Helsinki, one beautiful building at a time

Unfortunately, I missed another Saarinen landmark, the National Romantic Finnish National Museum — half castle, half cathedral — which was closed for renovations and cocooned in scaffolding. The museum is set to reopen in 2027 with a new annex that resembles a sleek flying saucer.

Saarinen’s greatest monument, and an icon of early Modernism, is his 1914 Helsinki Central Railway Station. But the current building wasn’t the architect’s original design. Saarinen won the 1904 depot competition with a churchlike, granite National Romantic structure similar to the National Museum. But this victory provoked a pair of scathing rebukes by two young architects in an architectural journal.

One was Gustaf Strengell, who deplored the proposal’s “quasi-nationalistic, archaic, archaeological romanticism” as wholly inappropriate for a building housing cutting-edge technology. Saarinen may have been Finland’s most celebrated young architect-artist, but that didn’t save him from a public drubbing.

But the next year, according to Timo Tuomi, an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki and the author of the forthcoming From Form Follows Everything: Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Saarinen returned with a new proposal for what Dr Tuomi calls a work of “monumental poetics.”

That design is simpler and more geometric than the original, pointing the way toward Finnish Modernism. With its copper-clad tower looming over Railway Square, and four giant, bas-relief lantern bearers holding great glass globes that light up the night, the depot remains one of Helsinki’s most arresting sights.

Saarinen Tours, run by Eliel’s great-grandniece, offers one-hour visits to the clock tower and its high balcony, which has fabulous views (24 euros, about US$27.30 or S$35.50).

A GLOBAL LEGACY