A stool made of scrap wood, from the Woodism collective, featured in “Finland: Designed Environments” at the MIA.
Six. That’s the short answer. But of the six times I traveled to Finland to research Finland: Designed Environments, the exhibition of Finnish product, graphic, home, and urban design that opened this month at the MIA, perhaps the most interesting trip was in February 2012. I timed it to correspond with the opening events of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012, a year-long celebration of the city’s design scene, including an international gala. The weather was bitterly cold, if no sweat for this naturalized Minnesotan. (I quickly noticed that Finnish women, ever practical, wear their snow boots to formal events and carry their dress shoes in a bag for changing.)
In Lahti, a center of the timber industry, I met with Tapio Anttila and Markku Tonttila, whose Woodism partnership makes well-designed products from wood that doesn’t meet industry standards.
A view of Kuopio, a Finnish city renowned for a recent urban design that blended new housing and transit into the environment.
Traveling by train, my next stop was Kuopio (shown above and at right), Minneapolis’s sister city in Finland, to meet with city planner Leo Kosonen. On a sunny but very cold day, we explored the new housing developments that, through careful planning, thoughtfully blend with the environment. Getting out of the car to better take in the view, our hands were soon numbed by the minus-20F cold. But one highlight we could drive on: the elegant new parkway called Saaristokatu, or Archipelago Avenue, that directly links the city center to the new housing nodes across several small islands. This is no I-394 freeway, but a multi-use, low-rise scenic tour—commuting was never so pleasant. Looking down on beautiful Lake Kallavesi, we could see ice fisherman in the distance, stoically eschewing an ice house!
A memory-based image of a Finnish lake, sewn into stone, by jewelry artist Eija Mustonen and featured in “Finland: Designed Environments.”
Continuing southeast to Imatra and Lappeenranta—and learning the state train system, VR, will not strand anyone in frigid weather—I met with Tarja Tuupanen and several students in the jewelry program at the Saimaa University of Applied Sciences. Finns love to use stone in art jewelry, which I can appreciate, coming from a granite-rich area of the United States. And this was obvious in the program—some students even worked with stones they found on their way home. Eija Mustonen, head of the Fine Arts program and an artist herself, hosted me in her home in Ylämaa, near the Finnish-Russian border. I reviewed her work, which features memory-based images of lakes, while her radiant stone hearth warmed both us and our dinner.
Two lovely art jewelry objects from this trip, along with a Woodism stool and a summary of the Saaristokatu project, made it into the show. (One of the exhibition’s larger objects, a 4.5-foot-tall urn by Helsinki ceramic artist Kristina Riska, would be acquired for the MIA’s collection during my next trip to Finland, in April 2012. Generous donors from that trip were as excited about this mysterious pot as I was, and thankfully it arrived safe and sound in Minnesota—as I did after all my research trips!)
The town hall in Lahti, designed by Eliel Saarinen, whose belief that design could play a role in many aspects of society, has heavily influenced Finnish design today.
But the winter trip yielded more than objects, reinforcing two truths about Finland. So often perceived as stoic, the Finns are incredibly generous about sharing their own work—you only have to ask them. Secondly, Finnish design today is not limited to objects, ranging from large urban projects to intimate objects of personal expression, all with an eye to the environment around them. Returning home, I knew that the exhibition would need to somehow capture the fact that 21st-century Finnish design follows the spirit of Eliel Saarinen, the great Finnish architect and designer of the previous century, who saw the designed environment broadly—from the plan of the city, to the house within that city, to the furniture within the house.