the suburbs

varissuo

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 02:16:00 +0300

location: turku, finland
time: 1970s, 1980s

i was traveling all the afternoon. infinite curves and spirals in this mediocre port city. then i’ve seen these houses finally, and got off from the bus. varissuo was built on a meadow. the finnish people call it a problematic district. 32 percent of the inhabitants are immigrants. i am walking in a dreamlike ghetto in new york. finally something with meaning. the moomins definitely don’t live here, maybe the groke at best. pine trees and high rises merge into the dusk, people switch on the lights in their windows, all of them is a reminder, home is where the heart is far away.

halinen

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:59:00 +0200

location: turku, finland
time: 1970s

my fingers tend to type funland constantly. who would say something like that about this sinking rainy land. here immigrants live mixed with students, slava says happily in a downtown café when i mention where i go: my home! i am traveling with the star-shaped cookies got from her, with my 2.50 euros ticket to adventure. there is nothing here, the bus turns around at one point; hungarian higher middle class families live so hidden in their hillside houses like here. leaves are outstanding contrast to the other parts of the landscape; playgrounds, without any hint to the space age, stand in the fog, waiting for a spring which is deeply hidden in the future yet.

lauste

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:17:54 +0300

location: turku, finland
time: 1960s, 1970s

if the múmins had lived on a housing estate, that would have looked like this one: maybe just the illusory weather, but lauste looked like a tiny cartoon empire, where nothing remains on its place for long time, and building bricks are placed on the ground in the playful oblivion. because, eventually, nobody was there, only a girl with an umbrella, and an apparently disadvantaged couple who were pulling a shopping trolley and having a very unpleasant quarrel (some things never change anywhere?)

but come on, it’s october, the fictive inhabitants probably started their winter sleep already.

runosmäki

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:24:00 +0300

location: turku, finland
time: 1970s

the largest suburb of turku, with 20 percent of immigrant population. i get off the bus n18 a bit frightened, no idea why here, after all east europe. but nothing happens, really nothing, a few people walking on the streets, one group of kids, pensioners, grownups walking dogs, hardly any sign of life, because these places are not built for that, however impressive the vegetation is around them. finland is good in that: all housing estates look like elite healthcare institutions in the middle of a park full of primal trees, and sometimes it’s really hard to imagine the “serious problems” that are written in the articles on them, but in the end, segregation knows no borders.

no answer petrograd

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 03:05:00 +0300

location: õismäe, tallinn, estonia
time: 2010 november

i don’t think i’ll ever be as happy as i was in that autumn in estonia

minsk tetris

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:53:24 +0300

location: minsk, belarus
time: 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s…

tsentralny, sovietski, pershamaysky, partyzansky, zavodski, leninski, kastrichnitsky, moskovski, frunzenski… whatever. all sounds beautiful. i couldn’t find out where we are, street names are rare commodities in this land. but there are colorful tetris facades, rocket playgrounds, multicolor televisions, and all the shapes of the space age.

hello minsk

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:51:49 +0300

location: minsk, belarus
time: 18 July 2012

welcome to minsk, where the past has not ended,

concrete skyscrapers are perpetually being constructed, light coloured high rises representing constant serenity, but cannot hide the overall greyness emanating from the city.

welcome to minsk, where the distant blocks glare like forgotten ruins of ancient towns in the accidental sunlight.

wilanów

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:27:00 +0200

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1960-70s

next to wilanów palace, the polish versailles.

land of the pastels, bathrooms, balconies. green trees, concrete overpasses, loud city highways.

the diplomat housing estate.

the glass covered staircases.

the riverside and the polish caramel candies.

land of the early nineties, the memories before our birth.

the rain.

the future.

(the elite: here the 70s urban space starts to recall some desperate housewives scene. or, in this light, a bit of tel-aviv.)

gocław

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:50:00 +0200

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1977

it is wonderful again: since the estate is built by the housing cooperative gocław airport, the four subdistricts of gocław are named of different polis aircraft pieces:

iskra (spark)
jantar (amber)
orlik (eagle)
wilga (oriole)

a secret sentence about socialism written into the urban landscape.

and in the middle of the estate there is a lake called BALATON!

natolin

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:38:23 +0200

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1980

going further on the bus, we arrive to a land even more out of reality. this is the postwar world of pastel lights reflecting eternal greyness. greyness is usual everywhere in warsaw, but here it looks like the official atmosphere ordered by the commanders of the neighbourhood. houses are tall and continue in endless fragmented structures, the strong aesthetic order of the elements which is a characteristic of all the concrete blocks is especially significant here.

and street names are written on the concrete walls with big letters, giving a title for every single artwork constructing this living reality.

ursynów

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:27:00 +0300

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1977

it’s easy to say ursynów, although it is an unforeseeble area of different housing estates, where innumerable buses carry the passengers to unknown places. ursynów never ends, or the buses have round lines.

ghetto and garden city in one.

i have a hunch that it was the greyest place i’ve ever been, or i just don’t remember to romania anymore.

and this place consists of the most melodic streetnames, that generates nice synesthetic experiences in our mind. and there is a bartók béla street, which composes an interesting contrast with the budapest one.

warsaw is the city of trees and concrete. a city of may and rain, doesn’t matter when are we going there. but we can’t really miss it, light conditions around the central station are frighteningly similar in may and december. these pictures were taken in july. it’s kind of a solidity.

when the housing estates in warsaw were built in the years of oppression, one of the chief architects’ wife committed suicide in the bathtub. since then bathrooms in warsaw housing blocks are smelling like a fairy’s forgotten bathwater. conduits are not fogetting.

besides the magic forests, yellow and green houses are also very usual here. and the shades change in every block.

the next part of ursynów is blue for a change, and quotes greek villages. it doesn’t worth to give up dreaming at all.

piaski

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:17:31 +0300

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1970s

we don’t know anything about this place except that piasków means sand, which shows the less creative sort of naming, and that it is located next to chomiczówka, separated by a nice tram track.

at some point i could even experience that kind of sacralized space which sometimes appears in a random corner of conrete blocks, always next to the trees.

inside the block follow less interesting pastel houses with a summer garden feeling.

chomiczówką

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:15:00 +0300

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1975-80

chomiczówką, chomiczówką, pierwsze wino, pierwsza wódka, mean that anything, (obviously something with vodka)

that song shows that there should be some character in this neighbourhood, but i didn’t experience so much of that. it was just a new example of colorful toy cities arisen from rehabilitation programs or the planner’s fantasy. but nothing significantly original. anyway, it looks pretty amazing on this photo, so maybe i was in too much of hurry (i just stepped of from an urban activist workshop, where i had the task to make beetroot paint), and didn’t discover the exciting parts.

but there are some nice picture, where concrete blocs become pastel scenes of fairy tales,

where the essence of warsaw housing feeling, the light green walls and rich vegetation are in present,

and some harder contours.

wilhelmsburg

Tue, 17 May 2011 23:13:00 +0300

location: hamburg, germany
time: ca. 1970

surprisingly ghetto-like landscape when we get off the s-bahn, that becomes different step by step.

slowly transforming into a decent post 70s garden estate…

stalin style blocks…

little streams and good pedestrian connections…

moderately exciting facades.

yeah, that’s pretty hard. le corbusier in the sky with diamonds!

steilshoop

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 16:09:27 +0200

location: hamburg, germany
time: 1969-73

good to know that western europe is also keeping secrets for us. the keyword is diversity: more form, more material, more colour. and the condition of the buildings of course. but it’s still far away from the gloss of helsinki suburbs. and we can’t forget about the water, as in any point of this city. grand waters and frightening distances, this is hamburg.

contours.

corps.

spaces.

facades.

streetscapes.

contrasts.

zolitūde

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:06:48 +0200

location: riga, latvia
time: 1980-1991

zolitūde is on the ‘buda’ side of riga. sorry, it’s really a local approach from budapest, it means something nicer, calmer, hillier, grassier part of the river in a city, relatively of course.

it is also from the last moments of soviet times, when architecture seemed to find itself in a colorful postmodern way, but it was already too late. anyhow, it’s still not so depressing neighbourhood as usually, delight of lego bricks is floating over the buildings. (ok, maybe it doesn’t shout from the pictures. maybe in the summer!)

the name means solitude, which is really astonishing after lots of dreary and imageless place names. there are more explanations for it, one is about a part of napoleon’s army which remained here separated from others, other simply refers to the loneliness of inhabitants who lived between abandoned fields, forests and swampy grounds of the area. it is already amazing to have napoleon and this place in our mind at the same time, but the name perfectly fits today’s loneliness, which is a particular characteristic of housing estates in large distance from anything alive.

bus number 8 comes from the city, blue and modern, goes around the neighbourhood. colorful high-rises appear in front of the eye, as the bus goes, they are moving behind each other. appear, disappear and reappear after the curve. final station, we are almost back in the start.

deep blue

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:17:00 +0200

they’re moving towards you with their colors all the same

time: 04.12.2010.
location: from purvciems to mežciems, riga, latvia

there is a 19th century worker district near the centre of riga, called grizinkalns. it’s brown and rusty and noble, details maybe later. in this neighbourhood the buildings are tied to each other by overcrossing trolley wires, and time to time, light blue trolleys appear on brown streets. they have numbers: if we miss 23, we still can catch the 18, and it takes us farther, even to mežciems.

first, we reach purvciems, which means ‘marsh village’, and it was built in the 1980s and 90s, so it is sometimes referred as postsoviet rather than soviet.

as journey continues, landscape becomes blurred, contours become soft.

than the trolley slowly arrives to the egde of the town, where fairy creatures are living in lakes called juglas ezers. it is already mežciems, which means ‘forest village’ and was built in the 1970s. it is hiding from the visitor, at first sight everything seems so distant, as if real life of the neighbourhood would happen somewhere inside, where outsiders can’t see it. it is just a bus stop in the end of the world, driving to the forests, and some houses in the distance, which could be built anytime, even in the nineties.

pļavnieki

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:34:36 +0200

location: riga, latvia
time: 1980-85

never seen such a rich collection of forms in a housing estate before! really delightful experience after a lot of grey concrete and poor design. it looks like for the 80s architects got bored with unattractive housing projects, and they also had the chance to plan buildings as smart as possible. we can tell about many block buildings, that they are lego houses, but here they used a high, almost western quality lego. the most noticeable feature of the buildings is the careful attention, which accompanied their planning. the goal of architects is not anymore to get off the job with the lowest charges and the highest plan numbers, but to find a way to create an environment more exciting and fitting to human demands.

look at the facades! with a good cut, they are pure aesthetic play of forms.

genre paintings with high contrasts of baltic winter.

different house types are also interesting in three dimension.

a blue quarter.

other facades in the space.

microdistricts in golden sunshine.

the wilderness downtown

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:43:00 +0200

time: 23.11.2010.
location: lasnamäe, tallinn, estonia

take the bus number 65 in a gloomy late autumn day. bus 65 is like a sightseeing line to lovers of housing estates (~ catastrophe tourists)

it leaves from the airport, and meanders long long time in the deepest greyness. traveler would think that it is the end of the world, but bus takes a curve and a new endless row of blocks appears to the eye. how many people are living there actually? all of these incredible number of dwellings are habited? what are they doing in a winter day, when there is three ours of daylight, and it looks like this? what are they doing in a house that stands in the middle of nothing? i wanna see their homes, dull yellow of lamps, subtle lace curtains in the kitchen window, facing a city covered with concrete, thinking about beauty.

as we are getting far away from downtown, number of russian words is growing. as if driver would say the stops in russian as well… number of overweight, fake blonde and displeased girls is growing. but old ladies are smiling. they are going to the prisma centre, with bags in their hands. in some microdistricts streets are almost busy: people hurrying on the pavement, waiting in the bus stop, which reminds to real life. in other places there is no one, only some random little girl with her father, but they don’t seem so real, rather memories from last christmas, while mummy was decorating the tree.

what happened in the last century?

some buildings have maybe twenty floors, i can’t see exactly. some buildings have oly five floors. they are placed to the ground diagonally, rows after rows. this is the first housing estate in my life which i can experience perfectly as it was on the scale size model. i am in the dream of soviet architects. i can see little blonde girls dancing tuljak in the spacious areas between the buildings. other parts of the world seem so unreal from here. what is still waiting for us?

and then what is this happiness?

csepel

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:40:00 +0200

location: budapest, hungary
time: 1950-1980

firstly some background knowledge. csepel is an island on the river danube, situated close to the historical budapest. it was an industrial area from the beginning of the 20^th century, and in the 1950s it became a shining comet of socialist industry. not an accident that it is usually called ‘red’ csepel, referring to the communist roots.

and the workers needed accommodation. there were built many types of housing unit during forty years of socialism, so the area has a diverse and colorful stock of socialist buildings. there are stalinistic buildings from the 1950s.

there are moderate modernist ones from 1960s, with lower number of levels, from cast concrete.

there are over dimensioned housing estates from the 1970s, with huge no man’s lands and depressing grey blocks.

as well, there are many examples of panel rehabilitation program, which tries to repair mistakes of original planning, and improve quality of life in these areas.

(new clothes and old clothes)

(organic design)

(different colors)

(transformers)

and there are facades which are colorful in themselves without any rehabilitation.

finally there are some which are exciting because of their spatial features.

this is poetry.