The Fish Chapel
St.Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel by Matti Sanaksenaho
Originality is a rare guest in architecture. So rare indeed that most architectural critics feel uncomfortable by praising buildings far away from the main stream or – if digging deep enough – might discover that what at first appeared to be an original work can be traced as a piece of architectural history transformed a little.
This seems to be the case with the most specific form of the large Viking houses, named ‘hogbacks’ by the British of those days, which has survived for thousand years primarily as archaeological foundations and tombstones just to be reinvented as a form fit for a chapel by the artistic Finnish architect Matti Sanaksenaho (born 1966).
Among his colleagues Sanaksenaho has been famous for winning a national competition of the Finnish Pavilion for the 1992 World Exhibition in Seville along with 4 of his fellow students from the Otaniemi School of Architecture in Helsinki. Under the name Monark the group not only got this prestigious commission while still students, they also proved extraordinary skills to deliver possibly the best pavilion among more than 100 others made by world famous architects.
The form of the Finnish pavilion was inspired a small local canyon and carried out as a darkish steel box connected to a more organic volume clad in wood by an open bridge and a rampart between the two building. As a visual composition as for the function of an exhibition this solution turned out to work perfectly. And to no ones surprise the pavilion was chosen as the best performing building by the guests of the exhibition that year and was later taken over by the Society of Castilian Architects.
Special for this premature start of an architectural wonder career was Sanaksenahos artistic or sculptural attitude in creating buildings. And when he only four years later (1996) won another national competition - this time of St. Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel in Hirvensalo (near Turku) - the concept was even more exceptional:
‘The project idea came to me during a fishing trip in Lapland, after I’d just landed a big trout that was flipping about in the bottom of my boat. With my penknife I shaped a model straight away, using a piece of driftwood I had picked up on the shore. The fish theme emerged unconsciously. It’s always hard for me to explain how a project takes shape. I can’t say by what paths it comes together, what emerges first, whether form of function, exterior or interior. I would say that everything starts falling into place in a sort of global mental synergy. As it happens, in this case the fish shape harks back to the symbol used by the early Christians, who adopted the Greek word Ikthus (‘fish’) as sign of recognition. The boat is also an important symbol for the project, expressing the idea of community travelling towards the same goal’*.
From the time of discovering this concept and winning the competition of the Ecumenical Art Chapel ten years ago there has been a long way to the inauguration in May 2005. Since the client was a union of several different churches - Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox the many participants involved created a lot of confusion in particularly the question to which of them the main responsibility for financing belonged. Only due to the public commitment aroused by this chapel it was built at last without being fully financed yet. As supporters the main contractor did his part without any profit, while the minister of culture along with several churches donated cash. The goodwill has partially been explained by the chapel being Finland’s first ecumenical chapel serving a neighbouring hospital for cancer patients and their relatives as a place in which to seek consolation and strength.
Among the challenges for the architect was getting most advantage of the rocky landscape of the island of Hirvensalo surrounding the chapel - an archipelago covered with pine trees. He ended up with letting the building rest proudly on the top of a hill strictly orientated west-east. To the outside the symbolic fish form serves to unite all the various churches involved in the chapel while the inside has powerful references to the Bible tale of Jonah in the whale’s belly. Even the exterior of the chapel covered with glimmering copper plates applied in a pattern suggesting fish scales are supporting the overall impression of that creature.
While the impressive fish volume appears rather compact and enclosed from the outside, the experience changes radically while entering the entrance at the western gable. A magnificent high pointed interior composed of laminated pine beams are meeting dramatically in a ridge almost ten times the height of a human. At the bottom of the mayor space the aisle is spatially separated from the nave of the church by secondary spaces hid in two wooden boxes intersected by a rampart moving upwards. Along the sides of the rampart restrooms, an office as well as a staircase leading up to the choir balcony are hiding. In its own strange way the narrow canyon between the minor spaces recalls similarities with the entrance of Sanaksenaho’s earlier pavilion in Seville. And the structure of the chapel space itself could be compared to the protuberances of the sun stretching upwards while a rear window in full height at the altar is giving light to the interior.
The architect has restrained the wooden cross at the altar so it almost appears camouflaged since he didn’t want the religious symbols to be too intrusive. Instead he provided a naked interior for quiet speak in order to allow greater space for the visitors’ own reflections. At best holiness, spirituality and the sense of the sacred should arise in people themselves, since architecture itself will not be able to create these feelings, he claims. He might be too modest to claim what his architecture in fact does convey for the visitors: ‘But architecture can make it possible for people to have spiritual experiences. Then the space becomes holy.
In the vision of Sanaksenaho natural and living materials are very close to what is holy. This may explain why the interior is entirely clad in smooth pine from which the scent is overpowering. Finland’s heritage of unpretentious old wooden churches might have inspired the architect with their striking beauty, since beauty is a precondition for experiencing a sense of the sacred: ’A church has to be beautiful, that is how I feel about it anyway. Of course there are differing views about what is beautiful, but beauty itself is essential’.
By his restrained use of religious forms and symbols Sanaksenaho has succeeded in making an utmost simple and monumental chapel at the same time thereby containing modesty as well as greatness in architecture.
Flemming Skude
*Interview with the architect in FORUM 3(2005)
Images and research for this article are provided by Cupperforum
