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. Not being a fan of religion, I’m not sure why I like the architecture of small churches so much, but I think it may be the fact that they have a sort of communal quality, as if everyone is sheltering together under an enormous overturned ship. When empty, churches seem sort of contradictorily mute and expressive. They also seem to suggest both openness and a feeling of being enclosed or harboured, and while this is true of many little churches, it’s more pronounced for me when they’re wooden. This little wooden church is in the town of Kärsämäki, Oulu province, Finland. It was designed by Anssi 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, bathrooms, 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 a structure 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 its 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.

More wooden churches here and here.

Tofino, British Columbia. DIY fence & humour by a retired consultant and RN couple.

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.

You mean fewer. But yeah. In more ways than one.

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.

While on the topic of buildings that don’t always function the way we want them to, I was reminded of the quite hilarious 2008 documentary Koolhaas Houselife, in which a housekeeper talks about the difficulties of cleaning one of Koolhaas’ houses. Segments of the trailer above and below. Koolhaas says below “You see two systems colliding, the systems of the platonic conception of cleaning with the platonic ideal of architecture. It’s not necessarily daily life confronting an exceptional structure; it’s two ideologies confronting each other.” Which may be true but also sounds like a bit of a dodge. It’s an exceptional structure, but you do still have to clean it. The DVD and an accompanying book are here.

“Buildings are the wealth of nations, our largest capital asset. They are the ornament of cultures and they are where we spend most of our lives. Some of our more arrogant and careless buildings are at war with time and change, and they always lose. Some buildings though seem to flow with time, they flow with us. I’ve been living and writing in and around San Francisco for forty years. I’ve seen the city change and grow. Architectural styles came and went, planning theories came and went. Real estate boomed and busted. Old buildings were refreshed, new buildings modified. Some got steadily better, some steadily worse. I began to wonder about that. What makes some buildings keep getting better, and others not? Since we create the buildings around us you think they’d be our servants. Instead, most of the buildings we have thwart us constantly. I got so interested in this problem I wound up spending six years studying it. The approach I took was to look at what happens with buildings after they’re built. That’s when the users take over and begin to reshape the building to suit their real needs. What kinds of buildings work well with that evolution, and why do so many buildings work so badly?”

Parts 2, 3, 4, and other segments here. And watch this amazing story about the oak beams in an Oxford college hall.

Stewart Brand, most well known for his instrumental role in founding the Whole Earth Catalog, co-hosted the BBC TV series “How Buildings Learn” in 1997. The 6-part 3-hour series was based on Brand’s 1994 book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. Music by Brian Eno.