The Finnish capital’s new industrial-scale venue – Dance House Helsinki – has its own architectural rhythms
Photography by Hannu Rytky
Words by Lee Marable
Almost nine decades after renowned Finnish dancer Maggie Gripenberg first proposed a dedicated space for dance in Helsinki, Finland’s capital finally has its Dance House. Totalling 6,800 sqm and constructed for €42m (£35.8m), the new venue saw the curtain rise on its first performance in February 2022.
Dance House Helsinki is an addition to Finland’s largest cultural hub: the Cable Factory, home to a vast array of cultural activities from individual artist studios to the Finnish Museum of Photography. A significant former industrial building located within the Ruoholahti district of Helsinki, the Cable Factory was constructed in 1943 to house the production of rubber and marine cables, and was designed by architect Wäinö G Palmqvist.
The 57,000 sqm U-shaped building encloses a long, street-like courtyard and its pale sand-lime brick elevations are punctured with windows in rigorous yet varied grids. After ceasing cable production in 1985, the vacant building became an informal home for various artists, eventually growing into the institution it is today.
Photography by Hannu Rytky
The Dance House is the most recent stage of the Cable Factory’s development and has its own storied history. The project came close to realisation several times during the previous century, but gained real impetus in 2007 when the City of Helsinki concluded that dance was being prohibited from reaching the same level as other art forms due to a lack of facilities. In 2013, the city proposed that the Dance House should be located within the vicinity of the Cable Factory, and a donation from the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation the following year effectively sealed the deal.
Helsinki-based architecture firm JKMM has been involved since the feasibility stage and was tasked with designing the new building, the programme of which seamlessly straddles both renovated portions of the existing Cable Factory and an adjoining new structure. Teemu Kurkela, founding partner of JKMM and lead designer of the Dance House, describes the new building as ‘one machine added to the Cable Factory’, adding: ‘They used to have machines for cables or cutting; in this case, it’s a machine for dance.’
The new addition extends the Cable Factory’s north wing eastwards, defining a new public space to the south, and a park to the north. The project also includes the ambitious enclosure of almost half of the Cable Factory’s courtyard in a glazed box, forming a new ‘heart’ from which various parts of the cultural hub can be accessed.
Photography by Hannu Rytky
The architects’ approach here is flawless: a series of new steel trusses has been placed halfway up the facade, in line with an existing industrial bridge crane, the trusses of which are echoed in the new roof structure. It’s a sensitive and fitting way to enclose a portion of the courtyard, creating an internal space which can be functional all year round, while maintaining the atmosphere of an industrial yard.
From this space, visitors to the Dance House move through a pair of huge steel doors into the Event Square, a black cube lined with raw steel into which the Cable Factory’s existing east facade penetrates, replete with graffiti and strange concrete accoutrements. A bar runs the length of the wall opposite, sunk into a deep reveal like some kind of industrial control room. This well-proportioned space is top-lit with natural light and, once open to the public, a light installation tracking the movement of visitors will adorn the ceiling. From here, visitors can access two performance spaces: the Pannu Hall, which can hold 400, and the Erkko Hall, which seats 700 with a maximum capacity of 1,000.
The Pannu Hall is essentially a “found” performance space, located in the old boiler room of the former industrial building. The existing concrete structure and patchwork brick infill have been retained and exposed, with new additions denoted in black steel. A fly grid and flexible auditorium seating have been added to make the Pannu Hall as versatile as possible, while retaining the unique spatial and material qualities which undoubtedly drew artists to the vacant building 30 years ago.
Photography by Tuomas Uusheimo
The Erkko Hall is a black box auditorium, featuring a proscenium arch and an impressive fly tower. The hall has been designed specifically for dance with retractable seating and an even floor between the stage and auditorium. ‘The floor is flat so that everybody in the room can see the feet of the dancers and there’s no orchestra pit, so that’s unusual,’ says Kurkela. ‘Normally in theatres, if you have a dance performance, the dancers can be in danger of falling or the audience might not be able to see the performer’s whole body, but here the stage is the right size and everybody can see.’
Back in the Event Square, a stair descends into a cellar, cutting through the existing building’s concrete slab and revealing an almost archaeological slice of different aggregates, bringing to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts’ (1972-78). The cellar contains a cloakroom, bar and event space, all wrapped around gnarled concrete columns and even the circular concrete base of the building’s long-since-demolished chimney – remnants of the space’s former life as the boiler room cellar.
Externally, the building is equally as fascinating, but perhaps not quite as unequivocally successful. The main volume stands at approximately 27m tall with two secondary volumes stepping down to around 9.5m in the north. The building has three different facade treatments: a subtly reflective steel panelling to the south, weathering steel panelling to the east, and black profiled steel with sanded marine-grade aluminium ‘dots’ to the north and at the entrance. Kurkela explains that the facades have been designed to reference different aspects of dance, with the south and east alluding to ‘gravity defying’ and ‘illusionary’ qualities, and the aluminium dots playing on the idea of ‘rhythm’.
Photography by Tuomas Uusheimo
Both the south and east facades are constructed as planes suspended from the main volume, which Kurkela describes as ‘defying gravity – it looks like there’s no weight, as if they are floating, but when you look more closely there are thousands of kilos of steel, so it’s a bit like dance in that it looks effortless and gravity defying but there are lots of muscles behind it and years of practice.’
The facades are exquisitely detailed, and the structures are undoubtedly intelligent, featuring large laser-welded steel panels which minimise weight and reduce the need for additional supporting structure. However, the intended sense of weightlessness does not feel strongly enough articulated, and the large panels contribute to a general feeling of monumentality.
This presents something of a dichotomy: on one hand, the building clearly relates to the industrial scale of Ruoholahti, with its cityscape dominated by large industrial buildings; on the other, it’s hard not to feel that the new building dominates its immediate context – the new facades, including the dotted north facade, feel out of scale next to the rigour and fine grain of the Cable Factory’s brick elevations.
Photography by Hannu Rytky
What’s more, this abundant use of steel also feels jarring in 2022, and raises questions regarding the environmental impact of the building. The architects point to the adaptive reuse of the existing factory building as a key tenet of their approach to sustainable design. JKMM suggests the Erkko Hall’s black box theatre utilises minimal decoration in order to reduce the volume of construction material required.
Steel was apparently chosen as a facade material for its resilience, aiming to ensure that the lifespan of the building is as long as possible, and single-substance materials have reportedly been prioritised in order to facilitate the eventual reuse and recycling of the construction elements. Operationally, the building will be audited for compliance with the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation’s EcoCompass environmental management system, and all stage materials and props are intended to be recyclable.
Returning to the exterior, the most intriguing aspect of its appearance is the subtly reflective south facade. Described by JKMM as ‘reflective and immaterial’, it defines the north side of a public space bordered to the west by the Cable Factory. JKMM’s facade is intended to literally reflect the Cable Factory’s elevation, aiming to provide a shimmering ‘illusion’ and draw visitors into the glazed courtyard. Such reflections were extremely subtle during my winter visits, and placing such a large, essentially blank, facade in this prominent location feels instinctively like a missed opportunity.
Photography by Hannu Rytky
It may be, however, that more time is needed for the potential of this facade to be revealed: ‘The architectural pieces are really huge both outside and inside, so there’s not the normal “decoration and it’s ready”,’ says Kurkela. ‘You can put dancers and lights into the architecture and then it feels ready. It has the feeling that you are on a stage on the inside, but maybe also on the outside: there are supposed to be some people there, and lights, and then you get this feeling that you are the centre of attention.’
Kurkela goes on to describe how this facade is waiting for dancers, artists and producers to use it as backdrop for media projections and performances; the architecture isn’t really complete until it is inhabited. Perhaps the success of this facade will hinge on how far this idea is taken by artists, performers, and even the public, in the future.
If it is treated less as a piece of precious “architecture” and more as an industrial-scale stage set, then the possibilities for interaction and adaptation are almost limitless. In this sense, the new building has the potential to really live – just as the Cable Factory has over the decades.
This article was originally featured in ICON 207: Spring 2022. Read a digital version of the issue for free here
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