Computers and software have replaced fountain pens, rulers and transparencies in the toolkits of young architects and designers. Just like the electric guitar and JIMI HENDRIX created a new psychedelic sound in the 1960s, computers and the manufacturing robots they control are now enabling the discovery of new forms of expression in architecture and design for the third millennium.

Digital design technology provides exciting possibilities for expression because it enables the management of variation. Digitally designed totalities – buildings or product families – can be made up of components that are all unalike. The realisation of such polymorphous building and product totalities through traditional methods, which are based on industrial duplication, would make no sense, but a robot can just as well be instructed to craft a set of identical components or a series of parts that are all unique.

Digital planning and manufacturing technologies make it possible to replace the product duplication process that evolved during the industrial revolution with the production of different adaptations, thus enabling the realisation of increasingly polymorphous and unique environments and products.

The utilisation of free-flowing natural forms in architecture and design is of course nothing new in Finland. ALVAR AALTO, EERO SAARINEN, TAPIO WIRKKALA and REIMA & RAILI PIETILÄ were all masters in the application of natural forms. The world’s best-known expressive architect FRANK GEHRY has noted that he follows in the footsteps of Alvar Aalto more than anyone else.

Nor are digitality and sophisticated technology something new in our country, which is home to pioneering companies like Nokia, Tekla, Baltic Yachts and Remedy as well as influential personalities such as LINUS TORVALDS and trailblazing bands like Pan Sonic and Rinneradio. The engineers of forest industry corporation Finnforest help the world’s top architects create geometrically curvy structures using the company’s products. Fine examples include JÜRGEN MAYER’s Metropol Parasol in Seville and the Aquatics Centre by ZAHA HADID in London.

Finland is both artistically and technologically well poised to reclaim its pioneering role in free-form architecture and design. Technological creativity and a love for natural forms merge in our country.

It would be great if young designers boldly seized these new instruments and departed on a voyage of discovery to find out what kinds of sounds they can produce. There’s no reason to fear that sexy digital forms will replace the reserved and minimalistic modern expression that dominates contemporary Finnish architecture and design. After all, the electric guitar never replaced the acoustic guitar – it just enriched the field of music with a new source of sound. †

Kivi Sotamaa is a designer and the managing director of Sotamaa Design as well as a associate professor  of architecture and urban design at the University of California Los Angeles, UCLA. He returned to Finland last June after spending 6½ years in the USA. www.sotamaa.net

Photo Juuso Noronkoski

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