Finnish architect Juha Limari Leiviskä dies at 87

I “found” Leiviskä’s work in 1991 by means of one in all his ecclesiastical designs, the Myyrmäki Church and Parish Middle at Vantaa exterior Helsinki (1980–84). Real structure communicates earlier than it’s understood: It touches the thoughts and the senses at ranges past phrases and out of vary of theoretical justifications. I used to be overwhelmed instantly by the chic mild, vibrant area, and “musical” rhythms of floating planes. I used to be satisfied that I used to be within the presence of a masterpiece. I keep in mind visiting the place with Balkrishna Doshi, the Indian architect, who was additionally overwhelmed and stated: “Why is it that we have no idea extra about this architect? It’s so significantly better than most of what’s going on.” 

A 12 months later, I recorded my response in a textual content revealed within the Finland Builds 8 guide entitled “Ideas and Continuities.” This explored a number of strands of contemporary architectural custom in Finland and introduced Leiviskä’s Myyrmäki Church into excessive focus. Subsequently I included the constructing within the third version of Trendy Structure Since 1900 (Phaidon, 1996) the place it stood alongside different excellent buildings of the interval by masters similar to Tadao Ando and Álvaro Siza. As ordinary I tried to stability firsthand expertise of buildings, with cautious evaluation of intentions and a reconstruction of the architect’s place in longer traditions, together with these of contemporary structure, which I conceived of as a delta with many streams.

Leiviskä’s work evades facile historic and significant classes. Born in Helsinki and educated at Helsinki College of Know-how, he, throughout his profession of 60 years, established a singular household of types, a private fashion, however from this he generated a variety of buildings every with a singular identification of its personal. A few of these have entered the annals of world structure as masterpieces—one thinks significantly of the aforementioned Myyrmäki Church or his Männistö Church at Kuopio (1986–92)—each distinguished by their chic fusion of sunshine, sacred area, and geometry. 

However Leiviskä additionally had a secular aspect, working up and down the size from small residences to collective housing, from the German Embassy in Helsinki (1995) to the Dar al-Kalima Academy in Bethlehem (2002), from the Villa Lepola at Espoo (1998) to the Swedish College of Social Sciences in Helsinki (2009). On every event he sought an applicable character for the human actions enclosed and for the place the place the constructing stands. Whether or not designing an area of public meeting, a stair in a non-public villa or a kitchen in a public housing scheme, he introduced the identical consideration to the duty, endowing daily actions with a contact of poetry. 

Leiviskä handled pure and synthetic mild as architectural supplies and aspired to the concord of nature in his seek for genuine types. He had no time for the superficialities of postmodernism or for the simple tips of neo-modernist formalism, and nonetheless much less for the facile imagery of “iconic” vogue: His work was pushed by a social imaginative and prescient and a core of architectural rules. Leiviskä dug deep into the essence of the architectural artwork, particularly in his dealing with of polyphonic areas skilled over time. He declared:

I consider within the permanency of the essential options of structure, the so-called everlasting values. I don’t subsequently consider that there was something in recent times which might revolutionize the essential tenets of structure and its central process.

Leiviskä interpreted the social situations, local weather, and landscapes of Finland through an intense abstraction. He prolonged main classes of Aalto’s work into new expressive territories and in doing so enriched a fancy trendy Finnish custom. His buildings, with their overlapping planes and stratified types, resemble abstractions of panorama or luminous forest clearings, whereas his interlocking voids and summary plans recall to mind the work of de Stijl artists like Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. His fixed touch-tone up to now was the Bavarian Baroque as exemplified by the chic mild and layered surfaces of the mid–18th-century Neresheim Monastery by Balthasar Neumann. For Leiviskä, the previous was ever current, a fund of information, reminiscences, and impressions to be metamorphosed in his personal artwork. 

Leiviskä aspired in the direction of what he felt had been timeless values within the historical past of structure. Right here his deep data and feeling for nice classical music had been an indispensable help. Leiviskä typically stated that he had initially hoped to be an expert pianist however as an alternative grew to become an architect channeling music into one other medium and one other artwork kind. He acknowledged:

Structure is nearer to music than to the visible arts. To qualify as structure, buildings along with their inner areas and their particulars, have to be an natural a part of the surroundings, of its grand drama, of its motion and its spatial sequences. To me a constructing because it stands ‘as a chunk of structure’ is nothing. Its that means comes solely in counterpoint with its environment, with life and with mild.

The one constructing that Juha Leiviskä designed exterior Finland was the Dar al-Kalima Academy (2003) within the Previous Metropolis of Bethlehem, a cultural establishment fostering social actions within the Palestinian group however open to all. Leiviskä conceived this as form of city panorama of terraces and skylights skillfully inserted into the historic context and attuned to the stone buildings and the native local weather which required shade and safety in opposition to the solar.  It’s a place of calm and reconciliation. Juha himself referred to the venture in shifting phrases: “On a private, emotional stage, it’s maybe my most necessary achievement. I left my coronary heart in Palestine.” Leiviskä’s spirit lives on within the chic areas crammed with mild of his buildings. They’ll contact and encourage future generations who shall be moved by the silent music of his structure.

William J. R. Curtis is the creator of Trendy Structure Since 1900 and Le Corbusier: Concepts and Varieties, each thought of classics. He has written seminal texts on Finnish modernism, Alvar Aalto specifically. In 2000 the Museum of Finnish Structure, Helsinki, exhibited his work and drawings underneath the title Psychological Landscapes; in 2007 the Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyvaskyla exhibited his pictures in Buildings of Mild; and in 2006 Curtis was honored with a Medal by the MFA for his providers to structure.