Description

Commuters travelling to and from Helsinki pass by the church on not one but two sides of it, to the east by road, on the west by train. Twelve trains stop at Louhela station per hour every working day of the week. Traffic roars past from dawn until dusk. Certainly not an ideal location for a church. Nevertheless, the building rises to the challenge and acquits itself admirably. Its narrow, elongated shape turns its back on the railway embankment and shows its face to the park, adapting to fit the complex urban context and making a virtue out of a difficult situation.

The term elongated does not adequately describe the almost excessive extent of this building. The church has a total length of 116.6 metres and a maximum breadth of only 28.8 metres, a ratio of approximately 4:1. The complex consists of four buildings, the three buildings to the north providing parish facilities for children, young people and the elderly, the southernmost building for the church itself. The four buildings are, however, almost inseparable in their structure. Whilst the yellowish brickwork, laid exclusively in stretcher-bond, underlines the static rootedness of the building, the stepped, staggered ascent of the building’s form from north to south establishes a crescendo that reaches its climax with the 28.5 metre tall slab of the church tower.

The church has a total of seven entrances. Those arriving from the north are led through a weave of small passageways past the parish facilities to the entrance of the church. Arriving from the “foyer”, the 12.5 metre high church hall appears light and airy. The white pews are arranged mostly on the east side, with a few further pews to the north. The free aisle to the altar is short and the space around the altar is like a stage without any depth. The high rear wall, the backbone of the entire building, is most apparent whilst the north and south sides – despite the free view to the organ and musician’s platform – attract less attention. The acoustics of the church are reputedly so good that it is also often used for classical concerts.

Several critics have pointed out a relationship between the church at Myyrmäki and the oeuvre of Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld. The neoplasticism of the two Dutchmen emphasises the planar qualities of wall and surface rather than the volume as a whole. In this respect, the church in Vantaa does follow in the footsteps of De Stijl. The extent to which the theme of the wall slab dominates the building can be seen by the frequency with which walls project beyond or above the extents of spaces, and the degree to which freestanding planes extend northwards or southwards into the site. If one calculates all these additional projections and adds them to the length of the building, the length of the complex totals 180.6 metres.

In the interior too, walls stand next to and behind other walls, all smoothly plastered and painted white, some vertically ridged, separated into tall strips, layered or staggered. The striped, translucent and coloured textiles by Kristiina Nyrhinen, which hang like banners or flags from the flat ceiling, are not simply decoration but constitute an integral interpretative element of the architecture, placed with a rhythmic musicality not unlike that of canon and fugue.

Particular attention should be given to the use of light in the building. Firstly, since the early Gothic period, the representation of godliness in Christianity has been connected with the relationship of light and space; secondly, in northern climates – where in summer night never falls and in winter day never breaks – light is a phenomenon with extremes. For 20th-century Finnish architects, the maximisation of daylight is one of the most important design criteria.

The church at Vantaa owes its radiant, almost baroque luminosity to light from the east and south and to a lesser degree from the west and north: from the east via full-height strips of glass, and from the south and east via wide, diagonally projecting roof and side lights that join at the corners. The building itself is a scaffold for light to pervade. Light never stays, it comes and goes. Early in the morning, light illuminates the altar, the ambo and rear wall directly; in the afternoon it skirts the same surface but from the other side. The light transforms the edges and corners of the numerous staggered vertical segments of wall into thin lines that subtly change in tone, blend and disappear as if painted sfumato.

In Finland, the essence of space is not the urban space of the city; it is landscape. It is a cutting through a forest or the banks of a lake that marks spatial experience. The creation of genuinely modern architecture that draws on the landscape is perhaps Alvar Aalto’s greatest achievement. The creation of form from nature remains a Finnish trait to this day. The Myyrmäki Church, despite its urban context, picks up this theme too, alongside that of the wall and of light. Its relationship to nature is, however, not one of form, which has nothing remotely in common with mountains, valleys or tree stumps. Instead it is one of the play of light and colour, the continual change between matt white and grey, mixed and laced with the blue and green of the strips of fabric to the left and right of the altar. Strong colours are nowhere to be seen, only the freshness of a winter morning.

The church next to the rail embankment of Louhela station is not the only sacred building the architects have created. Similarly illustrious are St Thomas’ Church in Oulu from 1975 and St John’s Church in Kuopio from 1992. All three buildings employ the same restricted, or rather concentrated, vocabulary. All three buildings are characterised by staggered or stepped walls, the use of red or yellow brickwork outside, white plaster inside, the inrush of bright light through the use of sharply sloping or diagonal skylights and sidelights, and the gentle play of light on soft colours. Those fortunate enough to have experienced all three buildings will be aware of how the architectural language has matured from one church to the next. Of these, the complexity of built form and intensity of the feeling of space is most pronounced in the Myyrmäki Church. It is not without reason that the British architect Colin St John Wilson remarked on the “trance-like experience of spiritual exultation” felt in the church.

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.