I want to show right away what I mean when I speak about choices.
These two buildings are the result of two different choices and they express different values; it’s always important to make the effort of seeing the values that lay behind things.
The first building is the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, designed by the worldwide famous American architect Frank O’Gehry; the second building is a small chapel on the university campus of Otaniemi in Helsinki, Finland, designed by the barely known Finnish architects Heikki and Kaija Siren.
The first building, being a museum, should be designed around the art that it contains in order to let us admire its content in the best possible way, but instead it was designed for the purpose of surprising and catching our emotions so as to strongly inculcate the name of the architect and the name of the city, in which the museum was built, in our minds. It’s a marketing operation to strengthen tourism in Bilbao and to celebrate the ego of the architect and provide him with fame and publicity.
In this case the values of hunger for fame and tourism business used the art to serve their purposes.
And it worked quite well. I am sure that most people know this building, its location and its architect but couldn’t name a single sculpture or painting you can see in there.
The second building impressed me very much, because it is designed around a single strong concept that makes this place weigh more spiritual than many churches I have seen.
Finland is an evangelic Lutheran country and the main difference between Catholicism and Luheranism is that the latter does not accept the church’s interpretation of the Holy Bible but leaves everyone free to read for themselves and develop their own interpretation so that religion remains a spiritual entity and does not turn into a tool for political power.
This chapel expresses this value very clearly. In a Catholic church you usually see paintings or sculptures behind the altars that represent the artist’s interpretation of God, instead in this chapel, by positioning a glass wall behind the altar and using furnitures that are extremely poor and simple, the architects created a space where nothing distracts you from direct contemplation of nature; nature being intended as a divine creation which the cross signifies stuck outside in the feral forest.
In this case, the architects made a different choice; they decided to be humble and that the direct contemplation of God’s creation was the value that this building had to serve.
In fact, when you enter this chapel, your emotions are caught by the divine spirit of nature and not by the building itself.
Of course these architects did not become famous nor did this building, but I can say that they understood the highest values of architecture and that the spiritual power of this place is still intact after 40 years, while the excitement produced by the museum in Bilbao lasted a few years because it could only speak to the surface of our souls but did not touch any deep universal chord.