April 2015

          Architectural tradition in the Finnish Nordic landscape today   by Sára Roeselová     at the University of Lapland 2015, Rovaniemi               Preface This essay is a result and a viewpoint of one individual who has had a chance to spend several months in Rovaniemi, a city marking the southern border of Finnish Lapland. Coming to live in a rather small city so far in the north, from the Central European perspective, opens up a new way of thinking about the living environment. In this case, it opened up a window into thinking about the purposes architecture should have and what functions it should serve. More than that, it started a thought process about the impact architecture has on a person and vice versa. As this topic is written about from the standpoint of an individual human being, the main focus of it will be it a familiar scale, a single person’s interaction with small scale architecture. Regarding Finnish architecture, there is a lot to be written about, moreover, there has already been a lot written. Having that in mind, this text does not go straight in those already familiar directions, but it combines, not solely for the lack of relevant literature, different views on a certain landscape and architectural environment. When one thinks of Finland, they think of a calm natural landscape that gets very close to feeling limitless. We also think of large and heavy bodies of water lacking a lot of energetic movement, laying in the landscape with a quiet and majestic strength of a very present yet hidden energy. Being present at a lakeside means being present at the edge of a, visually very open and continuous, space filled with light. In contrast with that, there are the endless forests.  Considering how flat most of Finland is, the presence in such forest can make one feel lost or closed off, even while being in this limitless and physically open space. There is a whole scale of positive feelings forests awake in people, although when it is a foreign forest, much of the comfort and enjoyment comes from knowing that this continuous maze has an end in reach. Once a person reaches that edge between a forest and an open space, they can choose to prolong their time spent inside the forest labyrinth where one cannot see clearly very far, but with the knowledge of a way out. The initial meaning behind spending time in this landscape comes from the excitement of discovery. Unfortunately this meaning isn’t one that can be kept alive constantly over a longer period of time. Of course the sense of discovery is maybe the main motivation behind the need of travel, but an essential part of that is also coming back home, where a person spends a majority of their time after all. That is where the second meaning comes in. The reason a person comes back into a space is the feeling of positive familiarity which goes hand in hand with an ever deepening sense of understanding and knowledge of the space. The process of familiarizing a foreign environment is where architecture finally comes in. That is the perspective from which this essay is written, the scale of an individual encountering a natural landscape and making it their own as a living space outside of their home. Now there comes the question of, where does the architectural historical tradition fit into this topic. After spending some time in a foreign country, you start to get curious and ask about things. In this case, it was the questions about local terms for things with a significance to me that led me to trying to find more about them. These things I am speaking about are represented by the small architecture I naturally came in contact with within the very first few days of my time here. It is the small architecture and the natural landscape through which this new country got introduced to me and it was nothing less than these spaces that lined my own process of familiarization and adaptation into the before foreign space. I found that the term “kota” has been around for centuries and the same goes for many other terms. I started noticing the similarities in ground plans and organization of different types of small scale simple architecture and that process inevitably led to the past, where all of the traditions have their roots. Because there is a significant focus on the interaction between architecture and a person, a lot of what is written in this text, mainly in the last chapters, is inspired by the writings of Juhani Pallasmaa, an architect and a theoretician of art and architecture of this time.   Environment Following the lines of the introduction comes a brief specification of the spoken environment including a small comparison of the situation of living in a big city of Central Europe with the situation of living in, population wise, a smaller scale city or a town in the Nordic environment being represented by the area starting with the city of Rovaniemi and going north. Comparing to living in a city of a million-plus inhabitants, nature and landscape plays a much more significant role here in Finland. If we compare the urban area of a metropolitan city to the urban environment of Rovaniemi, we find that the term “urban” has two very different meanings. Though it is probably not about the meaning, but the scale on which this term is played out. If we were to consider a city as a palette of one color, let’s say blue, and we were to mix in a bit of a different color, let’s say yellow, for every sign of nature present in the city, we would, in the end, come up with two significantly differing tones from the same scale. For a large European metropolitan city, in many cases, the result would be some tone