsinki Workers Savings Bank in Erottaja, Helsinki of 1951–1952, with its pure white interior, circular columns and glazed balcony below a gridded ceiling.
But designs of this quality from Välikangas’s office were becoming less frequent, and the majority of the bank buildings, along with further apartments and latterly a number of hospital buildings, including Kätilöopisto Hospital Helsinki of 1960, were generally unremarkable. By the end of the 1950s, with Martti Välikangas well into his sixties, little remained of the incredible creative spark, which had contributed so much to the Social Housing Movement, Nordic Classicism in the 1920s and Modernism in 1930’s Finland.
Puu Käpylä Housing
The rapid industrialization of the Scandinavian countries in the first three decades of the twentieth century required a massive expansion of the cities to cope with the influx of workers from the countryside. The population of Helsinki trebled between 1890 and1914, and solving the inevitable housing problem soon became both a major issue for the city and a major opportunity for Finnish architects. Very soon ‘the housing question was at the centre of the debate about the national society. Within only a few years, building costs had tripled. Private sector building companies had become almost completely inactive. The result was severe housing shortages and rising rents which was most hard on the working population that was already living in cramped conditions’.3
FIGURE 63 Typical Puu Käpylä House Plan, Credit – John Stewart. 1. Kitchen 2. Living 3. Bed
FIGURE 64 Typical Puu Käpylä House Section and Elevation, Credit – John Stewart.
As a result of this huge pressure to deliver new housing, in 1920, Martti Välikangas found himself commissioned by the city council to undertake the design of a new workers housing development of 165 homes. As if the scale of the project wasn’t a sufficient challenge, he was also required to build the houses as cheaply and quickly as possible. The fact that this young architect, who was only twenty-six at the time of his appointment, not only avoided the disaster that such a brief deserves but instead created one of the most successful social housing projects of the twentieth century, is an extraordinary achievement.
There are two principal elements in Puu Käpylä’s success – the design of the houses and the design of the spaces between the houses. In accepting the commission from the city council, Välikangas was required to work closely with their City Planning Department on the development of the overall plan for the project and was fortunate in that the department was led at that time by Birger Brunila (1882–1979), an architect who had been appointed as Helsinki Town Planner in 1917. Even more fortunately, he was supported in the planning department by Otto Meurman (1890–1994), another architect (who was to go on to create the first town plan for Tapiola – probably Finland’s most successful new town). Both Brunila and Meurman were enthusiastic followers of the English Garden City Movement and had already attempted to apply the ideas of the movement to new housing developments such as Torkkelinmäki (1926–1928) and Ferry Island (Lauttasaari – 1913–1919) in Helsinki.
The concept of Garden Cities was first proposed by Ebenezer Howard in his book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, which was published in 1898, and further developed in Garden Cities of Tomorrow published in 1902. As the title of his first book implies, Howard was a social reformer, inspired by William Morris, and appalled by the living conditions experienced by the majority of industrial workers in Britain at that time. His proposals were focused on providing humane living and working environments for the working class, which combined the amenities of the city with the fresh air, greenery and sunshine of the country. In a diagram (which predated Le Corbusier’s famous Ville Radieuse4 by some thirty years), Howard proposed a model new town in which the centre was formed by public buildings and parks, which were then surrounded by houses and gardens, which were themselves further encircled by factories and workshops, around which ran a railway line, outside of which were open fields of sufficient acreage to support the town. The concept inspired a number of wealthy, benevolent individuals and groups, and the first garden city was founded in Letchworth, some forty miles north of London in 1903. It was largely designed by Barry Parker (1867–1947) and Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) with its tree-lined streets, generous gardens and public amenities, making it both highly attractive and hugely influential. The houses were designed in a simple Arts and Crafts style, encircling the formal spaces of the town centre, where the principal Classical public buildings were located.
For Brunila, Meurman and others in Scandinavia, this appeared to be a model which would allow them to bypass the appalling living conditions of the cities of the early industrialized nations and proceed directly to what appeared to be an ideal solution, which was entirely consistent with the new social democratic values to which they aspired. From Välikangas’s earlier involvement in the Brändö Villastad housing company, which was another early garden city project in Helsinki (led by Lars Sonck, amongst others), one can presume that he was equally committed to this approach. One further unique element of their strategy for Puu Käpylä was the importance which they placed on the existing landscape of trees, rocks and other features and their desire to treat the existing landscape, which they saw as a unique asset, with the utmost respect (While this was evident in Käpylä, it later became an even greater influence on Välikangas’s Olympic Housing and on Meurmann’s Tapiola.)
While Välikangas, Brunila and Meurman were keen to promote the garden city concept, their scope in Käpylä was limited as this was essentially a much-needed mass housing development in the suburbs of Helsinki. Nevertheless, they were able to include a sports ground, a meeting room, several communal washing rooms and eventually a church (designed by Erkki Ilmari Sutinen and opened in 1930) in addition to the housing, and Käpylä was connected to Central Helsinki by public transport with a link to the city’s tram system, completed in 1925. The housing itself was simple but radical for working-class housing at the time when the norm was a small city-centre apartment. At Käpylä, the houses were either individual or in small terraces, arranged along tree-lined streets with both private and shared gardens and courtyards behind every home, where the residents could grow at least some of their own food and enjoy the clean, fresh air, sunlight and the contact with nature to which Ebenezer Howard had aspired. Many of the courtyards created behind the houses were further enclosed and reinforced by covered walkways linking the houses, which provided a sense of enclosure and protection and through which entrance gates and archways led in and out of the surrounding streets. As many as possible of the existing trees were retained on site and supplemented by further extensive planting during construction (in contrast to many other contemporary housing developments where the site was immediately cleared of all existing trees and rocks for ease of construction) (Figure 65).
FIGURE 65 Typical Puu Käpylä Street, Credit – John Stewart.
When Martti Välikangas turned to the design of the homes, he faced the dual pressures of programme and finance – the need for the homes was desperate and the need to maximize the number of homes provided was essential. In a country abounding in timber, the answer may have seemed obvious – indeed up until the end of the nineteenth century, timber houses for all classes had been the norm in almost all the Scandinavian countries. Välikangas, however, aspired to produce much more than timber cottages and developed both a rationalized system of construction for the houses and a sophisticated Classical language for their architecture.
Välikangas believed that, if much of the construction of the houses could be carried out indoors, off-site, then the erection of the houses, on-site, could be accelerated and be less impacted by the long Finnish winters. The designs for the houses were therefore rationalized, and he created what was an early ‘kit of parts’, which provided all the key components for the construction of the houses while still allowing himself considerable invention and creativity as to how they were combined. All the houses were built on a concrete slab, which was edged with stone, and the first houses were built in traditional Finnish square log construction to allow work to commence on site, while the rationalization process was still being developed. On completion, these were boarded to match the later houses to thus provide a consistent visual approach across the whole community. The structures for the prefabricated houses were traditional post and beam with the factory-produced panels fixed to this frame. These were the first (and amongst the most successful) twentieth-century prefabricated houses in Scandinavia (Figure 66).
FIGURE 66 Typical Puu Käpylä House, Credit – John Stewart.
Välikangas’s primary inspiration for the form of the houses was the Finnish vernacular of cottages, farmhouses and red ochre farm buildings, which JM Richards in his 800 Years of Finnish Architecture had identified in Ostrobothnia: ‘In this province two-storey farmhouses became common in the nineteenth century. (This is a typical example, standing in the flat countryside East of Vassa.) It has red boarded walls with white trim and window surrounds ornamented in a style similar to those in many neighbouring seaport towns.’5 Välikangas’s approach was, however, much more sophisticated than simply historic reproduction, and more subtle influences were numerous. The English Garden Cities were admired as much for the design of their Arts and Crafts workers houses (in particular, the arrangements of terraced houses and individual cottages) as they were for their town planning. The influence of Italy, which Välikangas visited while designing Käpylä, is clear too in the refined proportions of the buildings and particularly in the Classical details, which became such a significant element of the design. What Välikangas attempted was to find the roots of Classicism in the Finnish vernacular in the same way that Heinrich Tessenow was then reinterpreting the German vernacular in terms of a purified vision of a simplified Classical style for ordinary buildings. As Kenneth Frampton suggested of Tessenow and the Nordic Classicists, ‘they accepted the normative authority of vernacular components – the house types, barns, roofs, gables, windows, shutters, steps, pergolas, fences and casements which were seen as being comparable in their fixity to the received repertoire of Western Classicism’.6
It is equally important to note the influence of Italy on the overall layout of Puu Käpylä as, unlike the English garden cities, it is laid out on a grid with obvious Classical intentions, thus owing as much to Roman town planning as it does to the theories of Ebenezer Howard.
Välikangas’s workers houses were two-storeyed, clad vertically in timber with either shallow pitched roofs (creating temple-like gables) or the occasional mansard roof. The boarding is painted in strong colours, which vary throughout the estate but with a dominance of traditional red ochre. Many of the houses are connected with similar boarded timber fences or arcades, which enclose the courtyards and gardens. With the coloured boarding as a base, Välikangas then added contrasting windows and door frames in white-painted wood and decorated the houses with white-painted wooden Classical details, including garlands, medallions, acroteria, quasi-balustrades, columns, arches, bullseye windows, and both arched and pedimented porticos (Figure 67). This application of Classical details, along with the elegant proportions of the buildings, raised the symbolic status of the houses by the deployment of an architectural language which had previously been the preserve of the middle and upper classes. As Richard Weston noted: ‘Classicism was able to raise industrial environments above the utilitarian, dignify public buildings, legitimise the luxury of the wealthy by adding an aura of refinement and, as at Käpylä, giving character to cheap workers housing.’7
FIGURE 67 Typical Puu Käpylä House Detail, Credit – John Stewart.
What Välikangas achieved (and where so many others have subsequently failed) was to apply the details with an elegance and restraint – never too heavy, too numerous or too complex to contrast against the simple, coloured vertical-boarded backdrop. The language was used freely to respond to the internal arrangements of the dwellings and what were largely repetitive housing plans, found a wide variety of expressions across Käpylä. There is also a suggestion that ‘Välikangas gave his buildings human features and went beyond the viewer’s sense of beauty alone in exploiting his emotions. He used symmetry, asymmetry and combinations of the two … he toyed with houses with ends wider than the sides – an influence perhaps of the courthouse designed by Asplund’.8
The result of Välikangas’s efforts is a large group of low-cost workers houses, which were completed at an astonishing rate and price, which achieved a quality of environment previously only experienced in the Nordic countries by the bourgeoisie and which quickly developed into a successful, healthy community. These simple houses sit amongst trees on either side of shady avenues and enjoy communal gardens, playgrounds and courtyards, where children can play safely, parents can enjoy fresh air and sunlight, and flowers and vegetables can be grown. Their detailing and proportions give these relatively humble buildings a certain grace and even sophistication, and their bright-coloured timber cladding provides both vitality and warmth.
Interestingly, on their completion, they received a mixed response from both members of the city council and from the general public, many of whom expected the new independent Finland to be more forward looking in its social housing design. As Simo Paavilainen has suggested ‘it is almost as though, when comparing them with the monumentality of Sirén’s Parliament scheme, they found their homely qualities disappointing and embarrassing’.9 Malcolm Quantrill concurs with this view that ‘Kapyla seems to have reminded people too much of the modest rural past of Finland with its gently pitched roofs, plank fences and earth colours’.10 Fortunately, the workers for whom Käpylä became home (many of whom had moved out of slum apartments in Helsinki) had few concerns or criticisms. The opportunity to live in and raise their children in this little garden city was hugely appreciated, and the houses have been popular with their residents ever since. Perhaps the differing views were symptomatic of the age, to quote Richard Weston once more: ‘Although superficially the classicism of the 1920s may appear conservative, even nostalgic, in the political and cultural context of the time, it was a radical, outward-looking movement opposed to the dominant nationalist ideology. Nordic Classicism cast a unifying veil over “the all too bitter contrasts of the age” as the Scandinavian societies moved from privilege towards social democracy, from craft to industrial production, from predominantly rural-agrarian to increasingly industrial-urban economies’.11
In the 1960s, a combination of maintenance problems and its then unfashionable architectural style led to Puu Käpylä’s threatened demolition, but a committed group of residents successfully fought to save it. It still remains mostly occupied by working-class families, although more recently it has proved popular with professionals (especially architects) and even become established as something of a tourist attraction in Helsinki.
Considering the complexity of the challenge, which Välikangas was set, his solution for Puu Käpylä is an extraordinary, social and architectural achievement. He managed not only to overcome a plethora of short-term pressures but also to provide a solution, which has dramatically improved the lives of hundreds of local families since its completion almost a century ago and had a positive influence on many thousands more throughout Scandinavia.