Finland’s geopolitical position has changed, and it also affects architecture
Finland has joined NATO and relations with Russia have frozen, but the effects of the country's changing geopolitical position on the field of architecture have hardly been discussed. Daniele Belleri, who led the curatorial team for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, now addresses the topic in his online article series.
Every time I walked near the sea, an image haunted me. Or rather, a shadow. The Russian shadow fleet, that’s how they call it: hundreds of tankers, many in a dilapidated state, transiting illegally along Finland’s coast, delivering oil to unknown locations despite the European ban.
The Baltic Sea facing Helsinki is roughly 65 kilometres wide before touching northern Estonia. Assuming the secret vessels departing from ports around St. Petersburg navigated mid-sea, one could calculate that this trace of Europe’s geopolitical threats – linked to pollution hazards, underwater cable sabotage, and even launch pads for drones – was sitting just 30 kilometers from Finland’s capital region.
Those thoughts had begun to surface a few months after Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine in 2022. By summer 2024, as my activity for the Venice Biennale was at full speed, they had become inescapable. I was working closely with Carlo Ratti, leading the curatorial team of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, preparing an exhibition devoted to the environmental and climate crisis.
Our group was based in Northern Italy, but on some weekends I managed to travel 2,300 kilometers north, to the Helsinki waterfront, next to the place I’ve called home for five years. Seeking solace from a project advancing at breakneck speed, I found myself immersed in another urgent manifestation of the same reality we sought to confront: aggressive imperialism, conflicting approaches to natural resource use, and the impact of human activity on the environment, both built and unbuilt.
Hope through experiments, innovation, and vernacular rediscovery
The main point of our work in Venice was that, faced with today’s predicaments, we could still propose positive responses.
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” wrote the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci – a sentiment that curiously mirrors, somehow, the liberal master Karl Popper’s injunction that “optimism is a duty.” Building on the idea of multiple intelligences, connecting architecture with other disciplines, we aimed to offer hope through experiments, innovation, and vernacular rediscovery.
The triadic sections featured in the title Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. were conceived to be as accessible as possible. Each section thus became an operative lens: Natural encouraged re-entanglement with ecosystems; Artificial explored computation’s agency, its perils and promises; Collective emphasized the social intelligence that emerges when people organize and invent together.
Beyond them, I drew inspiration from the theory of philosopher Pierre Charbonnier. In a 2020 paper called “The Three Tribes of Political Ecology”, the French scholar identified as many spheres of mobilization against climate change: “radical critics of modernity,” “green socialism,” and “elite technocracy.” These groups perceive the crisis on different timescales and propose distinct revisions of political thought. Only through a “convergence of struggle,” he suggested, could humanity respond in time.
The exhibition pivoted on an open call which drew hundreds and hundreds of proposals. Finland, per capita, stood out, and Archinfo dubbed 2025 “Finland’s super year.”
The country seemed especially alert to the same tensions we wanted to explore: between ecology and innovation, heritage and diversity, and the impact of geopolitics on the built environment.
A nation facing the unknown
Indeed, much has changed in Finland in recent years. The war in Ukraine ended Helsinki’s long tradition of neutrality. NATO membership and the closure of the border with Russia mark a shift – perhaps comparable to independence in 1917, the end of World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At each such moment, the country has had to reexamine its identity, priorities, and social contract.
Meanwhile, domestic pressures deepen the sense of transition. Economic growth is slow, the construction sector in decline, and unemployment among the highest in the EU. Demographic trends raise questions about “the long-term sustainability of the Finnish welfare system,” as noted by Sitra and The Institutional Architecture Lab earlier this year.
It is a localized polycrisis, echoing the global one we diagnosed in Venice. Could architecture help Finland navigate it?
The built environment expresses, although with contradictions, a nation’s vision of itself.
The built environment expresses, although with contradictions, a nation’s vision of itself. In the 20th century, modern architecture and planning were central to Finland’s rise as an egalitarian, prosperous nation, through experiments in housing, culture, and civic infrastructure. Many of the country’s most influential practitioners possessed an extraordinary ability to reconcile dualisms such as urban-rural, national-international, functionality-poetry.
American critic Herbert Muschamp, writing about the Aaltos, described their attitude as “an assault on binary thinking, the tendency to see things either–or.” For decades, this outlook may also have reflected Finland’s geopolitical effort to remain within the capitalist West while keeping relations with its threatening neighbour to the East.
Expanding the debate on architecture
How can this history advance as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century? This article series for the Finnish Architecture Review stems from that question. It seeks to expand the debate on Finnish design and architecture amid geopolitical upheaval, emphasizing the need for the field to widen its scope and identify areas where it can intervene – at a time when broader social conditions are also being redefined.
What agency can architecture claim amid geopolitical change? How might Finland’s design practice align with its new positioning – as a European avant-garde, Putin-countering force? How can it design the physical counterparts to today’s priorities such as fighting climate change, fostering diversity, and resisting digital disinformation?
Further questions arise: How might civic infrastructure – from libraries to public health centres – provide tools to address today’s crises? How can dialogue between institutions and minorities remain open as the raison d’État grows stronger?
What are the risks of the modernist cult shaping much of Finland’s discourse? How can the nation leverage its unique geography, relationship with nature, focus on technological innovation, and collective psychology? Is the “assault on binary thinking” something to be preserved or rethought now that Finland has unequivocally chosen one camp over the other?
How might Finland’s design practice align with its new positioning – as a European avant-garde, Putin-countering force?
The scope of this editorial series might appear incautious at times – reflecting the position of a foreigner in the Nordics, at risk of slipping into the “outsider syndrome” Roger Connah, a British-born Finnish architecture specialist, so well described in his Aaltomania: behaving like a “rogue anthropologist [with] uncritical support for all things Finnish.”
Most importantly, echoing our approach from the Venice Biennale, these conversations will be multidisciplinary and hopeful, moving freely between the triads of intelligences and Charbonnier’s tribes, to explore alliances – or clashes – between differing visions of architectural futures. The conviction is that neither architecture as a discipline nor Finland as a country can be believed to be self-sufficient. Not on the long run.
Ultimately, this is also a story about the European Union. If Finland can transform its design strengths into civic resilience, it will not only defend itself – it may propose a model for the whole bloc. That, for me, is the wager of this series: to listen, test, and sketch the outlines of an architectural practice that is politically lucid, environmentally rigorous, and socially generative. In this northern corner of the Old Continent, it may be the duty of both natives and newcomers to build a new centre of imagination.
The article series “Finnish architecture in the shadow of geopolitics” will be published on the Finnish Architecture Review website during the winter of 2025–2026.
