This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
In May, I went to Helsinki, having previously only been on a day trip by hovercraft from Talinn long ago. It gave me an opportunity to see a great deal of work by Alvar Aalto, who is treated, for good reasons, as a national hero.
He is the man who brought the ideals of the Bauhaus to Finland and an early member of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which was responsible for promulgating the tenets of modernism.
He was much admired by the architectural journalist, P. Morton Shand (Queen Camilla’s grandfather), who organised an exhibition of Aalto’s work in Fortnum and Mason in November 1933.
Aalto was also the founder, with his wife, Aino, of Artek, which still supplies well-designed wooden furniture and glassware to the world. In 1938, he was the subject of only the second exhibition of an architect at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But what impressed me more than his work was a small-scale suburb, Käpylä, in the north of Helsinki, where, in the early 1920s, the Finnish Housing Reform Association constructed wooden houses which survive as an example of a social housing experiment.
The Association was established in 1910 to promote new ideas in housing design. Plans for Käpylä were first drawn up in 1911, when Bertel Jung, the town planning architect for Helsinki, made an initial design owing much to art nouveau.
A year later he collaborated with Birger Brunila in a plan which was still largely baroque, with grand formal streets laid out axially. By 1918, the layout was vastly simplified by Brunila and Otto-livari Meurman into a conventional rectilinear grid, not entirely evident because the land is both undulating and steeply forested.
The architect responsible for the great majority of the individual houses was Martti Välikangas, who had been brought up in Savonlinna, a small town of mostly wooden houses in an area of lakes in eastern Finland.
He studied at Helsinki University of Technology, where he graduated in 1917 and then went to design industrial housing in Yuzovka — then in Russia, now Donetsk in eastern Ukraine — before establishing an architectural practice in 1920.
In April 1920, aged only 26, he was given the task of designing several hundred houses for Käpylä. The first were completed by November 1920.
Välikangas, who was subsequently responsible for the early design of the 1952 Olympic housing just south of Käpylä, adopted a fairly standardised model of wooden house built of narrow vertical planks — cheap to build, normally with gently sloping pitched roofs, but sometimes hipped or gabled.
Some of the buildings are single-storey, but mostly double, originally containing four small dwellings, two downstairs and two above. He then set the houses slightly back from the street to give the development a feeling of generosity, and allowed for considerable minor variations in height and design, as well as colour — red or yellow ochre, occasionally blue or turquoise, which prevents an appearance of uniformity.
In particular, porches were added, normally to the sides of the house, often in a style of rustic classicism, which gives each house its own individual character. He also added small decorative features, including medallions, garlands and acroteria, drawn from handbooks of classical design.
These are not difficult things to do, but for some reason, most housebuilders prefer standardisation, as was evident in the later new towns in Finland (as well as in England) and is now the normal way of building the tracts of new-build suburban housing which surround so many British towns such as Aylesbury, Horsham and Cambridge. We have lost the art of, or an interest in, subtle variation of house design.
It is worth considering what were Välikangas’s sources of inspiration. The first is likely to have been Heinrich Tessenow’s Hausbau und dergleichen (Homebuilding and the Like), published in 1919, which, following the writings of Ruskin and Morris, recommended a return to pre-industrial methods of housebuilding and as much simplicity as possible. As he wrote, “Simplicity is not always best; but the best is always simple.”
The second is the Finnish rural architecture Välikangas had been surrounded by in his youth. In the immediate aftermath of Finland’s independence from Russia in 1917, there was an understandable desire to reassert local and national rural traditions, as was also happening in Sweden and Denmark.
The third, less obvious, influence was the Italian village architecture — architettura minore — he had seen on a visit to Italy in 1921 and became a source of inspiration for both him and for Alvar Aalto who first visited Italy on his honeymoon in October 1924.
These interests in what were essentially folk traditions of architecture were pushed aside by modernism, with its fascination for the new and the dreams of standardisation and system-building.
Aalto himself moved on rapidly from designing in a classical way to the pure (and beautiful) functionalism of the Paimio Sanatorium, the building which made his reputation internationally and established his credentials as a modernist.
What Käpylä demonstrates is that an adherence to local and national traditions of architecture could produce a new town, now an old town, which has worn well over the years, is full of character, and has houses which are today increasingly desirable.
