The pioneering architects of equality on display in Helsinki

One of the installations of the exhibition on Wivi Lönn and the Finnish architects, pioneer of equality.

It was the generation of women born 150 years ago, such as Wivi Lönn, born in 1872, that pioneered equality and obtained the opportunity to compete as equals in politics (in Finland the right to vote and to elect to parliament for women was established in 1906) and in the profession. And the architects who founded 80 years ago the first professional trade association in the worldArchitecta, to offer mutual, human and professional support, to update, to travel are role model of female empowerment.

70 years of the pioneer of equality

On May 30, 1942 in the studio apartment of her colleague Elsi Borg and her husband, in Helsinki, the party for the 70th anniversary of Wivi Lönn, the first architect to open her own professional studio in Finland that with his personal and professional history represented an absolute reference point for equality in Finland. While the Finland was caught between two wars, that of ’39-40, the Winter War, and that of ’41-44, War of continuation, again against the Soviet Union,

The women gathered at the long tables they decided to create a mutual aid network human and professional, Architekta, born to unite professionals and react to the obstruction, in fact, of the analogous male association. The founders had kept in touch over the decades after attending Helsinki Technical University together in the 1910s and sharing jobs and commissions in a professionally hostile world, taking care of to tie together women of generations different.

One of the convivial and operational meetings of Architecta, the pioneers of equality alongside the youngest, a blow-up on display at the Mfa in Helsinki.

Single and self-possessed

Wivi Lönn’s career represents a paradigm of this commitment. He graduated in 1896 from the Technical University of Helsinki, which since 1879 was open to women, albeit with numerical constraints.

Students of the Helsinki Polytechnic, 1930. © Arkitekturmuseet / Salme Setäläs album

You had to sin fact, overcoming the gender barrierthe one that forbade women to carry out certain jobs (and which was abolished in Finland in 1916 for university teaching and in 1926 to access almost all state posts).

The bachelorette party dinner of one of the architects, 1937. © Arkitekturmuseet / Salme Setäläs album

Born in 1876, she is about to complete 25, the age at which unmarried women in Finland have been considered emancipated since 1864 from paternal protection, that is, master of oneself, they can choose a profession and manage their assets. (For those instead married until 1930 the protection passed to her husband who could dispose of the assets and prohibit women from working, or in the case of architects, sign their own works).

Architect at the drawing table, around 1900. © Architectan arkisto / Kansallisarkisto

Because of this Wivi and others with and after her chose not to marry.

The rules of the game

In 1903 Wivi Lönn won the competition, which involved the delivery of an anonymous project, for the Aleksanteri school in Tampere, one of the most developed cities in Finland.

Aleksanteri Elementary School, Tampere 1904. © Museum of Finnish Architecture / Aukusti Heinonen

However, when it became known that it was a woman who had won, the male colleagues took a counterattack: they demonstrated in front of the city council, wrote anonymous letters to the newspapers complaining of“Intruder who took away a well-paid job from men taking advantage of a mechanism that had been brought to the limits of illegality “. “Marry that girl and get her out of the game” invoked at the meetings of men’s architects’ club, strictly closed to women, after that with an anonymous project Wivi Lönn had also won the competition for the construction of the new fire station in Tampere.

The Tampere Fire Station designed by Wivi Lonn is still in use. © Museum of Finnish Architecture / Aukusti Heinonen © Museum of Central Finland

This time there was discrimination: unjustifiably it was not Wivi Lönn who directed the work of the winning project but colleague Heikki Titola.

Draw like a man!

Tampere Fire Station Project. © Museum of Finnish Architecture / Aukusti Heinonen

To get here Wivi Lönn, daughter of a widowed mother, had obtained a scholarship from the Tampere Technical School, to become master builder. But she was so brilliant that the director of the school himself recommended her to continue her studies in Helsinki at the Polytechnic. She attended her outside, because her mother could not pay the matriculation fee and I was among the first of her. “Our little girl draws like a man! “the headmaster was pleased.

Wivi Lonn in her studio in 1915. The pioneer of equality of Finnish professionals was the first to open her own. © Architecta archives / National Archives of Finland

Spaces designed for women

For survive professionally the architects soon learned to network: associations dealing with single women and mothers, schools and children were the first to commission buildings and projects from them. An example the Tampere girls’ house which allowed the recent graduate Wivi Lõnn to make herself known. Also for this reason many of the buildings designed by Wivi Lönn were her schools, at least thirty of her, built throughout her professional life which extended beyond the 1930s.

The lobby of the Tampere School of Home Economics designed in 1912 by Wivi Lonn. © Museum of Finnish Architecture / Aukusti Heinonen

In this area too she acted as a pioneer: as an alternative to the long severe corridors flanked by classrooms, she designed large lobbies around which the study and work spaces opened up. He drew many elements of her inspiration from her travels in Finland and in Europe, even in the South. She herself defined her domestic rationality: she was able to tune in to the needs of users and to make it pleasant as well as effective the use of space.

Work, but also music and travel

Architechta’s members on a trip to Denmark, 1951. © Architecta archives / National Archives of Finland

But what was done in the Architechta meetings? New projects were told, trips to construction sites and around Europe were planned, the work and curriculum vitae of all the members were kept in mind, a very precious archive work that continued until 1990, providing a formidable document of female professionalism .

Catalog of the exhibition dedicated to Wivi Lönn.

And then they played, sang songs composed by the members about their profession and the difficulty of juggling, in case, between family and career.

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