Last
September my wife had to go to a conference to Helsinki, Finland, so I decided
to tag along and see what Helsinki is all about.
On arriving
I quickly noticed that much of the buildings and stone walls in Helsinki are
made of a lovely pink granite. If you had a geologist to hand he would
tell you the reason for this is because Helsinki sits on an indented Pegmatitic
(pink) granite peninsula that makes up part of the Baltic shield. I did not
have a geologist to hand, but walking in some of the many green areas in
Helsinki, large outcrops of this rock were poking out of the ground everywhere I looked.
Most of the buildings built with this stone are highly
manicured and well dressed. The central train station and the parliament
buildings are fine examples of this. One building that I was very much
taken by was a place called The Temppeliaukio Church or The Rock Church.
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| Exterior, dry stacked wall of the rock church. |
A stark contrast to the well dressed pink granite buildings
around Helsinki, the rock church is rugged and unmanicured.
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| 360º view of the inside |
Temppeliaukio Church is a Lutheran church in the Töölö
neighborhood of Helsinki. The project comes from an architectural competition
won by the architect brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen in 1961. The design of
their project was recognized by the jury as “completely original” and
respectful of the competition goal to “include the organization plan to keep as
much of the giant granite outcrop that makes up Temppeliaukio Square intact.”
Their original solution to saving the square was to have the
interior of the church site excavated and built into the rock. It dawned
intuitively on the Suomalainen brothers when they visited the building site
that in order to save the character of place, the rock itself had to be understood
as a church and everything built at the site should be adjusted to accompany
the character of the rock.
Before the Suomalainen brothers started designing the Temppeliaukio
Church, they had done planning work for the Ministry of Defence and thus had
become familiar with rock building.
The brothers' aim was to locate the floor of the sanctuary
at the level of the widest and highest street, Fredrikinkatu Street, which ends
at the square. This required the church hall to be cut into the
bedrock. As a result this leads the visitor to the sanctuary without the need
to climb stairs, simultaneously offering a friendly rather than overbearing
experience of the church space.
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| The Rock church looking down at Temppeliaukio Square. Photo by MKFI via Wikipedia |
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| The seemliness transition of the rock walls from inside to outside. |
The 24m diameter roof is made up of a copper
plate-covered dome, using a impressive 13.6 miles (22 km) of copper plate strips. The dome is connected to the natural rock wall by 180 window panes that
let in natural light. Due to the varying height of the rock wall, each glass
part of the roof is different in size.
As a result of the natural slope of the bedrock walls, the glass panes above the altar area are bigger, allowing the altar to become more illuminated compared to the other parts of the sanctuary
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| 13.6 miles (22 km) of copper plate strips covered the inside of the dome. |
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| The alter |
The colour scheme of the interior was based on the red, purple and grey shades of granite. The metals were also carefully selected to match the colours of the stone. Steel, made bluish by hammering, non-oxidised copper for the entrance doors as well as for the front facing of the gallery and interior of the dome, concrete left in its raw state.
The brothers' vision was for the church to have a strong connection with nature and its surroundings, and they wanted the natural rough quarried stone to have a leading role in creating the atmosphere inside the sanctuary. To achieve this the bedrock walls were left rough, with all drill markings from the quarrying visible, while the resulting quarried rock was stacked on top to create the rest of the walls that continue out and over the park surface.
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| Drill marks leftover from quarrying |
Aside from the aesthetic and structural benefits, an additional benefit of the solid rough walls is its acoustic qualities, and with a seating capacity for 940, it is no wonder that the church is also a popular concert venue.
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| The glistening Non-oxidised copper entrance doors to the church. |
