The "Anti-Devil Defence Bunker" wins the day against architectural critics

Temppeliaukio Church, now 40, is among Finland's most popular sights

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By Hannu Pöppönen
     
      Already well before the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki's Töölö district opens its doors for the day at 10 a.m., there is a tourist bus drawing up outside.
      Out pours a crowd of enthusiastic Japanese visitors, who disperse to explore and photograph the building's handsome interior, the rock walls, and the famous copper domed roof.
     
"Whenever I come here, I get the feeling of what my brother and I were looking for when we designed the place. Above all there is a sense of the devotional, as this is a church after all. We also thought at the time that the only way of preserving the character of the place was to build the church out of the bare rock", says architect Timo Suomalainen, 81, as we stand inside the main chamber of the church.
      Timo Suomalainen and his late brother Tuomo (1931-1988) designed the church, which was completed for consecration on September 28th, 1968.
      The principle at the time was that Temppeliaukio Church - more familiarly known as "the church in the rock" - should have a natural feel to it.
      The interior walls are of natural stone, blasted in situ.
      The watchword was that whatever was made by the hand of man should be left visible, and hence the walls bear the grooved marks of where drills have bored holes for detonating the rock.
     
Forty years on, Temppeliaukio is among the most popular tourist stopping-points in the capital, and in the country as a whole.
      Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen were given the task of designing a new church on the basis of a competition held in 1960.
      At around the same time, the two brothers (Timo is three years older) also won a competition to build an administrative and cultural centre for the central city of Jyväskylä.
      The door seemed to be opening wide for the young architects, but there was some resistance. In the end they did not get to realise their plans in Jyväskylä, as the work was given a few years later to the rather more famous Alvar Aalto.
      The city of Jyväkylä decided they wanted to make the place an Aalto-city.
     
The brothers only heard about the matter from the newspapers, Timo Suomalainen recalls.
      "We were pretty bitter about it, when Alvar Aalto took the job. We boys weren't used to the idea of having someone walk over us like that, and so we started writing pieces directly against Aalto."
      This led to a reprimand from the Finnish Association of Architects, which had decalred that the competition rules had not been violated.
      The battle over the Jyväskylä building was a suitable pipe-opener for the young architects, given the struggles they would have to face later in connection with the church in Helsinki.
     
To be fair, immediately after the competition results were announced, the brother's design was favourably received.
      "Yes, for the first couple of years the reception was generally quite positive. But then we began to see opposition forming within the ranks of our own profession."
      In the early 1960s, a freer style of architecture, as represented by the Temppeliaukio Church, Timo Penttilä's design for the Helsinki City Theatre, and the works of Reima and Raili Pietilä, sought to take on the prevailing more rationalistic approach.
      This did not go down well at all in some circles.
      "Our worst adversary was the Museum of Finnish Architecture, which was then headed by Aarno Ruusuvuori", says Suomalainen.
      Ruusuvuori, who was also a professor, is known for his spare designs, often using bare concrete and with a Brutalist mien. He had no truck with the plans for the church.
     
The general public mood also turned against the design.
      When the numbers came in, it was considered to be too expensive - the copper roof in particular was a bone of contention - and the church was dubbed "the mosque in the rock" and "the anti-devil defence bunker", among some other less flattering nicknames.
      In November 1968 a group of Christian students daubed "Biafra!" texts on the concrete foundations, in possibly the first example of graffiti on Finnish walls.
      The protesters demanded that the sums being spent on the construction work should instead be channelled towards relieving hunger in Africa.
      One such Biafra slogan has been left as a reminder on a wall in the church.
     
The Museum of Finnish Architecture doggedly held out for thirty years, and approved Temppeliaukio for inclusion in an exhibition only in 1999, when the German Museum of Architecture held a show of Finnish works.
      By 2003, however, when the Museum's Sacral Space exhibition set off on an international tour, the brothers' church was prominently displayed.
     
Even if their ideas have ultimately been vindicated and the building is a popular part of the Helsinki cityscape, the scars of what went before still affect Timo Suomalainen.
      He has not relaxed his defensive posture.
      Before the Suomalainens' winning design came along, there had already been two earlier competitions for a church on this site.
      in the 1930s, the architect Pauli Blomstedt put forward the idea of building the church in a hole dug into the sides of the rock hill.
      Both designs have made use of the exisiting rock, and the similarities - and even whispered suggestions of plagiarism - have often been discussed.
      Timo Suomalainen says that they did not know of Blomstedt's design.
      "In some sense I can understand people who glance at the drawings with a careless eye. There is the same dome shape, but the other principles involved are quite different. The prize committee wrote perfectly clearly that the design was ours and ours alone, and it should be remembered that among the committee members at the time was Aulis Blomstedt, Pauli Blomstedt's brother."
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 28.9.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Forty years on for Temppeliaukio Church (28.9.2009)

Links:
  Temppeliaukio Church (Wikipedia)
  Museum of Finnish Architecture
  Finnish Association of Architects, SAFA
  More pictures of the exterior and interior
  An article on the design history of the Temppeliaukio Church (with drawings)

HANNU PÖPPÖNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
hannu.popponen@hs.fi