Finnish Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright Concept Gets Updated Scandinavian Interpretation
Architect Pekka Helin evokes the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater with his latest design, Villa Vetro.
What do the northern lights, concrete walls and Italian wine have in common? For Finnish architect Pekka Helin, they each evoke memories of Villa Vetro, his latest project on Porkkala, a peninsula on the Gulf of Finland about 20 miles from Helsinki.
Along with his assistant, Mariitta Helineva, Helin recently completed what can best be described as a single-family resort. Villa Vetro’s five acres include a 2,260-square-foot main house, a 592-square-foot guest house, a 484-square-foot sauna and a maintenance building of 753 square feet.
Having designed the forward-thinking, energy-efficient Nokia offices in Helsinki, and having won 31 different city-planning competitions, Helin was already celebrated. He met his client, an Italian wine importer, at a tasting four years ago, where the two were introduced by a mutual friend and Nokia employee. Several discussions later, a project was born.
Although Helin was given a free hand with the design, he had to abide by a strict building code that specified, among other things, how big and how far back from the shoreline the main house could be. Given these importunities, Helin ultimately divided the house into three buildings—a small guesthouse, a separate sauna and the main house—connected by wooden walkways and, above, trellisways. The main house is about 20 yards from the sea; a small peninsula surrounds the house.
The client and his wife, who collects post-1950s modern design, wanted a space to relax with their grown children and numerous cats. Primarily, they wanted to take full advantage of the landscape, to feel immersed in nature and revel in views of the sea. And while in other parts of the world, clients spend a fortune to hide their bare concrete structures, this couple had other ideas. “Somehow, I think they didn’t want to have a romantic wooden interior,” says Helin. “They wanted a sense of coolness inside, and they didn’t want to mix it too much.”
What the clients opted for was a house with interior concrete walls. “It’s difficult to use concrete in our climate,” says Helin. “So we used natural stone and solid bedrock for the outside.” Taking it from the site, with its many code restrictions as well as environmental obstacles—much of the rock, for example, is covered in lichen and moss—was out of the question, Helin says, so they imported it from a nearby spot. They did use the onsite black granite, however, for the façade.
Inside the house, standard-issue concrete with a delicate white pigment shows the texture of the surroundings and also provides some interesting construction possibilities; for example, it can follow the curves of the house much more faithfully than wood could. Concrete also has another key benefit. “The fine issue is the play of light and shadows on the concrete surface,” says Helin. “We had to take into account how the light turns, how much light filters in from the smaller openings, changes of light through the year.” This is especially important in the summer, he points out, when the Northern Lights mean only four hours of darkness out of 24.
The play of light was one of the most difficult aspects of the house to finesse because, on the one hand, the floor-to-ceiling glass walls face the lake (“vetro,” the client’s chosen name for the project, means “glass” in Italian), capturing all available light and providing views of nature; on the other hand, “We wanted to have the entrance sheltered so you can’t see inside the house or guess what happens after the stone wall.”
By building along the natural curve of the peninsula and its rock formations, and by placing echoing concrete support walls strategically throughout the interior, Helin was able to create interiors that, he says, “reflect the time of day. The dining area is privileged with both morning and evening sun reflecting from the water.”
Another important aspect of the space is the merging of inside and outside, manmade and natural. “The best way to build on this piece of land was to follow the forms of the surrounding rocks and the forms of shoreline,” Helin says. “The advantage of this was that in mid-summer, you can see the sun rising from the sea and setting, and also that the entrance is sheltered against the wind from the sea.”
Helin doesn’t mention Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. On the contrary, he cites a fellow Finnish architect, the late Eero Saarinen; British architect and Columbia professor Kenneth Frampton; his Oppenheim training; and “a northern tradition” as his major influences.
But it’s certainly the same architectural philosophy that comes to mind when Helin describes the flow of the space. “There are no doors,” he says. “It’s a sliding space with movement within the inner space, and movement from inside to outside. Even the flooring moves from outside to inside.”
In the flooring, Helin abandoned the concrete and opted instead for oak planks that begin on the terrace outside. These allow for one of Helin’s trademark energy-saving innovations: an under-floor thermal pump that relies on heat from the depths of about 500 feet below the foundation. Earth-warmed liquid flows through pipes under the flooring, keeping the indoor temperature steady at about 75 degrees. There’s no need for radiators, as the surface of the double-glazed windows is also heated electrically.
“The site is magnificent,” Helin contends. “And although we’ve designed a few other houses like this, they were mostly wooden. This was most challenging because of the site and the material we were using.”
“It’s good exercise for an architect to use resources to improve the life of a client,” he concludes. “And to have discussions with the people who are really gong to live in the house. You are influencing their living conditions, their atmosphere. Architects have a big responsibility in that sense.”
