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News • Helsinki • Finland • 2012-06-16

Walking tour of Helsinki\'s architecture

It\'s this year\'s World Design Capital, and few cities can match the Finnish metropolis for the craftsmanship of its buildings. Justin McGuirk sets out on foot A modernist iceberg\': Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, designed by Alvar Aalto. Click on the magnifying glass icon to see a map of Justin\'s tour of the city. Photograph: Alamy

Earlier this month I paid my second visit to Helsinki. The first time I went it was winter and all I remember is dark, sludgy streets and ducking into bars to escape the cold. What a difference the summer makes. The light seemed inordinately bright, and with the long days I kept getting up from dinner feeling like it was mid-afternoon and time for a stroll. Helsinki is really two cities, each with its own season and its own rituals.

It happens that this year is Helsinki\'s 200th anniversary as the capital of Finland – in 1812 its Russian rulers moved the capital from Turku. But that\'s not why I was visiting. I was invited because Helsinki is the World Design Capital 2012. What does that mean exactly? It\'s an honorary title celebrating places that use design as \"a tool to improve social, cultural and economic life\". There have only been two before now – Turin in 2008 and Seoul in 2010 – but it feels like an honorific that was made for this city.

Design is to Helsinki as literature is to Dublin and samba is to Rio. It is simply a cultural manifestation of the national character, and Finns are sensible, detail-oriented people. Apart from the great Alvar Aalto, few Finnish designers or architects are widely known outside their own country. But to Finns themselves, designers such as Tapio Wirkkala and Ilmari Tapiovaara are household names. Their furniture from the 1940s and 1950s – once inexpensive, hard-wearing everyday items that now count as collectible classics – is still passed down from generation to generation.

Beyond simple, perfect objects, Finns have an innate sense of the role design can play in society. How many countries can you think of that make design a matter of government policy? Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, uses designers to address issues from sustainability to education. Let\'s just say they take their design pretty seriously.

With a whole programme of World Design Capital events stretching through the summer and autumn, it\'s a good time to go even if you couldn\'t care less about design. And the beautiful thing about Helsinki is that this compact metropolis of 1.2 million people is made for walking. The municipality is protective of its human scale – you\'ll find almost no building over eight storeys – and the gridded, pleasant streetscape makes it very difficult to get lost.

The character of this Baltic city is a slippery thing – at times you feel you\'re in eastern Europe, with the trams and the flat-fronted buildings, and at others, especially near the water, you could only be in Scandinavia. But one thing that is utterly distinctive is the Jugend architecture, the Austrian-influenced art nouveau style that manifested itself here at the turn of the last century as a kind of fairy-tale urbanity. You\'ll see buildings with heavy stone rustication as though they\'ve been hewn from mountains, carved with decorative flourishes and the occasional gargoyle. Keep your eyes open and you\'ll discover no end of curious detailing.

Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Skaters test a \'wave\' sculpture at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Photograph: Markku Ulander/Rex

One of the few conspicuously new buildings in the centre is the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (number 1 on the interactive map of the walk – click here to view), designed by the American architect Steven Holl in the 1990s. It strikes a rare controversial note, not just because it is overtly contemporary compared with the rest of the city – Helsinkians are conservative about their architecture and prone to nimbyism – but because it is one of the few buildings constructed by a foreigner. It may not be one of Holl\'s finest, but the interior\'s curving concrete atrium and glass ceiling prove that the man knows how to work with light.

A few minutes\' walk away is Aalto\'s Finlandia Hall (number 2), a modernist iceberg overlooking Töölö bay. It is clad in white Carrara marble, a material ill-suited to Helsinki\'s temperature extremes, and the slabs on the façade have bowed in a way that accidentally makes it more beautiful. The best place to see it from is Sinisen Huvilan (number 3), a café across the bay. From here you can appreciate the trompe l\'oeil that Aalto created when he put a vertical black stripe down the façade – at this angle the stripe lines up with the tower of the National Museum of Finland behind it, as if the building were transparent. Visual gags aside, you could spend a whole weekend here just soaking up Aalto\'s legacy, in which case you\'ll want to take a taxi to the late architect\'s house in the northern suburbs – a lesson in modest elegance.

There are also new buildings opening as part of the WDC programme. One is the Lutheran Chapel of Silence (number 4) in Kamppi. This little wooden structure, shaped like an egg cup and sitting incongruously next to a shopping centre on the edge of busy Narinkka Square, is a haven from the city. Designed by K2S Architects, it has an unstinting minimalism which makes it an openly contemplative space. The oval interior is a work of perfect craftsmanship – it\'s like being inside a guitar.

The interior of Temppeliaukio, the Church in the Rock. The interior of Temppeliaukio, the Church in the Rock. Photograph: Alison Wright/National Geographic Society/Corbis

If you prefer your cornerless sacred spaces less transcendental and more visceral, a 10-minute walk north will take you to the Church in the Rock (number 5). This 1960s building, designed by brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen, is pure Bond-villain lair. Dynamited into the granite, its rough walls are topped with a copper dome like a road-scraped penny. It has a quirky power, made magical by the fact that I was lucky enough to visit while there was a string quartet rehearsing.

Helsinki is not an instantly beautiful city – it is not St Petersburg across the Baltic, say – but its treasures reveal themselves gradually. This is a city of second glances, of details. You only have to look at the drainpipes to see the level of attention that goes into the streetscape. This sounds perverse – nerdy in the extreme – but everywhere I looked the drainpipes were carefully moulded around a cornice or tucked in flush with a façade. You could do a whole walking tour just observing lapidary door handles, portico lamps and sundry details.

In fact, Napa Gallery (number 6) has made a walking tour for you. The Font Walk takes you on a circuit of several central blocks, pointing out building signs and other typographical marginalia. Did you know that Helsinki\'s street name plaques, which are always in both Finnish and Swedish, are set in the Cheltenham font, designed in 1896 by American architect Bertram Goodhue? I thought not. Cities are made of millions of invisible histories, each detail a story. And even just a few blocks of the Font Walk wakens your curiosity.

Colourful glasses on sale at littala Colourful glasses on sale at Iittala. Photograph: Alamy

If you\'re more interested in design of the consumable variety, then Helsinki is a treasure trove, particularly for modernist classics. There is homeware from Iittala (number 7), textiles from Marimekko (number 8) and modernist furniture from Artek. Try Artek\'s secondhand shop, 2nd Cycle (number 9) – one of the few cases of a brand recycling its own products. Across the plaza from Kiasma there\'s a glass cubicle called Secret Shop (number 10), where you\'ll find less orthodox pieces. But you should also pay a visit to Eat & Joy (number 11), the organic food market piled high with local breads, organic cheeses, jams, smoked salmon and reindeer.

Finally, squeeze in a sauna, that most Finnish of social rites, which one local described to me as \"the art of being alone, together\". There used to be 200 public saunas in the city, but now that Finns tend to have them in their homes, only four remain. The architects and designers Tuomas Toivonen and Nene Tsuboi are building a new one, Kulttuurisauna (number 12), right on the bay – and they plan to run it themselves. When I visited, it was still a construction site, but come late summer you\'ll be able to steam yourself senseless and then flop straight into the bay.

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