What to do on weekend

Next weekend is filled with events - either very affordable events or totally free of charge. All of these have been advertised in English, so I'm quite confident that they work for non-Finnish-speaking too:

1. Restaurant day

On Sunday anyone can open a pop-up restaurant. The concept is expanding outside Finland too! Check out the restaurant closest to you on the map.


2. Helsinki Design Open

Image: Rauno Träskelin

Pop-up concept store / exhibition / café about Finnish design at Iron house, right opposite to Stockmann at city center. Open only until Saturday (9 AM to 2 PM). Quality pieces, beautiful architecture.


3. Robot workshop

Build your own robot at Kaapelitehdas. Instructions and material are on the house. Workshop is running on Sunday from 11 AM to 3 PM.

So many things to do, so little time...

Movie shows

One of the nicest services in Tapiola is the old cinema, Kino Tapiola. It has been recently renovated, and the end result is a nice combination of modern technology and old architecture.

The advantages of Kino Tapiola:

• Plenty of room for your legs
• Minimum amount of commercials before the movie
• Love seats in the back
• Beautiful vintage neon lights outside the cinema
• No need to reserve tickets in advance and hurry get them one hour before the show
• Seats are not numbered, you can pick whichever seat you want
• Lack of screaming video/dance/rally games in the waiting hall

And anyway, movies are a safe place to go to even though you didn't speak Finnish. Almost all of the non-Finnish movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Usually only kids movies are dubbed in Finnish, but in nearly 100% of the cases the original English version is running at the movie theaters at the same time with the dubbed version.


Larger map

Something concrete

Yesterday I met a nice Dutch lady (meeting a nice Dutch isn't the news, I think I've met only nice Dutch people). She was the mom of the family where my friend was staying during her exchange student year. I ended up talking about concrete with the Dutch exchange mom. Precast concrete, to be more precise. And why did we have this concrete conversation? Well, because considering the size of the population and the size of the construction market, both Finland and Netherlands are world's top countries in using precast concrete elements. At least that's what they taught us in the university, and my experiences at work are supporting the claim.

A nice precast concrete building in the Netherlands 

(image from Tekla global BIM awards)

I don't know for sure what's Holland's excuse to use that much of precast elements in the construction, but at least in Finland the top three reasons have been the unfavorable weather, high labor costs and migration from countryside to cities in the 60's.

In the beginning of the 60's the population of the capital area was a bit above 500 000, and by the end of 60's it was nearly 700 000. I may be exaggerating a bit, but still, the population increased by one third during a decade! So they needed to build. A lot. Fast. In the construction boom of the late 60's and early 70's some of the concrete block houses were designed to last for 30 years only. They were not designed to go through the putkiremontti, they were not designed to go through the facade renovation - which makes the renovation really expensive today, and even after the renovation end result may not fulfill the requirements of the 21st century.

So, what shall we do with Merihaka? Any concrete suggestions?


Näytä Concrete block houses suuremmalla kartalla