Pihlajamäki Housing Estate
The first use of prefabrication in Finland
Aerial view in 1970, Pihlajamäki Residential Area (© Museum of Finnish Architecture)
The Post-war baby boom, industrialisation and urbanisation all meant that Helsinki required new housing areas during the 60’s.
The Pihlajamäki area was just North East of the original Helsinki foundation site at the mouth of the river Vantaa, a good place then. Already existing there was a settlement of small houses and farms in the valleys and on the north side, as well as some fortifications built by the Russians left over from WWI not uncommon around Helsinki.
The town plan design for that area was won by Olli Kivinen who laid out a lung diagram of 5 neighbourhoods branching off a central area which had the more public functions, shops, schools transport links etc.
Lauri Silvennoinen won the competition to design a new housing district in Pihajamäki in 1960. In the illustration below you can see where he has altered Kivinens town plan for the first side of the lung. His design is a little more responsive to the topography, the high rise towers a little better enclosed, the buildings laid out on a little more suitable grid.
In all four Architects are mainly responsibe for the area. Olli Kivinen, Lauri Sivennoinen, Esko Korhonen, and Sulo Savolainen.
One side of the lung (SW) is that designed by Sivennoinen. The other side (NE) was designed by Esko Korhonen and Sulo Savolainen.1
Sulo Savolainen began his career in this development and has lived most of his life in Pihlajamäki. His love of the area is not uncommon. An ex-college of mine lived there and was a proud advocate of it.
It’s easy to see the balancing of the lung planning concept applied around the countours of the site with the massing arranged to give a sense of enclosure but also sitting within nature.
The development is historic in that it is the first use of large scale pre-fabrication in Finland. So it tells an important story in the industrialisation of building methods here.
The first phase of the southwestern part of Pihlajamäki used onsite formwork, but the second phase was made with precast elements the technology for this coming from Sweden.
Construction site in 1963, Pihlajamäki Residential Area (© Foto Roos / HKM) from finnisharchitecture website
The system used fairly small prefabricated blocks spanning only the size of a room and floor to floor so more like giant planks.
The average size of the apartments was over 60m2 The larger family apartments were placed in the low buildings, the smaller apartments in the tall buildings.
They are not double loaded corrider but point access blocks which allows for better natural light and ventilation.
I couldn’t find good plans of the housing so looked online form Sato’s website and found an apartment for rent in the Southernmost V shaped low block.
So from the plan its easy to tell why these are still popular 60m2, 2 bedrooms, windows 2 sides. Good spatial planning and only the seperate kitchen to Living room maybe giving away the age of the layout.
Overall the feeling is of a garden city, of blocks placed in nature according to the open order.
Many of these types of developments have suffered over the years in countries all over the world. Furthermore the technology for precast construction was in its infancy, and terrible by modern standards. How is it that Pihlajamäki is still meeting it’s brief and still loved by its inhabitants?
A couple of reasons spring to mind. The buildings have been maintained, updated and altered.2 The space planning requirements of modern blocks are much more engineered for profit, so now in Helsinki these apartments represent great value for money.
Also maybe most importantly the Architects managed to build a community, not just a bunch of flats. Much of the credit should go to Sulo Savolainen who is partly responsible for the design, lived there most of his adult life and while working on it fought hard for the integrity of the design. He redisgned a parking block to save some important trees on the site for example.
Pihlajamäki Residential Area 1959-1964
⚲ location: 60°14’05.9”N 25°00’37.5”E
The two sides are now maintained by two differnet companies. Sato runs the SW Silvennoinen designed blocks and Haka runs the (NE) blocks by Esko Korhonen and Sulo Savolainen.↩︎
The original buildings have suffered from a few things. The wooden windows have in many cases been replaced by wood/aluminium frames. The original wall surface has had the addition on insulated outer layer added and in some cases the lower apartment blocks have had lifts added to the external elevations. Nowadays, the site plan is protected.↩︎