‘Designing Finnishness’
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Finland, Culture, Architecture, Books, Design

From hard to soft

While we can say Finnishness was in a sense designed along with Finland, it is also, at the same time, much older than Finland.

The Finnish language is signifcantly older. And of course the one thing non-Finns know about the Finnish language is that it is impenetrable, legendarily obscure, emblematic of an apparent hardness, or flintiness.

Perhaps as a result, Diego Marani’s idiosyncratic novel ‘New Finnish Grammar’ gives us the best contemporary insight into Finnishness. In Marani’s book, Finnishness is articulated for the reader by a frequently drunk pastor, who filters every aspect of his culture through the prism of the Finnish language as well as through copious amounts of koskenkorva. While Finnishness may be invented, he states that the language itself was not.

“(O)ther languages are merely temporary scaffolding for meaning. Not so for Finnish: Finnish was not invented. The sounds of our language were around us, in nature, in the woods, in the pull of the sea, in the call of the wild, in the sound of the falling snow. All we did was to bring them together and bend them to our needs.” (in Marani, ibid.)

At its core there are a group of ancient words — some think a few words are over 6000 years old. Small, soft words describing the body, the landscape, the weather, the world:

kuu (moon/month), suu (mouth), puu (tree), sää (weather), jää (ice), pää (head), kivi (stone), mäki (hill), joki (river), lahti (bay), järvi (lake), saari (island) …

This emphasis on the physical, the body, objects within a landscape, and their various conditions is an interesting starting point for a culture. Is this why Finnishness also focuses on objects and their material qualities, the body and the landscape? In what Marani describes as “chipped sounds, words eaten away by ice and silence” we might find the origins of a later facility with objects, with architecture, and in particular with a purist form of both, a design oriented around authenticity and the qualities of natural materials. Equally, the emphasis on the body would generate the form of humanist modernism associated with brands like Artek, who aimed to “support and nourish human beings’ physical and psychological wellbeing … blending functionalism with form and sculptural simplicity with the emotional warmth of wood.”

So hard conditions begat a hard language and a facility with hard materials. Yet those soft words also begat softness, through a comfort with the body and the ephemeral conditions of weather, flora and fauna.

Hardness also applies to the environmental conditions Finland enjoys. It is, of course, insanely cold. Yet everything is built to withstand it, from clothing to transport to the urban plan to the buildings — I have been colder in Australian or Italian houses than I ever was in our Helsinki apartment. Equally, the delights of the Finnish summer, which can be perfectly warm, if a little brief, means it is entirely possible to witness a 60-degree centigrade temperature swing across the year. Yet thanks to engineering that swing in conditions is not a problem. Conquering such conditions means that engineering itself has been elevated to exalted status within Finnishness.

Yet the next challenge is beyond engineering, beyond dealing with the hardness and difficulty of Finnish conditions, and instead dealing with soft systems, social systems.

“The idea of Helsinki is radical: a new capital for a new nation; an ideal city built from tabula rasa; an orthogonal grid laid over the topographic granite of an irregular peninsular; a window to the West and the East; a showcase and platform for a political, social, cultural, and architectural experiment on a grand scale.” (Kalliala ibid.)

Tsar Alexander I had designated, and in effect created, Helsinki as a kind of Special Political Zone (just as Shenzhen would be a Special Economic Zone for China almost two centuries later.) He designed it to be an autonomous Grand Duchy, a merging of Russian order with liberal European values picked up during his schooling in Switzerland. It was a prototype for politics.

While hard boundaries changed in largely obvious ways, the soft system of politics draped over what would become the Republic Of Finland suggested a design of decision-making itself.

Scroll forward many decades to the recent years and a practice of “strategic design” — the design of decision-making cultures — would emerge in Finland, partly courtesy of Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. The concern here is not with the production of objects, services, buildings and cities, but with the conditions that would enable those things, in order to address new kinds of highly complex and interdependent problems. Part of a growing international movement often looking at the design of the public sector, it feels like a different form of design, focused not only on those “hard” outcomes but on the soft systems of culture, management, services, and the organisation that enables them. It is a clear departure from the obvious tangibility of what people recognise as Finnish design.

Is it possible to connect the institutions that have nurtured Finnish design to the nation’s history of designing cultures, which is barely recognised as design at all? How to train a generation capable of articulating the architecture of “wicked problems”, and not simply the architecture of buildings?

This is the first step in evolving Finnishness — dealing with soft systems as well as hard outcomes.

From silent to social

That those Finnish words are “eaten away by silence” is also important. The ‘Finnish silence’ is an essential component of Finnishness, perhaps derived from the solitude that marks much of the Finns’ existence — the giant land mass, the small population, the late urbanisation: all conspire to creating an everyday life that, only a few generations ago, was based on not seeing many other people at all, for days on end.

Daniel Dennett suggests that “talking, and not talking, is what makes us human.” Dennett means “not talking” in order to deliberately conceal or obscure. But in Finnishness it is often simply … not talking. Foreigners are often thrown by the Finn’s ability to deploy a gaping silence into the middle of a conversation — like the old theatre joke when the narrator utters “night falls” being underlined by a sudden curtain drop. This comfort with silence is appealing, in the context of cultures that revel in small-talk instead, in filling each moment with something, anything, essentially with the chaff of shallowness. Yet equally, it can reinforce the idea that Finnishness is socially awkward. Though it should be noted that this taciturn characteristic to Finnish communication is most frequently associated with the male of the species.

Juhani Pallasmaa, who has perhaps written more influentially than any other Finnish architect, recalls of his childhood that:

“Tapio Wirkkala, the legendary designer was an elder brother for me, and he taught me the importance of craft. As I had spent the decisive years of my childhood at my farmer grandfather’s humble farm, I shared a love of nature, solitude and silence with Tapio.”

This is just about the most Finnish paragraph one could imagine. Craft, nature, solitude, silence.