History of Finnish wood construction
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Finland is a country covered in forests, and wood is a traditional Finnish building material. Laura Berger and Netta Böök, researchers of the history of architecture and experts in the tradition of wood construction, tell how wood construction changed from a basic life skill controlled by everyone to industrial innovations and a state-level export effort.
"In the southern countries, are there hemlocks, conifers, firs and nettles, like we have in Finland? We know that there are fruit trees there, but our beautiful spruces and pines, how can we find them there? They are used to build rooms, churches, and firewood." One schoolboy said: “What are you fools asking! You should understand that it is so warm in the southern countries that there is no need for living rooms or firewood." – Varpunen newspaper 1 June 1860
The schoolboys' conversation from 1860 aptly tells about the long-held assumption that both homes and landmark buildings such as churches are built of wood. A traditional Finnish building is made of massive logs and equipped with a large oven. It's a matter of survival: in a house with heat-storing structures, you can survive a long and cold winter.
From the 16th century, the government encouraged Finns to build with stone in the name of representativeness and fire safety, with poor results. Domestic wood was practically a free building material for a long time and, being quite soft, easy to work with. In a traditional Finnish peasant house, even a water roof was made of wood.
However, building from logs is a heavy, time-consuming and wood-consuming craft, where the reasonable maximum length of a wall log is 10–12 meters and weighs hundreds of kilograms. In addition, construction wood should only be felled when it is more than a hundred years old, if you want rot-resistant logs. Still, up until the beginning of the 20th century, Finns built everything from wood, from mansions to schools and barns to fire stations. Technically, log construction was brought to its peak in the huge churches of the 19th century.
On the other hand, the gallows has been considered an everyday material and it is gladly boarded or painted and wallpapered to hide it. It was only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that artists inspired by the national spirit discovered the honest peasant Finnishness of the log and built wilderness villas from the bare log as their homes.
More with less
In 20th-century urbanization in Finland, the housing shortage and cramped housing became a topical issue. Already in the previous century, there had been a shortage of decent logs, and now there was a need for more efficient, faster and more economical methods of wood construction. In order to make building production more efficient, three methods were used above all: industrial construction, standardization and lighter structures.
Finnish architects followed international developments with interest, especially in other Nordic countries and America. One source of inspiration was the frame structure developed in Chicago, of which Finland developed its own version. Instead of logs, the houses were built to measure from chopped, light lumber by nailing and stiffened with diagonal planking. Such a construction method was made possible by the production of industrial lumber and standardized products such as nails. Much less wood was consumed, and construction became faster and cheaper.
However, in Finland's cold climate, frame construction only became competitive in the 1930s, when new insulating materials appeared on the market. At the same time, with modernism, style ideals changed in a more reduced direction.
Model houses offered a significant way to make construction more efficient and to estimate the materials needed in advance. In the 1920s, especially on the order of the state and non-profit organizations, type drawings were prepared for small houses in the country and in the city. The goal was to influence the quality of living and guide builders to create aesthetically pleasing, mutually similar buildings.
In addition to the proliferation of type drawings, in the 1930s more companies also began to manufacture type houses. The effort was to use industrial pre-fabrication and standardization to speed up construction. An early example is the A-houses designed by Alvar Aalto in 1936 for A. Ahlström Osakeyhtiö. Despite the well-known architects, they were implemented in quite small numbers, mostly in forest industry areas as workers' apartments.
Wood has historically been used for many purposes, but industrialization offered more and more opportunities for it. In the same year, Alvar Aalto was invited to London to organize an exhibition called Wood only. In addition to the furniture, there were plywood items, wallpaper, children's wooden building blocks on display - and as a climax, a "silk-made" carpet woven from waste, which was originally from cellulose, i.e. wood!
A breakthrough in light wood construction
The Second World War caused an unprecedented need to quickly produce housing both in the country and in the cities. In Finland, the housing issue became burningly acute in 1940, when Finland lost about ten percent of its land to the Soviet Union and had to quickly resettle more than 420,000 evacuees.
Although prefabricated buildings had been produced in small quantities before, Puutalo Oy, founded in 1940, was the first company to start production on a large scale. Puutalo Oy was formed from 21 of Finland's largest wood industry companies, which had the necessary industrial plants, forest resources and networks ready for transporting raw materials and finished products. Thus, the cooperation started effectively. The company had also gained important experience from erecting 2,000 prefabricated wooden houses donated by the Swedish government, which the partner companies utilized when developing standardized house models in cooperation. The houses were built from wooden elements, from which the building could be erected in a few days.
However, the buildings of Puutalo Oy were not enough for the reconstruction of their own country for many years, because already during the war the houses became an important export product. After the Continuation War ended in 1944, Finland was on the losing side, and the country had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. They included a large number of prefabricated buildings, which the Soviet Union also acquired as a barter, about a hundred thousand in total. Thousands of buildings were exported to more than 30 other countries, and these "Finnish houses" can still be found on all inhabited continents.*
Although industrial construction developed, thousands of self-builders still erected frame houses from planks and boards. After the end of the war, the type drawings of many public utility operators were available to them. The use of drawings was necessary to obtain wood and other building materials at a time when everything was in short supply. On their basis, one-and-a-half-story small houses of frame construction were created, which are called front-line houses in Finland. The name comes from the fact that after the end of the Second World War, a law was passed in Finland, on the basis of which plots of land were given to soldiers and their families to build their own houses.
The Second World War had a significant impact on Finnish wooden construction and the organization and control of construction, as well as the types of wooden buildings that can still be found in Finland today.
Wood log
Just like the massive log house, the frame or plate wooden house of the 1940s and 1950s is practically a single material, because wood-based materials such as sawdust and construction cardboard have also been used as heat insulators. Thanks to the single material, the structure is easy to understand, maintain and repair.
Log construction has not disappeared from Finland either. It just first escaped to places where Finns are close to nature – forests and Lapland. The most tradition-conscious builders also cut down trees the old-fashioned way and use traditional tools for construction. At the turn of the millennium, the same thing happened even on a church scale, when a modern church was erected in Kärsämäki using only traditional wood construction techniques ( Anssi Lassila, Kärsämäki paanukirkko, 2004 ).
More recently, solid wood is coming back to cities as well, no longer because it is the only material available, but because a well-built solid wood house is long-lasting and healthy. It is now also considered a value that the building functions as a carbon storage throughout its use. And when the use ends, the building can be dismantled and the wood can be recycled or returned to nature's cycle. But what is the thousand-year tradition of log construction at its most concise? Of course, a Finnish smoke sauna!
Text: Laura Berger , Netta Böök