Dance House Helsinki – industrial strength and subtle grace
In the 1990s, the vast, empty halls of the Helsinki Cable Factory began to echo with the sounds of electronic music, heavy digital beats replaced the former rush of heavy machinery. Thirty years after those illegal raves and artists, DJs, dancers and designers conquering the empty industrial complex, music and movement have become institutionalized with the opening of Tansitalo Helsinki.
JKMM architect Teemu Kurkela calls the building a “dancing machine” that tries to tie the place back to its industrial history as a cable manufacturing plant. Built in the early 1940s, the factory covered the shipping industry, post-war reparations for the Soviet Union and the early years of the Finnish success story in Nokia’s previous incarnation as a cable manufacturer. It is a perfect example of the transition from industrial cultural production.
The taut lengths of twisted steel have been replaced by another kind of tendons: the frames for which the new space is built. The dance house is a mix of thick industrial archeology and a solid new metal box, expressed on the outside with a steel shell and an op-art chain mail of metal sheets.
The interior is so stripped of details and boxy in shape that it can feel like the architecture has been left out. Steel panels, concrete stairs, concrete floors, bleacher seats and endless industrial steel truss ceilings make it a visibly industrial spectacle. It is a deliberate trick to divert the eye from the structure to the performers on stage or to mingle before or after the performance. Planning bows before the event.
The first space you encounter is an old courtyard, now covered in steel and glass, old factory walls on either side. It has become a kind of covered street, with the museums and showrooms of the existing complex on one side and the new Dance Hall on the other.
Passing through the heavy doors, the visitor settles into a steel-lined black box, a raw, undecorated space. The first new performance space is located on the other side of the former engine room, the concrete funnels rise like upside down inverted pyramids and the lighting rigs look as industrial as anything here before.
The ducts and cables winding up the walls, steel spiral staircases and strip lighting make the whole a similar constructivist fantasy that the Russians indulged in in the 1920s. It’s a reinforced effect behind the seats, where the mess of steel supports and columns creates a dark metal forest as much from a Finnish fairy tale as from its factory past. It looks like a space that is desperate to find a function.
The main hall is a completely new space, a large black cube whose wall can be lowered to connect it to a smaller hall. The capacity is 700 and it is apparently as big as an auditorium, so the audience almost seems to be on the stage. This is performance as a production, a solid container for explosive movement that doesn’t interfere with it in any way.
Downstairs there is one more space, a reminder of what was once the largest building in Finland and the uncertainties of the time of its construction. A sprawling bomb shelter in the basement, thick concrete columns marching through the low-ceilinged space present memories of raves and parties that were held here in the cold Finnish winters, when the factories above had been abandoned. Graffiti stickers and remnants of old controls, clocks, signs and thermometers have been left on the doors and concrete.
The heavy concrete slabs have been cut through in the same way that Gordon Matta-Clark perforated abandoned industrial buildings in New York to reveal the substructure and comment on the disposable nature of the rich buildings of the historic layers. Here, too, the scars of successive incarnations have been left clearly visible.
The new concrete work aims to imitate the 1940s original and ends up reminding us of the brutalist volumes familiar from London’s South Bank, a direct border between functionality and culture through intense architecture. The new steel structure is simple and well thought out, so subtle that you hardly notice it.
Beyond that, the intensity fades a bit. Even with the huge steel facade and Paco Rabanne-esque discs, the more self-conscious exterior lacks the industrial power of the interior. The purpose, Teemu says, was to refer to the dancer’s body, where grace and flow hide enormous strength and effort. It’s a nice metaphor, but this massive structure has plenty to command attention and hardly needs another reference. The landscape around it is still evolving, but inside, at least, this is a series of spaces as full of power and potential as you could hope for.
Edwin Heathcote is FT’s architecture critic
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