How do you care for a city that’s centuries old? Do you preserve it for tourists and purists, or fix it to suit those who live there? The people of Tallinn seem to have got the balance just right. The old city center of the Estonian capital, which dates to the twelfth century, was happily preserved behind the iron curtain and is now a thriving tourist destination. There are little winding streets and a big public square and stone buildings with steep tiled roofs, all of which seem (to an American at least) older than time. And there are, everywhere, bars, cafes and curio shops and, just inside one of town’s gates, a big, bustling McDonalds. Yet the charm of the city shines through. Unlike the Old Town in Stockholm, which feels polished and preserved to the point of sterility, Tallinn felt like a real place where real people live.

Certainly the city could take its preservation work more seriously. I saw places where ancient stone copings had been replaced with clumsy tin flashing, and cobbled walks with asphalt. But however awkward these modernizations were, they never felt egregious. Instead they felt like a proof of life, that people living here make the place their own. What I liked best about Tallinn were the teenagers dressed in historically correct period costumes manning the entrances at some of the restaurants and bars. While they were friendly enough they looked just like teenagers everywhere else – slouching, sluggish and sullen. One girl wore ostentatiously unlaced Doc Martens with her court jester’s hose, and one boy had rolled back the sleeves of his horsehair cape to show off his tats. While the center of Tallinn is very, very pretty it’s a city where people live and, to some extent, rely on tourists for their livelihood. In that sense it’s like a much more genuine, much more spectacular Medieval Times.

July 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses

As I was pacing the sidewalk outside Finlandia Hall, trying to photograph the entire length of its facade, my mother asked why I was so interested in the back of the building. The famous concert hall by Alvar Aalto lies tucked between Mannerheimintie, Helsinki’s handsome main street, and a service road. And one could make a very compelling argument that its back – the side facing the service road – is actually its front. There are balconies there where concertgoers can congregate during intermission and peer north into the pretty park around Töölö Lake. While the street facade is low and plain, its rhythms interrupted by stands of tall trees, the service road facade features runs of stairs breaking through and hanging below the interminably long wall like notes on a staff. Yet there you are, standing by the service road, while you’re taking it all in. Perhaps the healthiest position to take is that the building has no front at all.

What’s amazing is how sprawling the hall is, like a cake that didn’t set properly. I wanted very badly for the building to be a heroic, mountain-like, sculpted mass. But it looks, from the outside, almost like a student project, where that student has diagrammed each item in the client’s program (entrance lobby, ticket booth, hallway, small auditorium, large auditorium…) and strung them together. The concert hall in Oslo is also low and long, but it’s unified; one senses the heart within. Finlandia Hall remains an enigma. This is not a building that was made to be looked at.

July 13, 2012 by Nalina Moses

How is a contemporary art museum different from any other kind of art museum? And how is a museum different from any other kind of building? Kiasma, the contemporary art gallery in Helsinki designed by Steven Holl, might be the perfect showcase for contemporary art. Museums with similar programs, like PS1 and Mass MoCA, both adaptations of existing buildings, seem to have been designed primarily to accommodate the humongous scale of so much contemporary work, as well as an increased focus on sculpture and installations. Kiasma has been designed to house the art, and delight visitors, in an array of galleries that are diverse in size, proportion and character. The result is a warm, welcoming gallery for a kind of art that is, oftentimes, not.

The most surprising thing about the building is its gentleness. Kiasma, which Holl won in a design competition, opened in 2008, at at time when he was regarded as a rock star in the United States. Publicity photos showing the building’s sweeping interior ramp made the museum seem highly expressive, sculptural, and idiosyncratic – another signature work from another over-regarded post-postmodern architect. But the building is astoundingly fluid; one moves through it effortlessly. A great deal of this is due to the careful composition, scaled beautifully for the moving body and alert to the picturesque. And a great deal of it is due to the judicious use of daylight, which is carried into the galleries through concealed windows and skylights. It’s a wonderful place to see contemporary art and, probably, just about anything.

July 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I overheard a man in our hotel lobby in Helsinki say that he wanted to visit the Hard Rock Cafe to pick up an only-available-there souvenir t-shirt. It’s with the same abject touristic spirit that I visited the Marimekko flagship, hoping to pick up a very cool, very authentic kind of souvenir, one in keeping with the city’s designation as World Design Capital 2012. The store turned out to be off-putting. While the brand’s graphics (like their map of Helsinki) are always charming, that charm just doesn’t always find its way into the products. The store’s two floors were merchandised unimaginatively, with products I’d already seen before, in patterns that were overly familiar, with laughingly expensive prices. Ten American dollars for a plastic change purse? Forty for a glass votive candle holder? The quality of the goods just didn’t justify it. The dresses were shapeless and and the linens were coarse; they didn’t feel luxurious at all.

What really inspired were the Iittala glasses and plates I stumbled across in the housewares section of an unassuming department store further off the main street. Even the simplest pieces here (water glasses, pitchers, cereal bowls) were pristinely shaped and finished, in dreamy, watery hues. A new line of Iittala tableware called Korento by designers Klaus Haapaniemi and Heikki Orvola was graced with a complex flower-and-insect pattern that is very close to sublime. It feels both old-world and contemporary, and definitely Finnish. I stopped and thought, for just a moment, about carrying some place settings home. They would have made an entirely fitting souvenir.

July 11, 2012 by Nalina Moses