Presentation WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE!! Mikko Heikkinen architect Quietness is a relative concept, nature is never 'quiet'. We just do not listen to or hear all the sounds around us. A summer evening by the lake is the highest form of peace to a Finn. The sounds of nature, the cries of seagulls, trees murmuring in the wind, the patter of raindrops, these will not disturb us. On the contrary; the crew in Tarkovsky's Solaris tried to break the silence of space by hanging strips of paper by the ventilation ducts to create a sound reminiscent of a forest. Our quietude is not threatened by sounds as such, except noise like the one that comes from the portable radio of our fellow humans. With quietness, we do not mean silence. We want solitude, the absence of others. An abandoned rusty chair in the shallow water makes a lake landscape even quieter. The more people there are absent from the picture, the emptier and more de Chiricoesque the atmosphere: a deserted beach after the summer, the empty field after the circus has left town, the countless empty villages in Russia, which never acquired the Soviet perspective. But the sounds of culture, that is, noise, can also create a dependency. I got used to falling asleep to the hum of the motorway penetrating my old windows. Now that the windows have been sealed up and the new noise embankment built between our house and the motorway, I find myself waking up to an oppressive silence. The buzz of a metropolis can be likened to the sighs of a primeval forest. We have received an amazing number of grant applications for the artist residences at the Finnish Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York from people seeking to find on Manhattan not only distance from the everyday, but also solitude and peace for creative work. It seems we can slow down and try to find the purpose of our existence just as well by Inarinjarvi lake as on Broadway. Something to this effect happened to my wife and I in the French Pyrenees a couple of years ago. There was an abbey on the outskirts of a small village where you just signed for a set of keys and instructions. We started climbing a path, marked with metal M-signs. The distance was not very long, but in the scorching heat, even a hundred metreﾕs climb made your heart pound. At the top, shadowed by stone pines, there was an oak door, which the key fitted. Behind the door was a cave high and long enough for a man to stand or lie down, like an ancient shepherd's shelter. The walls and the ceiling had been spread with beeswax, the scent of which lured butterflies to fly in through the door. From the door, a view opened over the Catalan holy mountain, Pic du Canigou. The door could be shut from the inside, and so your senses would gradually start adjusting to the darkness, waiting for the contours of the rock to become discernible. The work is by the German artist Wolfgang Laib, known for his pollen, milk and beeswax works. This is his first 'place of meditation' outside a museum. After standing a quarter of an hour in the dark, I pushed the heavy oak door open and the light and sounds of the world flooded in. This was an experience one needs not 'understand', and it needs no instruction. Even the artist is of little help here: in his interviews and writings, he only ever talks about the choice of location, and problems around funding or the building work itself. But then again, we do not know the purpose of the Stonehenge megaliths or the alignments of stones at Carnac, although they have enticed humankind for generations. Neither does it require any knowledge of Roman architecture to be swept away by the beauty of Pantheon. Ultimately, architecture presents nothing, it affects beyond words. Helmi Kuusi, a notable Finnish printmaker, wrote in the 1950s, "I do not wish to say anything grand or loud. If I could, I would make little bits of quietness." So would I - if I could - but I suppose one has to make some noise, just to be heard. My aim was to build an architectural installation that would not be an artificial backdrop to an experience or a miniature model of reality. The walk from the sauna, heated by my father, to the lake cannot be reconstructed indoors without turning it all into kitsch, like those glazed display cabinets in an ethnographic museum. The starting point for the work is the light; to bring light into a dim exhibition room, almost like the fools in that old story, who tried to bring light in sacks into a windowless room they had built. The wooden collapsible frame encloses a 2.1 x 2.1 x 2.1-metre cubic space, covered with black roofing felt and whitewashed inside. Light from eight fluorescent tubes floods inside the cube with the power of 464 watts through an opening cut in one side. Making an architectural object, an architecton, is like writing a short story. In both arts, the aim is to say what one has to say with very little. Raymond Carver is a master of 20th century short prose, dubbed the Chekhov of America. In Carver's short stories, first nothing worth telling seems to be happening. People go fishing, on a holiday or order a cake for the firstborn's birthday party. Then the unexpected, perhaps quite mundane turn of events puts everything in new light. The titles of his stories are often a line said at the climax of the story. They are unceremonious utterances, the meaning of which becomes clear to the reader only later. Unlike the famous last words of some prominent figure in history, these are true anticlimaxes, for example 'Are you a doctor' or 'What do you do in San Francisco?' This is also true of the story that gave my project its name. It was published in Carver's breakthrough collection of short stories in 1976. In the story, Ralph Wyman believes he has finally discovered what his wife did three years ago with a man called Mitchell Anderson, storms out of the house, wanders from one bar to another, gets drunk with self-pity, gambles away his money and finally gets beaten up in a dark alley. When he returns home in the small hours of the morning, covered in blood, Wyman locks himself in the bathroom and shouts at his alarmed family, 'Will you please be quiet, please!' The story has a happy end. 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