Foreign Comprehension

A staple of the traveling abroad experience tends to be the experience of fumbling through an unfamiliar language. We have the fortune of traveling in countries whose inhabitants all speak some English (although some only well enough to exhubertanly say 'Good price!'). Despite this convenience, no matter where we go we are confronted with foreign text. Even in Copenhagen, which is the city closest to mainland Europe and thus the city I thought would be the most English-friendly, presents the same amount of its written material in Danish. My few encounters with English have been on restaurant menus, and these are not always reliably bi-lingual. What I find most curious are signs that only provide translations for the parts that the person who made the sign determined not understandable.

Legend for map of City Hall, Stockholm

Laughter ensues when the writer has over-translated a sign. What happens when the writer chooses wrong, and leaves untranslated vital information?

Often, the comprehension effort becomes a linguistic exercise as we learn that 'street' in English is 'gade' in Danish, 'katu' in Finnish and 'gata' in Swedish. When a word is too far beyond comprehension, we look for clues as to its meaning, although even the contents of a store cannot always translate the name above its entrance.

A candy shop in Tivoli, Copenhagen

The row of lollipops in the store clearly indicate it is a candy shop, but I'm suspicious as to the literal translation of 'Bolchekogeriet'. According to the nice young employee, the name does in fact translate to 'Hard Candy Shop' with a particular emphasis on the candy being made in the shop.

If muddling through is not an option, and if an image has been provided, content can be gleaned accordingly. This places a large burden on the image to convey the entire meaning to me, the helpless alien. There is an inverse relationship between words and their reader and and image and its viewer. When I read a sign in a shop window or a poster explaining some event, I feel a burden to understand the meaning of the words (by reading them 'correctly'). Conversely, I consider the image in the shop window to be responsible for containing the proper information and conveying it in a manner understandable by me.

Maps provide a neat integration of image and text, by conveying one's location within a building or urban context, the location of points of interest and the meaning of those points. Through one's understanding of the map as an image conveying location, and the function of a particular place, one can derive the meaning of the words associated with a point.

St. Peter's Cathedral in Malmö, Sweden

 Consider the location A, labeled 'Ingång'. The letter A on the map is located just outside what looks like the physical boundary of the church. Combined with my basic knowledge of church design, and the shape of the building, I can derive the meaning of 'Ingång' to be 'Entrance'. Armed with this new understanding, I can apply it to future situations in which I may need to know where an entrance is, or ask a non-English speaking (in this case Swedish) person where to enter a building.

It may be frustrating to be unable to read all the words, but the city is an environment dripping with context, and one need not look far to understand its meaning.

The Right Drawing for the Right Building

I've done a lot of drawing so far, much more frequently than I've done at school as I tend to lean more heavily on computer modeling and trace paper. As I visit more buildings and draw them, I tend to classify the buildings based on their dates of construction. Subsequently, the drawings I make get grouped in with those time periods. As I look back through my sketchbook after my midsemester evaluation today, I've noticed that certain types of buildings, built in certain time periods, lend themselves to a particular manner of drawing.

Medieval churches lend themselves to isometric drawing due to their regular and predictable arch structure. I draw the reflected ceiling plan first to describe the geometry of the ceiling, then shift the drawing about forty degrees clockwise and construct the arches three-dimensionally from their corresponding positions in plan. The drawing below is a detail of the main nave arch and the smaller side arches, done at Lund Cathedral in Sweden.

Neoclassical buildings, especially those built in the nineteenth century, lend themselves nicely to sections. The perfect symmetry makes it easy to find a good place to cut through, to record the most interesting and telling information. Cutting a section through the wall of a neoclassical building will also reveal the intricate molding and ornament on the walls, both interior and exterior, and convey their depth in a way that an elevation can't do. The example below is of the main building of the University of Lund. The section is taken just through the lobby, but shows some of the elaborate detailing on the facade (to the right) and captures the proportions which are so important to neoclassical architecture. The cut is taken through the double-height space to convey the grandeur of the balcony and skylight above.

And then, we approach contemporary architecture. It's difficult to apply a blanket judgment as to the most appropriate way to represent contemporary buildings, but generally a three-dimensional drawing is most informative. The drawing below is a semi-constructed isometric of an interior detail of Libeskind's Danish Jewish Museum. The wood panel interior meets the brick of the existing building in this no-longer-functioning doorway. It's impossible to represent in plan or section, and I don't know where I would make the cut. I drew on paper what I wouldn't actually be able to see in real life, to better understand three-dimensionally how the new interacts with the old.

Or take Calatrava's Twisting Torso in Malmö, Sweden, which took a bit of plan, but a lot of isometric, to draw understandably.

The examples above lead to a conversation I'd like to continue to explore about how the drawing can act as the building's representative. The selection of the appropriate drawing method is as important as the quality of the drawing itself. As one who draws, I must also make choices about what information to include or exclude, before even thinking about how to convey it accurately. We're seeing enough variety of buildings now that we're in Denmark for me to practice multiple modes a drawing, so you'll be seeing more variety in the future.

Covert Spaces

We've seen a few buildings by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) in the past week, and the more I see, the more I wonder why I didn't know much about him before. Asplund's work is thoroughly intriguing. He pays equal attention to the dramatic heart-racing moments, such as the grand rotunda of the Public Library, and to the quieter, subtle moments, like the stair that follows the curve of the courtroom of the Lister County Courthouse. Asplund uses big, open expanses to excite the user by exaggerating one's sense of scale. This inspires awe in the dwarfed person who cannot help but feel reverence for the space, it's designer and owner. Everyone likes a big, grand space they can lose themselves in, but I find pleasure in the irregular spaces created by combining the large forms in which the dramatic rooms are housed.

Even spaces that cannot or are not meant to be occupied receive attention. The main stair of the Karlshamn Secondary School winds around an open shaft. A series of arches puncture the shaft to let light from the windows on the exterior wall send light where it would not go otherwise. The arches also provide views to other floors and other parts of the stair. By voiding the "center" of the stairwell, Asplund reveals more about the structure, which is pretty much entirely made of vaults. Also, you get a sense of interior wall thickness that you ordinarily would only get from a window.

One of the most important things I've learned so far is how to be critical of an architect's decisions to reveal or conceal the structure of his (oh let's be honest, we're not going to be seeing any female architects on this trip) building. Structure in architecture is like a routine performed by a magician. The better the magician, the better the routine, and the best magicians aren't the ones who don't reveal their secret, but who actually let you see how they perform the trick - if you're clever enough to catch it.

Let's get one thing straight: it isn't enough to simply show the structure in a building. And most people don't know what they're looking at, through no fault of their own. But a smartly articulated structural system can be appreciated by just about anybody. Part of an architect's responsibility is to understand and respond to the fact that the majority of the people using their building are not architects. I purposefully use the word "respond" because the architect has the choice to ignore or incorporate the public. When someone says about your building, "How did they do that?" you know you're on the right track. It's important to keep people intrigued and questioning and coming back for more.

Northern Lights

Light is inextricably bound with architecture. Whether it is blocked out or let in, an architect worth anything cannot afford to ignore light. In hot climates, the blockage of light through shading is tantamount to people's comfort. In Scandinavia, however, light is something precious and the architecture worth looking at sculpts and cradles light much as one would a priceless stone. When more than half the year is spent in darkness, light becomes a scarce commodity.

At Asplund's Stadsbiblioteket (Public Library), daylight is a key feature of the main rotunda space. Asplund floods the rotunda with daylight from clerestory windows just above the edge of the frame in the photo below, which washes the white walls above in a cheery glow. The light quality coupled with the sheer volume of the space makes a dramatic contrast with the dark stone and narrowness of the entry. We were fortunate enough to be in the library on a bright, sunny day, to see the room in all its glory. (Even if there were quite a few nasty electric lights turned on.)

I've already shown you how Aalto uses light in his buildings. I'll resurrect two examples.  The first, his home outside Helsinki and specifically, this moment where his desk, situated under a corner window, captures the sunlight streaming in the window.

The windows are high and wide enough to bathe the entire desk in warm sunlight. Even though the desk is in a fairly large room, the different between what is in light and what is in shadow simulates privacy for the architect at work.

Aalto's Nordic House handles light well, especially in the library. The combination of clerestory windows on either side, and the skylight above lets in light from all angles and takes advantage of multiple times of day.

Light does interesting things outside of buildings, too. Stockholm, as an urban city, contained many instances which manipulated light in an intriguing way. On Gamla Stan (Old Town) where our hostel was located, narrow alleys between the densely packed buildings channeled daylight and created shafts of light across the street.

Even though this image is stitched, you can still clearly see the beam of light that comes from the setting sun shining through the buildings. The strength of the light seems almost artificial, but it's entirely natural.

I hope to show more examples of daylighting and architecture, since I've surely talked everyone's ear off about electric lighting.

One Man's Trash is... probably still trash

Do you remember when I mentioned this bit of interesting outside a mall in Helsinki?

I wasn't sure if this was a piece of art or a garbage dump or a thrift swap. Its proximity to other art lent a deliberateness to the heap that lends itself to some avant-garde artist. But the haphazardness and the few people actually rifling through the assortment left me questioning. 

A few days ago we went to visit the Stadsbiblioteket (Public Library) by Asplund and a curious thing caught my eye. The rain and wind blew some leaves (or flower petals?) around and clumped around this unfortunate bicycle:

Rather than immediately dismiss the bicycle as trash and unusable, I thought the way the leaves threatened to swallow the bike whole to be beautiful in its drama.

Who's to say what's art and what isn't? This question isn't original, I know, but I haven't been able to satisfactorily answer it for myself. The answer is more like a constant pursuit of discovery, about what others deem "art" and reconciling that with my own tastes and preferences.

The Modern Art Museum in Stockholm had a feature exhibit of paintings by Ed Ruscha. He's not a name I was familiar with before the exhibit, but here's an example of his work. He does other things, but the largest body of his work is a phrase or sentence on top of a landscape or splotches of color:

I tried to understand it, and the others like it. I tried to switch words or letters around, looking for any hidden patterns in the letters and their positions in relation to each other and the image behind them. The search was fruitless and I wound up frustrated, not at myself but at the works on the wall. They were not art to me. To me, they were merely paint on a canvas, and that does not guarantee art.

The bicycle in the wet leaves above was more moving and stirred my senses to a much greater degree. Resisting the urge to encase it in a plexi-glass box, I had to admire it for what it was: a spontaneous accumulation of wet leaves and a lonely bicycle. I like it better that way: unassuming speaks to me more than a frame.

Let's Talk Royalty and... IKEA?

It's an exciting time to be in Stockholm, not only because it's summer and the weather is amazing, but because a once(ish)- in a lifetime even is taking place this Saturday. The royal family's oldest child, the Princess Victoria, is getting married! In three days, she will marry Daniel, a man whom the media has dubbed the "man of the people". He comes from a rural fishing family, and was the princess's personal fitness trainer. Their relationship has spanned seven years, and Saturday they will tie the knot!  For two weeks up until the ceremony, the royal family (and their many staff) have organized a citywide celebration with musical artists, cultural exhibitions and touristy stuff. Our hostel is literally right around the corner from the palace, on the island of Gamla Stan (lit. "Old Town") so we are smack in the middle of Love Stockholm 2010!

As a distinctly Swedish brand, IKEA was invited to set up a pavilion for the bash on Gamla Stan, almost directly across the street from our hostel. IKEA built a small mock palace and furnished it entirely with furniture and objects from their collection. Part advertisement, part fairly tale, with very little reality, the exhibit was pretty ridiculous.

The first room you enter is the library/study and is the first presentation of Swedish culture. The skis on the wall allude to Sweden's climate and geography, the shelves upon shelves of books celebrate Swedish literature.

If you look up behind me where I took the above photo, this large print of the royal family around the turn of the twentieth century looms above:

A special challenge to you all: can you identify the painting that the family is sitting in front of? The dog in the top right corner is the only clue, and I know I've seen the painting before but perhaps some of you with more nimble minds can help me.

The banquet room is pictured above, along with a pair of what seems to be reporters or talk show hosts being filmed talking about the IKEA palace. They seemed to be very interested in the flatware at the table, so they might have been representing a culinary or cooking design show. They spoke Swedish, so this is all conjecture.

The palace, as we moved through it, showed a strange mix of detail and simplicity. In some rooms, such as the banquet room, the walls were just white with some raw marker drawings of shields and molding. The table is richly decorated with dozens of flowers. In other rooms, such as the kitchen (shown below), the designers pay more attention to architectural integrity.

Look at those beautiful (fake) columns! (I wish it wasn't so hard to convey sarcasm through written word...)

I couldn't help wondering... what was I supposed to feel about the exhibit?  How was I supposed to see? As an American tourist, catching a glimpse of Swedish culture?  As a commoner in awe of the privileges of royal life? Or maybe IKEA wanted to create a place of escape by appealing to my sense of fantasy.

The recreation of the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea seemed to do this quite blatantly. Perhaps that's what was so unsettling about the entire exhibit: it was incomplete. It tried to take multiple routes and appeal to the so many different audiences that the result was disjointed and haphazard. I felt like I was being talked down to, and the receipts posted at the end of each room (to show how cheap all of the IKEA swag used in the room was) came off as really tacky. Overall, the exhibit quite literally cheapened the experience of the royal wedding and could have been more thoughtful and not so sloppy.

Another Note from the Author

Hopefully none of you have noticed, but I have to be honest. I'm VERY behind in my blogging. I've tried to record every day as it happened but, this is not an efficient use of my time. It's nice to have everything laid out all organized-like, but let's be honest: life isn't like that.

So I'm going to proceed in a different way, and instead record what happens as a series of vignettes. No more complete days, and things will be out of order. I'll provide dates and locations for your reference, but don't expect a logical sequence. I think this will make reading more interesting for all of you lovely people, and it will certainly make my life easier.

Thanks for bearing with me and I hope you all enjoy the new format!

Visit the CMU Scandinavia Blog!

I'd like to make a quick plug for the general CMU Scandinavia 2010 blog. You can find it at scandinavia2010.wordpress.com and it's used by everyone on the trip. There's a bunch of interesting posts by the other students there now. Leto and Dan have been using a device called a Gigapan, which takes giant panoramic pictures. Check out the posts!

Day 11 - Aalto, Aalto and, oh more Aalto

So much Aalto today! Today we only saw Aalto buildings. We saw Aalto's main house, his studio, and the Pensions Institute.

First we rode a cable car/train thing out to the house/studio area. Aalto's house has since been made into a museum and is very fiercely protected. We had to remove our shoes in the secretary's room. I didn't mind this at all, because I could feel the textures of the floors and it felt like I was walking around my own home. It was a more authentic experience.

The rooms in the house are fairly petite, but this is not because of any available funds but a combination of the time period, Finnish culture and architectural trend. The most interesting part of the room arrangement was their vertical relationships. Some rooms were reachable by a half-flight of stairs or sunken slightly below. Few rooms (on the first floor at least) were the same floor height as their adjacent rooms.

As you can see in the section above, there are at least four different levels of floor in the house. If the lowest part of the section is the dining room and den, then the next highest floor is the small studio (originally Aalto worked from his home before his office expanded). The door on the left side is up a few more stairs and leads to Aalto's private study. From there a stair leads to the second floor, where the rooms are all of a uniform height (with one or two exceptions of a step or two).

Here is an image of the small studio room taken from the door to the study:

The following image is of Aalto's own desk below a corner window looking out over a little tree. I could draft for hours at a desk like this.

It wouldn't be an Aalto building if there weren't some light fixtures. This one really had me perplexed, and I'm not sure exactly what the form is supposed to be doing.

Obviously it's focusing the light, but why the M-shaped form? What's the focusing the light towards? (It wasn't evident in the room). I welcome suggestions if you have them.

This lamp was made by a special friend of Aalto's. He had some influence on Aalto's future light designs, and Aalto's preference for his work helped the artist gain notoriety.

Also note the table cloth, which is another signature Aalto design and comes in other colors. We found the fabric for sale at the Aalto Museum... for 20 Euro a meter!!

A short walk down the road took us to Aalto's studio. Today it houses the Alvar Aalto Foundation which preserves and promotes Aalto's work. Although the studio was one connected building, two spaces stood out as definitive. First, the drafting room itself, a fairly well-lit, open-spanning space.

Second, Aalto's personal office and meeting room and the grandest space in the building:

That rug in the middle of the floor was irresistibly comfortable and I wanted badly to lie down and fall asleep on it.

I worked out the space in axon to better understand the relationship of the curving wall to the sloping ceiling.

The slope is so gentle, over such a distance that it's hard to tell in the drawing that there is even any sort of angle. This is the first axon I've done so far where I was satisfied with the angle I chose, especially for the way I was able to show the landing in the left corner and the little balcony on the upper floor.

Once we finished absorbing the studio, we hopped the train again to Helsinki and the Pensions Institute, also by Aalto. Here, Aalto's affinity for the semi-cylindrical tile I mentioned before comes out in full force. We barely stepped in the door before we were flooded in a sea of blue and white tile.

Just around the corner, though, I saw something I've never seen before, but everyone should: a paternoster! A paternoster is an open-lift elevator that is constantly moving so that one side is always traveling up and one side is always traveling down. A passenger just steps into the box and rides as far as their destination and steps out again. Here's the paternoster mid-level (I never saw it stopped, but, it's a photograph you know)

The Pensions Institute is a large building where something like 600 Finns work. For that reason, and it being a government building, we had a guide to navigate us, whose name was Petra. She was hands-down the best guide we've had so far, with a sense of humor and very easy-going. Certain areas and things were absolutely off-limits, but she did let one person (Dan) ride the Paternoster.

We visited the library on the tour, a curious area divided into two spaces: a lounge and the greater library itself, connected series of stairs and steps. I quickly sketched a section of how I perceived the different levels to relate to one another.

Note to Self: redraw this section!  What you can tell is that there are clearly two rooms, each with two levels. In the room on the right, the levels are full room height, whereas on the left, a few steps lead down to one level that (you can't tell exactly) circles an even lower area, reached by the second, and larger stair. If you remember the Nordic House library, something similar to the Pension library's left room happens. A lower set of stacks sits below and is ringed by a path and more stacks. The lower set is open to the upper so someone can look over the railing at the books and people below.

The light coming from the ceiling is daylight streaming in through light wells. The blue light is due to shadow from overhanging trees.

I was surprised by the playfulness in the cafeteria. There was the clay tile, of course, but the ceiling module, an upside-down square dish, made for an interesting surface that appeared to ripple and move (although of course it was fixed). The light fixtures are a simplified version of Aalto's patented "beehive" lamp.

That's Petra, our tour guide, on the right. The wall to the left, just out of the frame, is almost entirely glass and looks out on a grass courtyard.

I found this water dispenser particularly beautiful, if only for the blue translucent lever.  Looking at the photo now, I'm not sure what made me so interested in it, but I remember being drawn to its form and the blue lever.

 You thought I would forget about lighting? Heck no!  Howsabout this nifty lamp?

Or this three-lamp fixture?

So many lights, so little time.

We concluded the tour in the main hall, which is daylit from above with giant triangular skylights.

 
Why can't we do this more in America?  Why is it so hard to design for daylight? Aalto designed loads of great electric lamps, but he didn't ignore the need for daylight. Instead, he celebrated natural light as an integral part of the building's performance. When possible, I believe buildings should be naturally lit. Electric lighting has its place, of course, and should be treated with care and consideration. Each has its place and balance is key. We've come too rely too heavily electric lighting as the quick fix or the equalizer, but enough studies show that humans, biologically, need to be aware of the sun's position in the sky for their bodies to function. Fundamentally it's a chemical process, but the physical effects are equally significant. Aalto worked in a unique time when electricity was newly and cheaply accessible to all and postwar production was at an all-time high, allowing him to design mass-producible light fixtures. At the same time, thousands of years of daylight sensibility had not yet faded and so Aalto's buildings have a great balance of electric and day light.

That wraps things up for today. I'm slowly closing the gap between the actual day it is for me and the day talked about in the post. I've still got a lot of catching up to do.  I'll leave you with a shot of me in one of the smaller chamber rooms.

Day 10 - Architectural Adventures Continue

I made a small error in my last post when I said we visited four Aalto buildings this day. We only saw two Aalto buildings. The second building we saw on our outings, a church, was actually a spontaneous encounter. The church, Kristuskyrkan ("Christ's Church" in Finnish), was designed by Atte V. Willberg, a name unknown to me until that building. Kristuskyrkan was completed in 1928 and is located in the Töölö region of Helsinki. The front of the church was difficult for me to catch in a single photograph, so the following is a grab from Wikipedia:

I'm tempted to call Kristuskyrkan a pocket church, but the interior is surprisingly spacious. It also contains some nice detail and fixtures, such as this lighting piece.

Scandinavian architecture is full of unique lighting fixtures and arrangements. Aalto pushed the limits of lighting design to the max, for his time. You'll see more of this later on in this post when I talk about Finlandia Hall.

On either side of the church's nave, I found some curiously middle eastern influences in the arch form. The succession of scalloped arches is commonly found in mosques in the Middle East, but not in western Europe and certainly not in the United States.

I was unable to find any more information about the architect (in Finnish or otherwise) so I can't say for sure if he gleaned this detail from some travels to Istanbul or similar.

Now, a personal confession. Although I'm certainly not a religious person, I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to church interiors, and there are certain things I look for because I feel rather informed on the matter. It's hard not to when you spend four mornings a week for nearly four years sitting in front of this:

The only downside to spending so much time in such an awe-inspiring place is that you become desensitized to it. Now that it's been four (gasp) years since I graduated high school, I've relaxed into a comfortably informed appreciation of church architecture. As you have guessed, I'm particularly fond of wood carving, so I was happy to see this on the altar at Kristuskyrkan:

It's simple but worthy of some consideration. The wood is polished to a gleam, smooth as silk and there's some nice detailing in the folds of the fabrics. The candles in the image are about as tall as my hand, for reference, so it's a decent sized work.

Alright, it's time to move on to the things we were actually supposed to go see. The next stop was the National Museum of Finland, designed by Eliel Saarinen and completed in 1904. The building looks more like a re-purposed castle than an originally designed museum.

There's no end to the curiosities in this building, and we didn't even go inside! Saarinen does some odd things with materials in the facade, which I tried to work out in drawing, but the drawing needs revision so you get photographs.

The sheer amount of stone detailing is dizzying and delightful at the same time. The entrance to the museum is surrounded by stone carving of animals and symbols whose meanings elude me but fascinate me nonetheless.

Done before the days of CNC milling, by hand, to perfection.

We moved quickly on to the next building, located conveniently across the street. The second and final Aalto building of the day:

Finlandia Hall!

Finlandia Hall is easily one of Aalto's most defining buildings. I believe this has much to do with how the building looks, since its facade is entirely white marble, instead of his usual red brick. Finlandia Hall was originally designed as a concert hall, but in recent years has shifted to hosting more conferences and conventions. The interior is a bit more conventional for Aalto in terms of materials. He's very fond of this semi-cylindrical tile, which he uses in many of his buildings, in a variety of colors. The tiles are available for purchase at some of his buildings, for a heavy price, of course.

The tile has more depth than this image gives it credit for. You can almost grip the tile on the wall, if it weren't for the mortar in between. If you look at the column in the foreground, the cream tile reveals more of the shadow which evidences the depth of the physical tile.

This is the lobby and coat-check area. The ceiling is surprisingly low, which is meant to focus the viewer's gaze and attention to the glass wall behind me that looks out on... well, a parking lot.  But beyond the parking lot (which was not part of the original design but proved cheaper than the public transit system and underground parking lot) is a park and then a bit of the Helsinki skyline.

Can you tell where I had issues with this pano?  A wide flight of stairs leads you from the lobby to the main waiting area which ties all of the performance spaces together. Our tour guide (she's the left most person wearing the teal jacket in the distance) informed us that Aalto, by making the waiting area such a large, open space, had a significant impact on Finnish social culture. Finns are naturally reclusive, introverted people and not used to making small talk. ("Finnish small talk is the smallest of all," quipped the guide.) Aalto's large, open space deprived concert-going Finns of any real place to hide and thus coaxed many out of their shells, at least when they were in his building.

Aalto gave them plenty to talk about when it came to light fixtures. I mentioned earlier that I would be getting to them, so here's a quick dive into the vast collection of Aalto lighting.

At first, the fixtures look completely different, but little similarities begin to emerge. For example, the shape of the first two lights. Also, the use of wooden dowels in the first and third lights. No two Aalto lights entirely different from one another, but his work is unique in and of itself, and can only be attributed to the man himself.

Here's a proverbial shot of the interior of the main concert hall, only because I feel obliged to. I don't know enough about acoustics to full appreciate the sound quality, and authorities on the subject have mixed feelings about Finlandia.

That concludes Day 10. More Aalto and Saarinen to come!  I'll be sure to give some more info about Saarinen, since I merely mentioned his name, and his relationship with Finland is a tricky one.