New standards The story of Puutalo Oy, an industrial company founded in 1940 due to the Karelian refugee crisis, when 420,000 people were displaced as a result of the war. At the moment, both architects and industrialists came together to create a new factory housing model that would modernize the Finnish construction industry. In less than a decade, the company became one of the world’s largest manufacturers of prefabricated wooden buildings. By the mid-1950s, millions of square meters of buildings had been sent from Finland to more than 30 countries in exchange for goods and capital to support a struggling post-war economy. The story of Puutalo’s production and exports over these two decades illustrates the ways in which architecture connected with political, industrial, and economic forces during a period of intense global exchange and development.
The New standards the exhibition documents the history and development of these prefabricated buildings from the 1940s to the mid-1950s. The houses were developed by Finland’s leading architects in the middle of the century, and their architectural appearance negates the innovation that led to their structural design, space arrangement and home use. Archival drawings, photographs and advertisements illustrate the goals of this period, revealing new innovations and illustrating the transformations of buildings into different climatic and cultural contexts. Although the houses, schools, barracks and hospitals manufactured by Puutalo are not included in most of the basic history of architecture, they may be Finland’s largest architectural export. The company and the buildings it produced made a significant contribution to the post-war rise in living standards around the world.
The Venice Biennale Architettura 2021, originally commissioned and produced by Archinfo Finland for the Finnish Pavilion, has been designed by a team of three academics who combine their work at Aalto University: Laura Berger, Philip Tidwell and Kristo Vesikansa. New photography of Puutalo’s houses in Finland, Denmark and Colombia has been specially commissioned from a respected photographer Juuso Westerlund to show how these houses are now inhabited and how they have been personified over decades of use. After 80 years, the wooden house’s buildings have proven to be robust enough to withstand extensive use, upgrades and alterations in a wide variety of contexts and climates.
“Puutalo Oy’s story has largely gone unexplored, even though the same architects known for national monuments, such as the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, designed these modest wooden buildings for years. One reason may be that wartime has often been considered a kind of intervening period during which little happened in the field of architecture. The history of the company has brought to the surface the emergence of numerous innovations and important practices in the 1940s that have had an impact for decades. Today, many of these innovations seem so mundane that we take them for granted. says curator Laura Berger.
“We have traveled to different countries to visit the neighborhoods where these houses still exist, and we have been impressed with how proud the current owners are of their homes. The term “Finnish house” is still known in many countries with reference to the compact gabled roof buildings of the 1940s and 1950s. The simple building system and materials have also allowed residents to modify and expand these structures as they wish – at times in the most surprising way. Thus, originally more or less similar houses have been converted into individual dwellings. describes curator Kristo Vesikansa.
“The standardization of architecture often evokes thoughts of unity and monotony, but the prefabricated buildings of Puutalo tell a more complex story. The crisis of war and reconstruction reveals the ways in which architecture is involved in social, economic, political and material concerns. With the onset of climate change, these issues are as important today as they were in 1940. “ says curator Philip Tidwell.
Source: Museum of Architecture
Source: The Nordic Page