Class Warfare – An Analysis of Architecture, Property and the City

In February 2023 YLE published an article about how there was a record number of empty apartments in Helsinki and yet the rental prices had not come down. The article illustrated how the real estate owners, especially large corporations, would rather keep their apartment units empty than lower the rents.

Cost of housing will not come down by simply supplying new apartments to the market. There is a coalition in cities that benefits from rising rents and apartment costs, and is actively working to prevent prices from coming down. The coalition includes the usual suspects: real estate developers, investors and construction companies, but also forces such as the municipalities and home owners. While the coalition protects the value of their assets, those who lose are renters, small businesses and first time home buyers.

What dynamics and challenges does the concept of property cause in the city? Property in the form of home ownership has long been the most common way to build intergenerational wealth. In some cases it has been the great equalizer enabling upward mobility among people from different backgrounds.

Property has also a violent history from being a tool of colonization of the Americas to redlining and other discriminative measures where access to homeownership is denied as certain groups protect the value of their property. As different interests contest over the control of the city, architecture's role as an asset comes in conflict with its other roles such as the role of housing as a human right. In France “problematic” social housing complexes are actively demolished and replaced with lower densities of private housing. As the demolition progresses the stock of affordable housing is not replenished.

What are the challenges that emerge when architecture is seen as an asset or property? What other systems of managing vital infrastructures such as housing, public space and land are there? What is the role of concepts such as commons in the city?

Welcome to discuss on Wednesday 3.5. 18:00 in the library of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.

Architecture Without New Construction

"Seemingly static buildings are actually pieces of mining equipment, actively devouring the planet. In an important sense, buildings do not stand on the solid ground of the site in which they appear but instead in the holes of extractions from all the distant grounds that do not appear… More polemically, the supposed life sustained inside and around buildings is propped up by an economy of death at a distance that is in no way accidental. Buildings give shape to death. A sustained pessimism about architecture might be a much more valuable guide to design than the usual optimism." writes Mark Wigley in Returning the Gift - Running Architecture in Reverse, published in Non Extractive Architecture - On Design without Depletion

We are in the decisive decade in terms of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. As humanity is heading full speed past 1.5 degrees of global warming, what is needed from architecture may not be a new building.

In 2021 French architect Charlotte Malterre-Barthes launched an initiative called A Moratorium on New Construction. The initiative calls for a pause to new construction, demolition and extractive practices to enable critical reflection of the construction industry. Through this pause, the construction industry could realign itself to less extractive and destructive paths, focusing on care, repair, working with the existing buildings and redistribution of real estate. As long as the construction industry continues business as usual the needed radical rethinking will not happen.

What is architecture without new construction? What is the role of architects if they are not creating new designs but rather working with what already exists? Are architects ready to redefine how we understand authorship as the design work involves increasingly the oeuvre of architects who have come before.

Is architecture without new construction stagnant and conservative, stifling new ideas and innovation, or does it in fact open up a fundamentally different, more meaningful and exciting direction for the field?

Welcome to discuss on Wednesday 5.4. 18:00 in the library of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.

What: an open discussion event

Where: Library of the Museum of Finnish Architecture (Kasarmikatu 24, 00130 Helsinki)

When: Wednesday 5.4. 18-20:00

Why: To find like minded people and peer support as we are looking for our place in the Anthropocene

Pro Meri-Rastila and young architects’ You Tell Me Collective are hosting a discussion event about the future of Merirasti chapel. The chapel was designed by Kaarlo Leppänen 1991-1993, and its future is now uncertain as the congregation is leaving the building. The building is part of a larger transformation of the Meri-Rastila area where most of the existing public buildings from the mall, school, kindergarten to the youth center will be demolished. What will life be like for the residents during this transformation? Will all the services leave the area at once? And what could be the role of the chapel as one of the last original public buildings during these times? The true value and significance of buildings is many times discovered once they are gone.

The event will be held in Finnish.

What: Discussion event about the future of the Merirasti chapel (in Finnish)

Where: Merirasti chapel, Jaluspolku 3

When: Tuesday 25.10. 17:30

You Tell Me is participating in the Visitors Biennale, taking place 14.-24.7.2022 in Helsinki's Meri-Rastila and Kallahti area. Our piece is called "It's Time to Talk About Monstrosities". The piece looks into issues of demolition, construction materials and value of buildings.

Climate Crisis – situation check through 5 images

We all have an understanding that climate change is a major threat and something needs to be done about it. We also hear a lot of talk of how climate actions are being taken and how various products, means of transportation and cities will soon be made carbon neutral. But do we really understand the scope and urgency of the challenge? Or how much of the carbon neutrality talk is greenwashing? And what if we have missed the train and we need to simply adapt to the impending climate catastrophe?