Pure Laziness

Can't be bothered to post really, but I will update the header with this months image... these things are everywhere this time of year.

The competition is in by the way... so Jonna gets some now (competition on the blog that is)

Oh and I got a 5- on my level 7 Suomen Kieli the other week, despite getting everything wrong.
And level 8 is buggeringly hard.

If you know what I mean.

Partisiipit, ihana...

I'm really going now, move along, nothing to see here...

Time flies when you're having fun

Danger - Architect at work... via

What is it with architects and deadlines?

Somehow it is 10 days since our last post, although it only seems like last night. I have several things I want to blog about (including horses & cows, blood pancakes, not cycling, dentists and other random things) but we're in that mad 'draw-up' zone trying to get our Europan 10 competition entry ready, working 12 hour days redesigning everything for the n-th time, redrawing it, redesigning it again, drawing it again, re-reading the brief, starting it all again.... Having the world's worst rickety, uneven table as a drawing board, no network, flaky software and only an A4 printer (also very temperamental - rather like it's owner) doesn't exactly help. Mind you the set up is still almost as good as my last office...

The observant amongst you may be wondering why I making a big deal about this as we still have exactly a month to go, however my course starts on Monday (oh bugger I have to revise for that too), and we have Juhannus in between, and I need to get a 3d CAD model of the whole site finished next week so we can work up some perspective views then work on the written part. While Konna will only have to draw everything else! If we were doing this in an office I would hope there would be a few more hands.  Lucky it is 'only' three A1 boards... (and 10 A3's, and 2 CD's) ... and we can't even publish it here until after the judging - in January!

I don't think I quite got that...

actually I didn't: from Kiasma swag

If you're going to be late in Finland, it is good to have a good reason as lateness is, to put it mildly, somewhat frowned upon - and as excuses go 'I had to wait for Tarja Halonen to get out of my way' is not bad when being (almost) late for something. That's Finland's President Halonen if you didn't realise.

You might have read my post last month about me being one of the winners in the Ola Kolehmainen / Kiasma / Nokia Ovi valokuvakilpailu (photography competition).  As their site says, Ola chose 14 photos by 11 people (3 of which were mine - Zinc Slash Tree, Finlandia and Curves) from the 96 entrants.  Well on Friday I got my prize (luckily I wasn't too held up by a certain important person in reception) - a workshop with Ola on our efforts and tour of the show with him, which was also photographed for posterity.

 

Ola explains all... do I look like I get it?

If you look carefully at this picture you can see Ola commenting on some of my photographs. (He was interested in how these pictures went from 'documentary' to 'half documentary/half abstract' (crop out the sky...), to totally abstract; the difficulty on using a culturally, and meaning loaded building like the Berlin Jewish museum as a subject for 'abstract' photography; and also why I had chosen those pictures/subjects).  He also was extremely conversant with the buildings and architects themselves, which was interesting to me (as the only architect in the room) but perhaps over the heads of some of the others.  

Or perhaps not... Unfortunately the ten minutes while we discussed them was the only time spent speaking English for almost three hours - so it was hard to tell.  While what little I followed seemed interesting, you'll understand why I'm looking a bit blank in the photos.  I think he was discussing how naming the pictures changed them (eg. the picture of the reflection of Mies' Barcelona Pavillion 'Less Less Is Is More More' becomes a discourse on minimalism), and also how chance and accidents in the darkroom can totally change a picture even when carefully pre-planned and considered (a white building becomes vivid yellow; a magpie lands on a window ledge; a tiny weed grows unseen from behind a metal disc...), amongst other things, but... He was however kind enough to say he hoped I got something out of it at the end - probably noticing my glazed look!

We did also get a swag-bag from Kiasma (contents pictured below for authentic anal-retentive micro-blogging) - including a very apt t-shirt and pad of post-it notes considering my struggles... but my foolish dreams of shiny Nokia kit or photography books were dashed. Never mind - a fascinating day in any case.

This is Not Architecture

Zinc Slash Tree: From this is not architecture

At Helsinki's Kiasma art gallery until 24th April is an exhibition of Finnish photographer Ola Kolemainen's abstracted pictures of buildings, entitled 'A Building is Not A Building' - perhaps in a nod to the surrealist Magritte's famous 'The Treachery of Images' caption 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Then again the title is also literally true as, in the case of his carefully cropped and oversized works, none of the pictures are really of the buildings featured as such but of effects encountered when looking at them.

Now as you may know by now this is just my sort of thing - combining architecture with finding details and patterns from architecture and nature with my camera - so when I found out there was a photograph competition (sponsored by Nokia's Ovi picture sharing service) to get a tour of the exhibition with the photographer I thought 'why not?' (or to be exact Konna said 'you should enter that') and picked out a few of my old pics, cropped them as needed to give them a more abstracted look, and - voila!

      

red arcs, grooves, jupiter, light wave, finlandia - but can anyone identify the six buildings featured on this page?

There were apparently about 100 entrants, so I was quite pleased to hear today I was selected as one of the winners... although it's not clear which of my pictures I was selected for - I think 'red arcs' is most like his work, although 'zinc slash tree' is my favourite. I'll give the architects in the room a few days to work out which buildings (some quite famous) are featured.

I think that is probably the first thing I have won since getting second place in the javelin competition on a school sports day many moons ago so this is quite a novelty.  I just hope that it's not all explained in Finnish! (And wouldn't it be nice if it turned out there was a Nokia goodie bag...)

Architecture Corner

Following on from our 'And the winner will be...' and 'Stirling Stirling' posts recently I can now announce that 100% of you who took part in the Hölynpöly poll were wrong. As anyone who didn't glaze over when the A-work appeared in the title probably knows already, Accordia won - so well done Architects: Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios/Alison Brooks Architects/Macreanor Lavington and client Countryside Properties.  Undoubtedly a cut above your typical UK residential development.

silikkamarkkinat: sea and land 'marketecture'

Yesterday, on another grey and drizzly day, and on our way to Silikkamarkkinat (that's the annual baltic herring market at Kaupatori), we went and had a look at the exhibition of 104 competition entries for the Finnish pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010.  This was won by JKMM's 'Kirnu' entry.  Lewism has already made a good point regarding the question of how relevant these Expo's really are to international architectural thinking these days.  What interests me is how JKMM (who amazingly also got 3rd prize for another entry - actually I maybe preferred that entry) seem to have cracked the competition 'code' in Finland, with an amazing hit rate of wins, runner-ups and mentions.  Don't get me wrong, I think with the quality of their built work (e.g. Vikki church) and their design proposals, show obvious talent and hard work, so their projects deserve the success they are getting - but their envious competitors must be wondering how to compete... so it would also be interesting to see them up against big international names: Foster, Hadid, H&M (that's the architects not the clothes store...), OMA, etc.  

Having been involved in an open RIBA competition winning scheme in the past (in the end unbuilt despite getting planning permission and 95% of funding), I also can't help being equally envious at how many of these competition wins translate into built buildings that seem to meet the aspirations of the competition entry. Maybe one day I'll get my chance.