The first in a long line of blog posts I hope to do about my month-long trip to Scandinavia, this one features Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki. Through our travels across Finland, I noticed the innovation and modernism of Finnish religious architecture, and this is one such example. Comparable to a concert hall or auditorium, this circular space both cocoons and comforts the user, whilst at the same time, inspiring awe by its shear size and acoustics. Burrowed into solid rock and designed by Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen in 1969, the interior cavernous church features a copper roof balanced like a spaceship onto the bare rock of Lutherinkatu; “It dawned intuitively on the Suomalainen brothers when they visited the building site that, in order to save the character of place, the rock itself had to be understood as a church and everything to be built at the site should be adjusted to accompany the character of the rock.” Source: Temppeliaukio.
Images: my own.
