Swerving into Architecture

Window of Aalto's Säynätsalo municipality house.

After arriving back to Finland I've been spending so-lovely but so-lazy Christmas time having as my biggest challenge how to have enough time to meet everybody. After all this time with passive brain capacity usage I felt there's no return to the hard-valued-working life.
Finally Epiphany arrived and I gave up the lovely way to spent time only by eating, skiing and sleeping. When I had to leave the warm heart of my parents house and drive to the windy and cold Oulu-city I thought there was only inescapable mid-winter-angst waiting for me to pay back the good time I obviously didn't deserve with my lazyness. Surprisingly my theory didn't work and laziness had finally brought back my motivation and enthusiasm towards my studies. A huge bunch of Autumn's non-touched architecture magazines on the kitchen table became a saviour for the dark evenings of January.



In my eagerness I also swelled into Internet's endless database of architecture and building politics and I thought it was a mistake I will never find my way out with reasonable thoughts in my mind, until I found a kolumn of which sentencies couldn't be better describing the feelings of the architecture student (me) facing people's opinion about historical and modern architecture. The text is mainly about British architecture but it could be translated to handle whole worlds frustation about the bult environment, or even worse, to all that we would like to get better and more worth in the world.

"Whatever the rights and wrongs of medieval society – most people lived in hovels – architecture truly mattered: ambitious, beautifully made and finely crafted. Today, we simply can't, or don't want to, afford the price of meticulously wrought buildings. Britain is no longer a productive or a collective society; we are an atomistic nation of individual consumers. We might say we want better buildings, yet evidently, we don't want to pay for them.

More than this, we also really want the very buildings we so often say we despise: all those skyscrapers with funny names that house the banks that lend the money to build the shopping malls and their attendant distribution depots, motorways, supermarkets and edge-of-town housing estates – the architecture of ever-expanding consumption – that neither medieval masters nor the genius of Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, let alone today's big name architects, could or can do much to improve."

To read more, visit the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/01/great-architecture-not-cheap