Presentation THE FINNISH LIFESTYLE Barbro Kulvik Industrial Design / Fiskars Design Village Finland is a country with extreme variations of seasons and a severe winter climate. The capital, Helsinki, is on the latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. The seasons have an outright physical meaning for Finns. Also light has a physical, mental and aesthetic effect, with long, light nights in the spring and summer and long, dark days in the winter. We have four seasons - spring, summer, autumn and winter - but the year can also be divided into eight seasons. There is a great difference between the first two months of summer and August when the night are already dark. The summer is warm and the winter can be extremely cold. How then do the Finns live then? Throughout history Finns have built in wood; only churches and fortresses were made of masonry. This means that there are very few historic remains of ordinary settlements. Many towns were destroyed in disastrous fires. But timber was a basis for interiors and exteriors; it expresses moods; and it is a material that Finns are used to. People were accustomed since time immemorial to obtain wood from the forests for building lumber and for making everyday objects, even dishes and bowls for the table. Finland was an agricultural country until the Second World War, after which it rapidly became a technologically developed nation, where today 90% of the people go around into mobile phones. Finns are regarded as a stubborn and taciturn people closely guarding their personal integrity. It is highly contradictory, then. to see these same Finns talking into their cellphones in public places, often in a perfectly audible voice. An invisible space is required around people who communicate - a space that does not exist. Today, almost all children have mobile phones so that their parents can reach them and keep track of their whereabouts. Satellite positioning systems can also tell exactly where the child is. All this is leading to new patterns of behaviour, and new restrictions and legislation. New spaces are being made and created with new technology. Almost everyone from children to adults and the elderly are using computers today. This means that working space must be taken into account in interior design. We live in a continuous state of cultural change. The countryside is becoming depopulated. People are moving into the cities, and yet there is the contradiction that an unusually large proportion of the population escapes the cities to spend time at their summer houses. By far the most popular leisure occupation among Finns is to spend holidays and weekends chopping wood, picking mushrooms and jogging outdoors at their country houses. Also important for Finns is the custom of bathing in the sauna. To sit and look out over the sea or a nearby lake, or to walk in the forest is the Finn's way of meditating, of taking distance from everyday concerns, and to totally unwind from stress. The summer house is a counterweight to the home. Also people who live in the countryside and farm the land often have a separate house for the weekends. This is evidence to show that Finns have a need to take a break from everyday life and to spend more time in natural conditions. On the average, Finnish housing is well planned and designed. A great number of apartment blocks were built in the 1970s, but today smaller apartment buildings with fewer storeys are preferred. Wood is also making a comeback in contemporary building technology. In the city of Lahti there is already a concert hall built completely from timber (The Sibelius Hall) with excellent acoustics. Under construction by the Finn Forest company in Espoo near Helsinki is an office building of wood. Urban dwellers, and especially young people, spend more time in the city than at home or in their student dormitories. The city has become a living-room with places where one can step in and log onto the Internet, sit in cafes day and night, listen to music, and above all eat fast food. New places and premises have emerged at a fast pace and it has become common for young people to eat out. Restaurants are the new spaces for people. Since winter and autumn have extreme weather conditions, the Finnish home has been a cosy place where people spend a lot of their time. Today, there are young people who use the home only for sleeping and changing clothes. People move a great deal from one place to another. They have hobbies and pastimes that take up their leisure time, and young people are engaging in increasingly adventurous and extreme types of sports. In the old agrarian society, the floor plan of a dwelling often consisted of a room with benches along the wall and a long table that took up most of the available space. An open concept of space was introduced in modern times. Yrjo Kukkapuro's house is a combined studio and home. The kitchen unit is like a small island in the middle. An open landscape such as this permits complete freedom to rearrange the space for a meeting, dinner party or work, all according to the changing of the seasons. In winter, when the snow is on the ground, the light is different than in summer, when the trees outside shade and reflect green vegetation. When the house was built, it was more or less an experiment. The fact that such a bare and simplified space feels warm and human can be attributed to its perfect scale and comfort, the practical aspects of the architecture of the house and its interior design with furniture designed by Kukkapuro. The open multipurpose space is the core of the house, where only the kitchen unit is a permanent fixture. All the other furnishings are moved and changed according to tastes and need. In the house only the entrance, Kukkapuro's studio and the bathroom have walls for dividing space. Another house that is a large single-room dwelling and is also filled with the designers' own furniture is the home of Antti and Vuokko Nurmesniemi. This box-shaped structure of steel and glass is situated low and near the waterline, permitting an open and well-lit space inside. This is also an open-plan house where different levels and covering materials are the only factors distinguishing the various spaces from each other. The Villa Mairea, designed by Alvar Aalto and commissioned by Maire and Harry Gullichsen in 1937, was a radical experiment in its day. Aalto felt that houses should be like the harp, with outer walls but open inside. The lower floor of the Villa Mairea is a single open space. The shape of the house is both functional and playful, an experiment in various techniques of using wood and white rendered walls. The natural surroundings come close to the house, with a forest behind it. The Villa Mairea is still a work of architecture having impact on a whole world. The interaction between the proportions of the spaces and people in them is carefully considered. The house was both a residence where many internationally renowned cultural personages met and a living home for a family with four children. Today, there is a special Villa Mairea foundation entrusted with the care and preservation of the house. Over half of all Finnish families have a weekend or summer house, a second home in the countryside or the archipelago. This means that people vacate the cities especially in the summer and on the weekends. The sauna is a self-evident element of living in a summer house. To drive out to the summer house is not just to leave one's place of work, it is also a way of escaping one's neighbours, a way of celebrating a kind of solitude. It is an age-old custom to relocate in a different place when summer arrives. The architects Kaija and Heikki Siren built a lookout on their island. Made of four pine pillars placed stones, a flat roof and glass walls with an unbelievable view of the sea, it is one of the most absolutely beautiful places to meditate that I can imagine. This is perhaps the factor that distinguishes Finland from other countries and makes it different. Impulses from abroad have a great influence. Fashion design, which is prominent among young designers, finds a great deal of inspiration in music videos, which are the real trend-setters of today. In dwellings and habitation, the house of the future is already existing reality - a smart house where design is applied to achieve an obstacle-free, practical and pleasant everyday environment, where cookers and stoves can be turned on by remote control, and where baths can be run and the sauna switched on with a mobile telephone, and the lights come on when one steps in. The recycling of furniture material and ecological awareness belong to today's aware and conscious design. Architects and designers no longer have to subscribe to a particular style. Today's pluralistic society rejects proclaiming any single orthodox style that should apply to everyone. Our lifestyles are now differentiated; it is "the modern way of life" that now applies. Technology creates artificial milieus and architects can emphasize opportunities for indivualization instead of creating standardized housing. Where materials used to be an insurmountable limitation, the concept is now the point of departure, permitting a whole new realm of subjective architecture and design. Secretariat Japan Finland Design Association (Japan) c/o The Finnish Institute in Japan 3-5-39 Minami Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan 106-8561 c/o GK Graphics Incorporated telephone : 03-5952-6831 facsimile : 03-5952-6832 e-mail : jfda@gk-design.co.jp previous