Elina Standertskjรถld
American Influence on Finnish Architecture from the Turn of the 20th Century to the Second World War
Elina Standertskjรถld
American Influence on Finnish Architecture from the Turn of the 20th Century to the Second World War
Museum of Finnish Architecture
Front cover: Eliel Saarinen: The Chicago Lake Front plan 1923. The Drawings Collection of The Museum of Finnish Architecture. Back cover: Eliel Saarinen: The Chicago Lake Front plan 1923. The Drawings Collection of The Museum of Finnish Architecture. English translation: Mira Darmark Design & layout: Salla Bedard Picture assistant: Anna Autio © Writer and Museum of Finnish Architecture Printers: Art-Print Oy, Helsinki 2010 ISBN 978-952-5195-36-1 The book has been published with the support of Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, National Council for Architecture, Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the American Embassy in Helsinki
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Museum of Finnish Architecture Helsinki 2010 www.mfa.fi
Contents Preface The Dream of the New World Notes
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American Urban Planning and its influence in Finland during the 1910s and 1920s Notes
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Industrial Architecture American Efficiency and German Artistry Notes
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The Early Stages of Serial Production of Wooden Houses in Finland Links with Development in the United States Notes
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58 73
American Cinema and Modernist Architecture in Finland during the 1930s Notes
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Index of persons Sources for illustrations
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Sigurd Frosterus’ drawing for the Civic Centre 1924. Collections of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.
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Preface The idea of writing these articles appeared to me gradually in the course of other research as I came upon the American architects and phenomena mentioned in this book. As I was writing my Master’s thesis on the office buildings planned for downtown Helsinki in the 1920s and 30s, I realised that skyscrapers were much debated in the journal Arkkitehti during the 1920s. As I was finishing a monograph on the architect P. E. Blomstedt, I also found several references to Henry Ford’s writings in his unpublished notes. As to Alvar Aalto, I wrote about his visits to the United States in the book Matkalla! En route! published by the Museum of Finnish Architecture. The American influence on urban planning caught my interest when I discovered Sigurd Frosterus’ drawing for the civic centre in the museum’s drawings collection. The texts of the drawing, dated November 1924, are in English, something which was very uncommon at the time and which indicates that Frosterus intended his design to be presented in some English journal or exhibition. I was also aware of Eliel Saarinen’s American town plans which were already well-known and researched. Professor Pekka Korvenmaa’s articles on Alvar Aalto’s connections to the United States during the 1930s got me interested in the history of the frame house as well as its adaptation in Finland. As I was looking through old editions of Arkkitehti and Rakennustaito, I came upon information confirming that Finnish architects and building contractors were well acquainted with American house factories and working methods
as early as at the beginning of the 20th century. My article on the influence of cinema on 1930s Finnish architecture was the last to come about. Much has been written on architecture in the movies but not on how the movies influenced architecture. Cinema greatly influenced all aspects of culture in Finland, a country which in its process of modernization had a very positive attitude towards the United States prior to WWII. The publication of this book has been made possible through the Foreign Ministry’s financial contribution to the printing costs. I would like to thank Juha Parikka, Publications and Promotions Manager, Outi Hakanen, Embassy Counsellor, and Pekka Hako, Cultural Counsellor, for their assistance. Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge the Alfred Kordelin Foundation for the research grant provided, as well as the Arts Council of Finland and the American Embassy in Helsinki for the financial contribution to the translation of these articles. A big thank you also to Mira Darmark for her excellent translations and Harry Charrington for revising the text. Finally, I would like to thank Severi Blomstedt who took this book under his wings during his time as director at the Museum of Finnish Architecture. I dedicate this book to my son, Gustaf Hans Henrik Standertskjöld, who is one of us. Helsinki 27.9.2010 Elina Standertskjöld
Eliel Saarinen: Chicago Tribune tower 1922, competition entry, 2nd prize. Collections of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.
The Dream
The Dream of the New World The Americanisation of Europe at the Beginning of the 20th Century
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1. German soldiers during the First World War. 2. P.E. Blomstedt: Competition entry for Vallila church, Helsinki 1929. The building was so fantastical as to be impossible to construct in real life. 3. The Fuller Building in New York. This picture was published in the Arkkitehti in 1910 in connection with a piece on skyscrapers.
There were several reasons behind the increasing American influence in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the most important being the exceptionally rapid industrial development which had taken place in the United States.1 From the end of the 19th century, the United States was significantly ahead of Europe as concerns the development of new forms of energy and production. In his book of 1934, Technics and Civilization, the American sociologist Lewis Mumford stated that electricity, and hydro electrical power in particular, carried Western culture into an entirely new era. The change was not limited to a technological revolution alone but predicted a complete cultural transformation. In the United States people started to talk about a “super power” which allowed the dawn of a new society.2 Another cause for the so-called Americanisation was that people – worn out and shaken by the trials of the First World War – longed for change.3 Belief in the power of change was one of the main visions among the post-war Modernist generation. Europeans needed utopian ideals far enough removed from their everyday life, and North America – hard to reach over
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the ocean – fitted perfectly as a model for the wonderful times to come.4 Among architects, the strong belief that the world was changing revealed itself through fantastical plans which either required, or were based on, technological progress.5 The Italians, French and Russians planned buildings and town plans which were to be seen more or less as manifestos. These buildings were so fantastical as to be impossible to construct in real life.6 A new kind of building emerged as the symbol of progress – the skyscraper. From the end of the 19th century, engineers in New York and Chicago created steel structures which made it possible to build towers as tall as fifty floors. European architects began to take an increasing interest in skyscrapers, although building regulations limited the construction of tall buildings in most countries.7 The architects’ attitude towards this new kind of construction was quite sentimental.8 In architectural circles people even started to talk of “skyscraper romanticism”. In spite of the limitations, European architects created hundreds of different skyscraper plans during the 1920s. American urban planning also raised quite a bit of interest, and from the beginning of the 20th century new plans were presented at international exhibitions and conventions around Europe.9 The planning of big cities became increasingly difficult as they continued to expand and turn into slums. The only way to solve the problem was to treat the city as a whole. The prediction of growing traffic and its organisation became leading factors in urban planning. To aid them,
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urban planners made use of for instance aerial photos taken by plane, which clearly showed the structure of the city as well as its potential deficiencies.10 Furthermore, the word “greater� began to be used to an ever increasing degree in prefixes too, for example, the plans of Greater Berlin, Greater Tallinn or Greater Helsinki. Simultaneously the size of public buildings around the city centres grew.11Since all architects did not have the opportunity to attend the conventions, they got acquainted with American urban planning through the new literature on the subject. Two of the most well-known of these were American Vitruvius
1. Aerial photo of a motorway system in Greater Chicago. The photo was published in the exhibition catalogue of Amerikka rakentaa, in 1945. 2. Eliel Saarinen: Competition entry for the 1913 general plan of Greater Tallinn.
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– An Architect’s Handbook of Civic Art (1922) and Amerikanische Architektur & Stadtbaukunst (1925) written by Werner Hegemann who lived in the United States for several years and organised a number of international urban planning exhibitions.12 The United States was also the home of a new, energetic type of man who created his own destiny – the “self made man”. Practical labour was valued ever higher with the result that people began to alienate academic theorisation, and exaggerated study was even considered harmful. These new ideas quickly conquered Europe, and – as the Finnish historian Rainer Knapas states in his text “Aatteiden maisemat” (The Scenes of Ideals) – the so-called philosophers of pragmatism, William James and Henri Bergson, appeared even in the articles of Finnish journals as early as in the 1910s. Bergson coined the concept “vital force” and James, who worked at Harvard, presented his thoughts on consciousness as a subjective principle, as well as the notion of pragmatism, in his work Principles of Psychology (1890). In Europe, James was strongly linked to the American way of solving all potential problems quickly, efficiently and sensibly. The expressions “practical men” and “practical professions” became popular in industrial and business circles as early as around the turn of the century.13 When speaking of art, people began to make use of terms such as energy, activity and dynamics. Speed and efficiency came to be absolute values even within the larger architectural firms of the time. American firms were run as businesses, and practical training succeeded academic education. Gradually, the various stages of production were standardised.14 People embraced theories on work efficiency through the models created for industrial purposes by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, and the change which occurred in the field was closely followed in the Nordic countries as well. In 1908, an article by the title “Principerna för en rationell affärsledning på ett arkitektkontor” (Principles for the Rational Business Management of an Architectural Office) appeared in the Swedish journal Arkitektur och dekorativ konst, and in 1914 that same article featured in the Finnish journal Arkitekten under the title “Amerikanska arkitekturbyråer och deras organisation” (American Architectural Firms and Their Organisation).15 By the 1920s, this development resulted in European architects being more American than the Americans themselves in their admiration of the progress
made by engineers and their aim to create a uniform rational design. Paradoxically enough, American architects were not aware of the change taking place. In 1925, the Russian artist and architect El Lissitzky (1890-1941) wrote a text by the title “Americanism in European Architecture” in the journal Krasnia Niva: “In the old world – Europe – the words “America” and “American” conjured up an image of something perfect, rational, useful and universal… in the mind of the European, New York became the new Athens, Manhattan the Acropolis and the skyscrapers the Parthenon. New York, however, never knew of its own fame.” 16 The Image of North American Architecture Created through Literature and Photography Since it was expensive and difficult to cross the Atlantic even after the First World War, most European architects became familiar with American building culture through various means of media and literature. Architects were particularly interested in the architectural engineering of the day: the industrial buildings adapted to work on the assembly line, the prefabricated wooden houses and the steel structures which allowed the construction of skyscrapers.17 However, books on these subjects began to be published to a greater extent only during the 1920s, after the financial crisis brought about by the war was alleviated.18 It was not only books on technological innovations that were of significance, but travel books and pictorial books as well. Since one rarely got to know the buildings on site, the pictures of buildings published in these books were of great importance.19 In his work Concrete Atlantis (1986), the architectural critic and essayist Rayner Banham declares that the attitude of European architects towards the United States was idealising and uncritical at first. Furthermore, American industrial and silo architecture played a central part, according to him, in the emergence of European Modernism. As Jean-Louis Cohen in his book Scenes of the World to Come – European Architecture and the American Challenge 1893-1960 (1995), Banham points out the importance of photographs as a mediator of American trends. What was new was that, in connection with writings on architecture, one started to publish pictures of anonymous industrial facilities. In the eyes of European architects, American industrial and silo architecture had preserved the clean primary forms, making them universal. Some of the pictures had even been intentionally
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Bertel Jung, Eliel Saarinen and Burnham’s Plan of Chicago In Finland, the first person to take an interest in Burnham’s plan was the Helsinki town planning architect Bertel Jung (this post was created in 1908). He had learned of the plan from the German born Werner Hegemann.7 After having spent many years in the United States, Hegemann had worked as the executive secretary of the “Allgemeine Städtebau” exhibition which was held in Berlin in 1910. Jung visited the exhibition and was also familiar with Hegemann’s written work, Amerikanische Parkanlagen and Der neue Bauungsplan für Chicago, in which Burnham and Bennett’s plan was presented.8 In his book, which concerned parks, Hegemann compared the development which had taken place in Chicago with the future prospects of Berlin.9 In 1911, Hegemann visited Helsinki, where he – through Jung’s guidance – became acquainted with the architecture and urban planning of the city. 10 That same year Jung completed his “Stor-Helsingfors” Helsinki general plan, along with a proposal for
a Central Park. Hegemann’s writings, as well as the conversations he and Jung most likely had during the former’s visit, influenced Jung’s plan. At the end of 1911, he presented his Central Park plan in the journal Arkitekten. At the very beginning, Jung mentions that parks have gained an entirely new significance within urban planning, and he uses the United States as a case in point. Jung says that he knew American urban planning through specialist literature, since he has been unable to visit the places in question. In connection to the American examples, he brings up Hegemann’s text “Ein Parkbuch”, by which he means the work Amerikanische Parkanlagen. According to Jung, parks should be constructed according to the needs of the general public, and preferably in close proximity to where the settlement is at its most dense – as examples to follow he mentions Chicago and Boston. He suggests that Helsinki’s city gardener should be sent to America for purpose of study.11 In the Stor-Helsingfors plan, Jung had earmarked a vast area to the north of the Töölö Bay as the site for the park, and arranged walkways across the terrain. The area of the park included Kaisaniemi, Hakasalmi, Hesperia, Eläintarha (Linnunlaulu, the detached houses of Eläintarha, Alppila and the Borgström park), as well as part of the Reijola forest area, which Jung wanted to preserve as they were. Around the park borders, he planned to plant the trees so densely that they would prevent any view of the buildings. According to his own statement, he took the idea from the American plans.12 In 1912, the journal Arkitekten brought up American urban planning once again, when Birger Brunila – who had been hired as Bertel Jung’s assistant at the Town Planning Department – discussed Burnham’s plan of Chicago. He depicted the history of Chicago and its inhabitants, after which he presented Burnham and Bennett’s plan in detail.13 Three years after this publication, Jung developed the so called “Munkkiniemi-Haaga” plan together with Eliel Saarinen.14 The basic conditions of this plan were the same as those of the plan of Chicago, in so far that they were both financed by representatives of business life – in Helsinki, the plan was ordered by the M. G. Stenius company, in Chicago, by The Commercial Club of Chicago.15 According to the architect Kirmo Mikkola, Saarinen liberally combined various architectural themes in his urban plans; on the one hand, the southern part
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1. The Architect Bertel Jung (1872–1946). 2. Bertel Jung’s 1911 proposal for Central Park in Helsinki.
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of the area, and the notion of squares in connection to Iso Puistotie, was inspired by the European architects Camillo Sitte and Raymond Unwin, on the other, Laajalahdentie and its terminus reminded him of the Civic Centre of Burnham’s plan of Chicago.16 The main difference was that, in Saarinen’s plan, the focus lay on housing areas, not business and administration centres as in Burnham’s plan. Saarinen’s manner of dealing with large spaces as uniform wholes, traffic solutions targeting future needs (Jung was responsible for the suburban rail network), and especially the high-quality technical drawings which were part of the plan − and which were also published as a book − at any rate clearly pointed towards Burnham’s plan of Chicago. With funding provided by the businessman Julius Tallberg, Jung, Saarinen and Einar Sjöström continued working on the plan of Greater Helsinki under the name of “Pro Helsingfors” in 1918. By now, the area of the plan had expanded to include the Helsinki parish and Espoo. In addition, Saarinen also developed a new plan of the area around the Töölö Bay. In this plan,
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Eliel Saarinen’s Plan of the Chicago Lake Front and the Writings of Gustaf Strengell
traffic solutions were once again of great importance, with the wide, new business street − the so called King’s Avenue − placed in the filled Töölö Bay, and the railway station moved to Pasila.17 In 1919, Jung moved to Turku, where he remained faithful to the principles of American urban planning. In 1921, he designed a plan of the Linnanselkä and Iso-Heikkilä districts of Greater Turku. This city plan clearly shares its basis with Burnham’s plan of San Francisco; two monuments connected by a wide avenue, traversed by a business street. Jung’s intention was to create a “main city” close to the port area. The district was crossed by an almost 100 metres wide, north-southbound avenue, at one end of which the new Finnish language university was situated, and at the other Turku Castle. In connection with the university, he drew a park with plots for small houses. The Castle too was surrounded by a park with terrace houses, and in front of it was an open lawn. Along the avenue, buildings were allowed to be as tall as eight floors and along the transverse business street ten.18
1. The 1915 plan of “Munkkiniemi-Haaga” by Eliel Saarinen and Bertel Jung. 2. The 1918 plan of Greater Helsinki, “Pro Helsingfors”, by Bertel Jung, Eliel Saarinen and Einar Sjöström. The socalled “King’s Avenue”. 3. Eliel Saarinen on the front of Suomen Kuvalehti in 1931. In the background his 1922 entry for the Chicago Tribune competition can be seen.
At the beginning of the 1920s, Burnham and Bennett’s plan of Chicago once again became a topic for the papers. The renewed interest was sparked by Eliel Saarinen’s move to the United States. In 1922, he won second place in an office building competition organised by The Chicago Tribune, (9) after which he decided to move there. At first he lived in Chicago, where he created a scheme for the development of the Chicago lakefront, which partly had its basis in Burnham’s plan. Saarinen introduced his plan in the 1923 December issue of The American Architect and the Architectural Review, in which he mentions having had detailed knowledge of Burnham’s city plan long before moving to the United States.19 Saarinen developed the Lakefront plan on his own initiative, and received no payment for his work. In the middle of the area he placed Grant Plaza, on the north side of which rose the Grant Hotel skyscraper with its 57 floors. In front of the cross-shaped hotel tower was
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a vast square, around which there was a dense concentration of city blocks.20 The hotel was connected to the railway station, which was placed entirely underground. Saarinen was most likely inspired to connect the station directly to the huge hotel by the new Grand Central Terminus in New York, which was completed in 1910. The other buildings were similar to his entry in the Chicago Tribune competition. In the Lakefront plan, the most important traffic route was the wide road of Michigan Avenue, which passed through a park area. The road went under Grant Plaza where there was a vast multi-storey car park, a threestory structure which seems quite modern. Pedestrians were separated from motor traffic by overpasses above the motor roads.21 On Saarinen’s first journey to the United States, he brought along his friend, architect Gustaf Strengell
as an interpreter.22 Upon returning to Finland, Strengell wrote a five-part series of articles on American urban planning and Saarinen in the Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet. The first two-part article, which concerned Daniel Burnham, appeared at the beginning of February 1924. Strengell idealised Burnham. According to him, it was thanks to Burnham that the planning of skyscrapers was not limited to engineers, and that architects could participate in their development as well. Although he was critical of the Beaux Arts architecture of the World’s Columbian Exposition, he considered the exhibition to be successful when it came to urban planning. In the second part of the article, Strengell presents Burnham’s urban plans. He mentions Washington, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Chicago; the Mall, i.e. the park area, in Washington; the Civic Centre and es-
planades in Cleveland; the district plan in San Francisco. Finally, he introduces the plan of Chicago in greater detail. Strengell thought it important to point out that the entire plan was based on the notion of future expansion and the consideration of traffic. He praised the uniformity of the design and stated, bitterly, that it had yet to be executed.23 In the summer of 1924, an article appeared in Huvudstadsbladet – “Eliel Saarinen och skyskrapan” (“Eliel Saarinen and the Skyscraper”) – where Strengell relates his visit to Chicago with Saarinen. He mentions having met the architect Louis Sullivan while there. He also establishes that the architect in question died a couple of months earlier. Sullivan died on the 14th of April 1924, so the article was written in June. Strengell compares Sullivan to Burnham, establishing that Sullivan was the more reform minded of the two. One
can assume that a reason for Strengell’s positive attitude towards Sullivan was the fact that the latter had criticised the winner of the Chicago Tribune competition in the Architectural Record before his death, and praised Saarinen’s entry in the process.24 Strengell’s next article dealt with Saarinen’s plan for the Chicago lakefront. The text begins with a review of the history of traffic. Werner Hegemann, who was often mentioned by Bertel Jung, seems to 1. Eliel Saarinen’s 1923 plan for the Chicago Lake Front. Perspective drawing of Grant Plaza. 2. Eliel Saarinen’s 1923 plan for the Chicago Lake Front. The Grant Hotel skyscraper. 3. Eliel Saarinen: The Detroit lakefront. The Memorial-Hall 1924.
In 1937, Viking Göransson’s text “Filminteriören och verkligheten” (Film Sets and Reality) appeared in the Swedish art and design journal Form, which was also read by Finnish architects. Göransson writes that architects are already used in the planning of sets in foreign movies, and names Cederic Gibbons who, according to Göransson, had been of great influence to interior decoration throughout the world. Göransson’s attitude towards cinema architecture is critical; in his mind, the films’ Modernist interiors caused people to be negative of the style itself. According to Göransson, films had such propagandist significance as to be dangerous. However, Göransson did confess to admire cinema architecture as such, and he considered Things to Come to be a good example. Images from both Swedish and American pictures were used as illustrations for the
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text, though without naming the actual films. One of these images is taken from the restaurant interior of the film Swing Time of 1936, to which Göransson’s caption was “Dekorativ uppbyggnad för dansscen i modern lyxrevy” (Decorative Composition for Dance Scene in Modern High-class Variety Show).37 As far as American pictures and their architecture were of interest to Finnish architects, it is likely that this was the case among the younger generation during the 1930s. In all probability the interest in the American way of life grew at the end of the decade as the world political situation became increasingly strained. In the 1930s, the great majority of architects most likely went to the cinema, or at least followed the newsreels appearing during the latter half of the decade. However, it is difficult to know who saw what
when, because of the lacking data. Nonetheless, by way of interviews and correspondence it is known that some architects were interested in theatre and cinema, or in any case that they came in contact with them through their work, for instance Alvar Aalto and P. E. Blomstedt were both keen on theatre and cinema.38 In the 1920s, Aalto planned cinemas for the South-western Finland Agricultural Co-operative building in Turku, the Jyväskylä Workers’ Club, as well as a small film theatre for the Jyväskylä Defence Corps building. In 1930, he created the sets for Hagar Olsson’s play “SOS” at Turku’s new theatre. In addition, Aalto was very familiar with the Hungarian artist/director Lazlo Moholy-Nagy who directed several films during the 1920s and 30s, and who also published the book Malerei – Fotografie – Film in 1927. At the end of the 1930s, Aalto was working very closely with the film director Erik Blomberg in planning the latter’s 75
studio in Westend close to Helsinki.39 In 1937, he was setting up a pavilion he had planned for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, where he saw pictures shown in the exhibitions of other countries. It was here that he understood the importance of films as a means of propaganda, and a few years later he used them himself as part of the architecture in the exhibition pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.
1. The Architect P.E.Blomstedt (1900-1935). 2. Erik Bryggman: Lobby of the Kinopalatsi cinema, Turku 1936. 3. Alvar Aalto: A design for a studio for director Erik Blomberg in Westend, Espoo 1938. The project was not realised.
In five chapters The Dream of the New World provides the reader with a picture of the American influence on Finnish architecture from the turn of the 20th century to the outbreak of the Second World War. The book describes how the so-called “Americanism� reached Finland via the Continent and what American phenomena appeared in urban planning following the First World War. It explores industrial architecture in Finland, in the shape of Fordism and Taylorism, as well as the initial stages of prefabricated wooden houses and the connections between American cinema and Finnish Modernism during the 1930s.