“1960: PLUS COLORÉ, PLUS GAI, PLUS RAFFINÉ!”
This was the poet Pentti Saarikoski’s response – uttered suavely in French – when the Helsinki student journal Ylioppilaslehti asked Finland’s young cultural visionaries to share their hopes and dreams for the new decade in January 1960.
Saarikoski’s utterance captured the zeitgeist perfectly. Whether regarding architectural aesthetics, the cultural ethos or social progress, the 1960s will be remembered as a decade of change. The advent of industrial prefabrication and new onsite construction machinery marked a major shift in the practice of architecture.
The all-pervasive influence of ideology was also visible in architecture. The theoretical purpose of architecture became a subject of debate among various schools of thought. Amid growing affluence and rapid technological progress, architects embraced a new aesthetic breaking with the past, with brutal- ism, constructivism, Japonisme and structuralism broadening the stylistic repertoire of modernism.
Floor area
200 + 60 m2
Phase
Temporary exhibition 2016
