Need advice! The thought of going through another winter with the cold blasting through these thin, damaged church windows seems unbearable. The building dates from the 1930s and I think the window frames do too, but perhaps not the glass. When digging drain tile I found a lot of old, broken purple glass around the perimeter of the building. The current yellow panes are thin, cheap rippled glass set in sagging, decayed leading. Many panes are broken or have come loose, and there holes everywhere in the lead through which you can easily see the outside. I think the windows may be unsalvageable, apart from the wooden frames.
I was thinking of replacing the glass altogether but with something equally yellow. The yellow seems to be an important part of the building, both inside and out, and I’d like to retain that. The yellow light in winter is so warm. There needs to be some opacity too, at least on the bottom half of the windows, because since the building is at street level it needs some degree of privacy. Would appreciate advice.
This Finnish church by Anssi Lassila was one of the reasons for starting this blog, and maybe that’s why, paradoxically, it got forgetten – it already seemed to be here. The church is in the town of Kärsämäki, Oulu province, Finland. It was designed by Lassila as his master’s thesis, where he proposed it be built according to 18th C methods by which “trees are felled, building timbers cut, roofing shingles made and nails forged” entirely by hand. The main room is enclosed by a sleeve created by a log structure; between it and the exterior sheathing are utility rooms – kitchen, vestry. The exterior is clad in shingles weatherproofed with tar, and that’s why it’s sometimes called the “shingle church.” It was built by a team of international students. Anssi Lassila’s idea was to build something modern yet with traditional local methods and not that dissimilar from the traditional wooden churches of the region, specifically the 18th C church in Kärsämäki lost at the end of the 19th C. There have been a number of such wooden churches built over the last decade; this one seems in many ways to be the best – use of materials, proportions, useability, and the particular aesthetics that result from building techniques.
Perhaps it was growing up amidst the abundant wood of Canada’s west coast, but I love the wooden churches of Russia and Finland. I am always suprised to find out that people don’t like bare wood, especially in interiors. In zones where wood is abundant and the climate is often grey, the warmth of the wood can be a relief.
I love Alan Price who, among other things, was the founder of The Animals in 1962. He wrote the soundtrack for Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 film O Lucky Man! with Malcolm McDowell. The film was a political satire on capitalism and pre-Thatcher Britain. This song is called “Look Over Your Shoulder” and the title song O Lucky Man! is also great, as is the deceptively upbeat Poor People. Price actually appeared in the film, playing music and singing in what was effectively a kind of Greek chorus. I was looking at it again today online and found the following exchange in the YouTube comments:
A: Is it just me or were men’s suits a lot more stylish back then?
B: It’s not just you – they were more stylish back then.
C: Suits weren’t more stylish, there’s just less stylish people now.
Shigeru Ban is well known for his paper architecture, in particular the emergency structures designed for regions struck by disaster, notably houses for the Japanese city of Kobe hit by a devastating earthquake in 1995, and a series of paper tent structures for the UN High Commission for Refugees in Rwanda in 1999. Ban’s design for Kobe, a log house made of stiff paper tubes formed from recycled paper, was also proposed for Kosovo in 1999. In Kobe, Ban also built a Paper Church to replace a Catholic church fallen in the quake. Later, when Kobe was rebuilt, the paper church was disassembled and shipped to Taiwan where it has been made a permanent structure.
The use of paper in architecture does not mean the structures must be temporary. If proper films and treatments are applied, the buildings can be made both water- and fire-proof. See Open Architecture Network for details and advantages.
Top, paper tube structure Osaka-cho, Gifu, Japan, 1998. Above, Paper Loghouse and Paper Church for Kobe, Japan. Below, UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees) paper tube structures in Rwanda. Bottom, a temporary paper tube structure called the Vasarely Pavilion, Aix-en-Provence 2006. For a random search of Ban’s paper architecture, take a look. Paper’s versatility and lightness allows Ban to experiment with geometric shapes which may explain why some of the structures look like mathematical models.
Even when Ban is not building with paper, his orientation can be considered “green,” but though he also teaches within an environmental studies program, he doesn’t describe his architecture this way. From his point of view, “green” would not be a specialization but a consideration in all good architecture – similar to the fallacy in which climate change is siloed as an “environmental” problem rather than considered as a far more central problem penetrating all other human affairs. In other words Ban doesn’t want to ghettoize architecture that considers its environment; this is just what all architecture should be doing. Watch the NYT’s excellent video/slideshow on Ban here. See also his book Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture.
As an aside, and with respect to the mention of Taiwan, above, we were always told in British Columbia that when our old phone books were picked up they were shipped in containers to Taiwan where they were pulped to make building materials. This always seemed sort of mysterious and magical, and it may well have been, since I can find no proof of it online.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay on design. Its main interest is in the unexpectedly hybrid history of objects and buildings - cultural borrowing, the surprising impurity of design traditions long-considered pure, and just generally the miscegenation of everything. Its orientation is to the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the possibly lost promise of the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and creative mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, is the same upside-down as right-side-up, refers to both zeros and ones, and is pronounced uno. This site is open to complaints, nerdy critique and dissent. Without complaint and critique, design of housing, towns and cities won't get any better in North America. We do after all spend our entire lives in the built environment, which influences our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, so it might as well be a lot better than it is. Dear Canada and the USA, quit letting developers run this show.
