The 1950s apartment building in Töölö is in need of renovation. The plastering of the facade is crumbling and the paint on the window frames is cracking. Repair or new, many other residents of the same age housing association are now thinking.
Architect Henna Helander need to sail in a headwind towards the sea.
The destination is Merikannontie 3 in Helsinki’s Taivallahti: an apartment building from the 1950s along the beach route familiar to many, near the popular Hietaranta and the Regatta cafe.
When looking for the right door, Helander immediately finds interesting details in the building, such as the decorative strips of plastering.
The lines that resemble the seams of the concrete elements are probably harbingers of the break in housing construction in a time when houses were made of bricks and plastered jaggedly.
The exterior of the house is plastered jaggedly.
Before as we enter, Helander still has time to admire the path made of differently shaped slate stones, praise the granite staircase and stroke the brick surface of the entrance.
To the people of the concrete age, these details seem like a luxury, but in the housing shortage after the wars, what was found on the construction site was used as building material, explains Helander.
Of course, a house battered by wind and rain for decades looks like a person who has been battered by a storm: some kind of enhancement would be in order. The plaster has already fallen down from the ceiling.
The owners of the housing association are now faced with a difficult question, as in many other houses of this age: repair or new?
The plaster of the building has fallen off in places.
The apartment building at Merikannontie 3 on the shore of Taivallahti is in need of improvement.
The balconies are piled on top of each other in a fun overlapping fashion. The railings have wooden slats.
Merikannontie the apartment building belongs to the gems of its era. It is protected in the plan as an urban image and architecturally valuable. Therefore, the question of repair or renewal is not a simple one.
In practice, the protection designation means that the building may not be demolished, and no repairs and alterations may be made to it that weaken the building’s urban image or architectural artistic value.
Colors, structures, surfaces or other characteristics of the architecture or characteristic features typical of the construction period may not be changed.
What can you do anything in a house like this?
In all protected buildings, we look separately at what we want to preserve in the building and how it can be repaired, says Helsinki’s building control manager Leena Jaskanen.
According to him, the conditions related to the choice of repair method are reviewed in the construction supervision on a case-by-case basis.
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“The stigma of handicraft is disappearing.”
The house history is fascinating. It is part of an exceptional whole: a block of buildings designed by female architects.
The building is the first of two apartment buildings that the architect Elsi Borg designed after the wars as apartments for the personnel of the Defense Forces.
Borg’s most famous work is the Children’s Hospital, which he realized together with his architectural colleagues a few years before the Merikannontie colossus.
The Taivallahti barracks, which served the army’s car company, were already in the neighborhood of the apartment building completed in 1952. They are also drawn by female architects.
Helander, who has been the chairman of the Finnish Architects Association for a long time, describes the area as a “women’s quarter”.
Martta Martikainen funk buildings representing the modern Bauhaus style rose in the barracks area between 1934 and 1938. In 1939, a repair shop was built there Märtha Lilius-Tallroth from the drawing board.
Soon the women will be joined by a man.
In the middle of the barracks and apartment buildings, a paraika by an American architect is being built Steven Hollin exceptional in many ways dwelling housethe like of which has not been seen in Helsinki before.
You can admire the seascapes while cooking in the kitchen.
View from the kitchen to the dining room and living room.
The bathroom is between the two bedrooms and has a window.
Twenty moved to Merikannontie a year ago Marjatta Spankieand now his descendants already live in the third generation.
Spankie’s daughter Krista Paloheimo invites you further to his home.
He talks about the spatial solutions, from which he says he can see that the house was designed by a woman. One of Paloheimo’s great insights is that the kitchens are placed on the side of the house facing the sea.
“Even the housewives were looking at the sea and not at all at the backyard.”
A neighbor who came to the village Laura Brax praises the basic foundation of the apartments as otherwise functional. In addition to the kitchen, it consists of a dining room, a living room, two bedrooms and a bathroom with a window between them.
From the bathtub you can see Holli’s creation rising into the backyard.
Every apartment has windows in at least two directions, and most stairwells have only two apartments per floor.
This is rare in the efficient production of modern apartments, as is the fact that the facades are plastered by hand. Some of the residents of Merikannontie are worried about how the building’s original spirit will fare in the future renovation.
Taivallahta in 1913. The photo was taken from the western end of the current Eteläinen Hesperiankatu, near Merikannontie. Taivalsaari and Seurasaari can be seen in the background.
Apartment buildings at Merikannontie 3 and Pohjoisen Hesperiankatu 37 in 1984.
The apartment building at Merikannontie 3 can be seen on the left in the picture. An apartment building designed by Steven Holl will rise next to it. There are barracks buildings on the right.
in Helsinki there is plenty of building stock of a similar age. A total of 5,500 buildings were built in Helsinki in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the Helsinki region’s regional series statistical database and Statistics Finland’s tables.
However, their architectural historical value is rarely paid attention to in the same way as, for example, Art Nouveau buildings – despite the fact that they contain old and irreplaceable craftsmanship and building materials.
The 1950s was the last decade before industrial construction.
Architect of the Helsinki City Museum Mikko Lindqvist says that at that time the facades in apartment buildings were typically done with splash plaster. This is also the case in Merikannontie.
Roughcast means, as the name suggests, that the plastering compound is spread on the surface of the house by hand.
Lindqvist recommends building companies to find out the condition of the plastering with condition tests, because original plastering that is in reasonable condition should be repaired locally.
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“Throwing away the old is a senseless waste.”
Helander agrees. He says that plasterwork from the 18th century has even been found in Helsinki.
“It will last. The problems come from water getting under the plaster and starting to peel the plaster from the bottom.”
According to Lindqvist, it’s difficult to completely restore the soft splash plaster like the original, because the aggregate and the composition of the mass in the mortar have changed so much.
The plasters commonly used today contain a lot of cement and also contain plastic, whereas in the past they were lime-based. When patching lime-based plastering, the patching should also be done with lime-based plastering, says Helander.
At the same time, the skill of making things with your hands has receded, and construction technology has developed. That’s why fast mechanical plastering is easily sold to housing associations.
“This is how the stigma of handicraft disappears. These are small but important nuances, so conservative repair maintains values from this point of view,” says Lindqvist.
Plastering by hand is not completely impossible. Lindqvist takes, for example, the so-called snake house from Käpylä. In that case, the original plastering had to be renewed, but the new one was made by hand, aiming for the original look.
The elevators in the building have been renewed in accordance with the spirit of the 1950s.
The original concrete basin of the washing machine, where hand-woven clothes were washed.
On Merikannontie Krista Paloheimo presents her windows, which are part of the characteristic features of the building along with plastering.
They have graceful frames and drawn glass typical of the construction period, which can be recognized by the wavy surface. The fire tribe hopes that the beautiful old windows will be restored instead of replaced with new ones.
“Throwing away the old is a senseless waste. Always, if it can be repaired, it should be repaired,” says Paloheimo.
Laura Brax presents the balcony door and its original wavy glass surface.
In Brax’s opinion, the choice between replacing and repairing wooden windows is fundamentally a matter of value.
In Finland, especially with the climate crisis, it has been awakened to the fact that replacing the old with the new is not always the most sensible option.
Even ugly the demolition of well-kept buildings has started to be feared, and the same idea seems to be becoming more common in renovations. Paloheimo says that we should not repeat old mistakes that we will later regret.
In the past decades, old buildings have been demolished to make way for new ones in Helsinki, and now such houses built in their place are also being planned for demolition.
One example of this is an architect by Kurt Simberg designed office building on Mannerheimintie.
It was completed in 1963 by Theodor Höijer in place of the Neo-Renaissance building he drew. The building known as Huber’s house was completed in 1891.
Now Simberg’s house is about to suffer the same fate.
Picking up
Apartment buildings from two eras in one block
Merikannontie The Taivallahti barracks and wasteland used to be visible from the apartments of 3.
Now an architect has come forward Steven Hollin An apartment building called Meander.
The residents interviewed by Helsingin Sanomat do not seem to be bothered by the change in outlook, on the contrary. In their opinion, the city has layers. They compliment the winding shapes of the Meander house.
Holl himself has said that he got the inspiration for the house from the meandering river.
Coincidence or not, a wall made of slate meanders in the backyard of Merikannontie 3, whose design language can be seen much the same.
Elsi Borgin Merikannontie 3 and Hollin Meander, designed for the personnel of the Defense Forces, are pictures of the times. By comparing them, you can see how the housing requirements have changed.
While Holl’s house will have a wine cellar, a yoga studio and a movie theater, Borg’s house will have a large yard, a spacious laundry room and lots of storage space.
The laundry room in particular has been considered a communal place in the house. There you have been able to get to know your neighbors while spinning the everyday laundry.
Borg was a progressive architect and perhaps a bit ahead of his time. He planned a sauna section on Merikannontie 3, which for some reason was not built.
Nowadays, plans for new residential areas in Helsinki often stipulate that the sauna and common living areas are placed on the top floor of the building.
In the early years, the Housing Company also had its own gardener to look after the residents’ children, and the housekeepers had their own apartments downstairs. Nowadays, the housing association owns the apartments in question and still rents them out.
Sami Takala HS
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