Helsinki
With the passage (more or less) of covid, the college is picking up initiatives that had to be put on hold due to lockdowns. One of the yawning needs of our programs is greater opportunities for study abroad programming. Always an interest to students in our majors, it’s also a huge part of the Belmont ethos. I was delighted to have this reason to travel to Finland, which has long been on my list of hoped-for destinations (along with all the other Nordic countries).
As anticipated, it was great, but for bonus reasons in addition to what I expected. Interesting to learn that Helsinki is both the smallest and most modern of European capitals–it has about 660,000 people and a land area of 82.53 mi² (compare with London at 607 mi²). Named the capital of Finland in 1812, it has no reason to have a medieval core.
Finland has always exceeded expectations in terms of impact on the design world, with major modern players (Eero Saarinen, Aino & Alvar Aalto, Armi Ratia, Maija Isola, Wivi Lönn, Lars Sonck) emerging from long traditions of nature-bound, quality craft spanning millennia. The land of Marimekko & Moonin, the Aalto vase & Princess Leia’s necklace , as well as Metropolia’s “Creative Campus,” I am thrilled to have established a partnership with Metropolia for our fashion & interior design students, and am just a skosh jealous of them.
Helsinki
Helsinki
Helsinki
bat!
Metropolia: Arabia campus
Metropolia: Arabia campus
Saarinen
Saarinen
Sonck
Sonck
Saarinen
Helsinki
nicest airport in the world
exhibition: Eesti Arhitektuurimuuseum (Estonian Museum of Architecture), Tallinn
housed in a fabulous salt storage built in 1908
cellar
Cemetery chapel (Herbert Johanson, 1935), described as "limestone functionalism"
"House of Play" (Architect Must, 2014): kindergarten built around the idea of play as the primary way to learn
Post-Modern Estonia: Western posture as a radical political statement. "Brother's House" by Veljo Kaasik, 1975, an omage to Venturi
Roterman quarter, Tallinn: New developments from 2005+
First of all, a great (if small) national architecture museum (then again, Estonia is not large). What it may lack in size, Estonia makes up for in a rugged history that is told skillfully through architectural developments going only far back as the 19th c or so. Maybe with more space they’d dig into the buildings that came of being subject to Sweden and then Russia–not to mention centuries and millennia before that. Subsequent Romantic Nationalism flourished by the time of a brief independence in the 1920s and ’30s, which came to a crashing end by the occupation of the Soviets in 1940 and the Nazis a few years later. Unlike its neighbors Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia shook off Soviet control and recognized its independence in August, 1991–notably, the year that this great little museum was founded.
This very particular history, woven into what is more typically learned of the twentieth century, recasts architectural developments from Modernism to Post-Modernism into a very different context and thus with distinct meaning. The clarity of the exhibitions are skillful in telling Estonia’s fascinating, fraught, and triumphant history through its buildings in a way that I wish we’d see in more capitals.
exhibition: Designmuseo (Helsinki)
housed in a former school built in former school, designed in 1894 by Gustaf Nyström
at the ticket counter: display of those famous orange handles
Vuokko Nurmesniemi exhibition
Jaakko Iisalo's Angry Birds (2009)
fiskars everywhere
Planetary Valleys necklace (a.k.a. Princess Leia's necklace) by Björn Weckström, 1977
mold for THE Aalto vase
Vuokko
Marimekko <3
Vuokko Oy garden furniture
Vuokko Oy exhibition
Exhibition: “Weaving Splendor: Treasures of Asian Textiles”, Frist Museum (Nashville)
Another embroidery exhibition that would have passed my attention a few years ago, that now I run to and eat up. The more I look into and do embroidery, the more I am aware of the connections of this craft with another one that I have studied much more–architecture. There are similar issues concerning material capabilities, choices about drawing attention to connections vs. surface treatments, and of course the long history of aesthetics that are common across regional crafts.
This one addressed a pretty vast landscape, from China to Türkiye, exemplified by theatre costumes, decorative arts, and recent fashion. It was really scrumptuous.
Exhibition: “150 Years of the Royal School of Needlework: Crown to Catwalk”, Fashion and Textile Museum (London)
Like lots of people, I found some relief from the chronic mental anguish surrounding COVID through picking up a manual hobby–in this case, returning to needlework that I had futzed with much earlier in life. Nashville had a great little place called Craft South, where I took a class that introduced me to embroidery techniques that had seemed out of reach since the first wowie-zowie embroidery I remember seeing was the Whiplash by Hermann Obrist in an Art Nouveau segment of a modern European architecture class back in 1990 or so. Judging all embroidery by the Obrist standard–or, rather, the unknown embroiderer who likely stitched what Obrist drew–was maybe unfair, and what kept me from it for so long. But pushed to a need to claim something real and physical and beautiful by a global pandemic, I waded in.
And glad I did tho I have yet to whip up my own whiplash. But I do take opportunities to take in masterful needlework whenever I can. Seeing the RSN’s anniversary show was indeed gallery after gallery of wowie-zowie moments. I no longer feel intimidated by them, just a very healthy encouragement to keep stabbing away.
