City of views - On time, space and memory in the historical downtown of Helsinki

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
Ask about the availability of the thesis by sending email to the Aalto University Learning Centre oppimiskeskus@aalto.fi
Location:
P1 Ark A folio
Date
2016
Department
Major/Subject
Arkkitehtuurin perusteet ja teoria
Mcode
A-60
Degree programme
Arkkitehtuuri
Language
en
Pages
48
Series
Abstract
The city and its monuments of art and architecture together form a great stage of memory,capable of conveying essential cultural and historical meanings across time. Memories are formed in the brain through sensory inputs, and due to the dominance of vision over our other senses, spatial images play an especially important role in our collective memory of the city. This Master’s thesis in Architecture explores the relationship of space, time and memory in the historical downtown of Helsinki, Finland. The thesis consists of two parts,a historical analysis of downtown Helsinki cityscape and a project formulated as response to the ideas and themes that surfaced in the analysis. The sea-facing urban facade of downtown Helsinki is widely recognized as a national landscape, a city tableau unrivaled in its symbolic and iconographic meaning for the city. Formerly a modest trading town formed around a shallow natural bay, the cityscape dates back to the 19th century, when Helsinki was made the capital of Finland under the Russian Empire. 19th century Helsinki was a work of art, and its citizens were part of that work. In time, life in the city caught up with its monumental settings: the analysis part of this Thesis unfolds the South Harbour cityscape as a multilayered set of meanings embedded in its structure over time. With its monuments of art and architecture exposed to widely varying appreciation throughout time, the cityscape appears as a complex process of both remembering and forgetting, a public picture constantly redrawn. Today, preserved as public heritage and protected from change and the ravages of time, downtown Helsinki has developed as an outdoor museum that operates on strong historical narratives, leaving little room for new memories or interpretations to be made. The thesis project imagines a temporal space overlapping with the historical city that links citizens in a reflection about the cultural construction of memory images, their own identity relative to the pictorial cityscape and their own agency in the construction of the memory of place. A series of ‘living pictures‘ are framed in the space of the historical city, the curators, content creators, performers and spectators of which are the citizens themselves. The historical city is renewed as a living institution of memory through the situated interaction between its monuments of art and architecture and people looking for and creating new meanings within their content.
Description
Supervisor
Reuter, Jenni
Thesis advisor
Hsu, Frances
Keywords
time, space, memory, Helsinki, south harbour
Other note
Citation