A vacant building, living memory — who does the built environment belong to?

Every building has two bodies: the material and the immaterial. The material body is stone, mortar and window panes; what stands in place, deteriorates, and withstands weather and decades. The immaterial body, by nature, is scattered. It lives in those who have passed through the building, walked its corridors, and remember the smells or its winter chill.

The immaterial body of a building is not in any one place. It has taken root in dozens, maybe hundreds of people who may not even know one another, but who all carry the same building with them in one way or another. 

When Docent Timo Miettinen, this year's selector of the Finlandia Prize for Architecture, reflected in the prize event's panel discussion on what a building tells us about our society, he noted that historical interest is born not from texts or documents, but from the physical environment and experience. Architecture preserves traces of society that no other form of documentation records. Miettinen quoted John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century British thinker and art critic: "We cannot remember without architecture." He added that buildings help us recognise where we have come from and where we are going. They build a historical continuum.

“We cannot remember without architecture.”

These same questions arise with a more mundane building, less glamorous than the Finlandia finalists: an old primary school in Puistola, Helsinki, which residents are currently trying to save after it has stood empty for more than a decade.

Designed by architect Jalmari Peltonen, Puistola Primary School is a 1,800-square-metre stone building completed in 1930. It ceased to operate as a school in 2015. Since then it has stood mostly empty, even though the Finnish Heritage Agency has found it culturally and historically valuable. During this time the building's material body has waited quietly for a new use, its windows covered with plywood. But the other body, the scattered one, has not disappeared. On the contrary, it has awakened and grown in people's minds.

In 2024, local residents founded an association, Friends of Puistola Primary School, to advocate the building's protection and reuse. Last August the association organised a human chain around the school building, and it is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to buy the building from the City of Helsinki and to renovate it into usable condition. The City has given the association priority to negotiate the purchase before a public auction.

There is something beautiful in the fact that the voices speaking for this building are primarily not architects, engineers or municipality officials, but those who once sat in its classrooms or who pass it every day on their way to somewhere else. Here, preservation does not arise as an authoritative top-down value, but as a local bottom-up chain of affection.

A thesis has also emerged in support of the project. Olli Erlund, who graduated from Aalto University’s Department of Architecture in August 2026, examined in his master's thesis why this particular building fell vacant and how it could be brought back into use resource-efficiently. According to Erlund, the cause was not the building's poor condition but political decision-making that favoured larger school centres, along with problems brought by mechanical ventilation installed during the buildings renovation in the 2000s. The building did not fail; rather, it was not allowed to function in the way it was meant to.

"Whenever we build or tear down, we always determine what future generations will inherit."

Timo Miettinen asked at the Finlandia Prize event what we are as Finns and where we are heading. Where do we want to go and who do we want to be? He spoke of how we want to cherish memories and traditions through the built environment, while recognising the challenge that construction must also meet the demands of the future. He warned that renewal carried out in the name of efficiency increasingly looks like the destruction of the old. The past, he remarked, holds possibilities we have not yet recognised. Whenever we build or tear down, we always determine what future generations will inherit.

In Puistola, these questions are not pondered in a grand seminar room but in a local club room and on the school yard, coffee cup in hand on a grey afternoon, or in a human chain in the August sun. The case crystallises a broader, nationally topical issue: small schools are being closed and teaching centralised into larger classes in enormous school centres, while the lack of nearby meeting places is known to increase loneliness. Another question, global in scale, is that the construction sector, with its current emphasis on new construction, accounts for around 28 percent of Finland's total emissions.

Reuse of the existing building stock has therefore become increasingly central to how architecture is valued. Miettinen noted that civic buildings reveal what we hold valuable. In Puistola, this appreciation doesn’t lie in wait for a future zoning decision or an architecture competition. It already exists, scattered in dozens of people who do not yet know whether they will get their building back.

"The building's other body, that scattered memory, affection and shared will that lives in no single wall, is alive."

Former pupil of the school, Sanna Tirkkonen, a philosopher and Academy Research Fellow who has studied loneliness, has stated that meeting places like this can play a major role in combating loneliness. Perhaps that is the heart of it: the building's other body, that scattered memory, affection and shared will that lives in no single wall, is alive. The question is whether it can still find a home in the body made of stone.

The same question applies to hundreds of unused buildings across Finland that are part of our collective memory. They travel with us when we board the tram in the morning, fuss over our tax return, or chat about this and that at a relative’s birthday party. Architecture is not physical, cold, lifeless material, but what people make of it and the meanings they give it. Cities, town squares and homes were built for thousands of years before we had the term "principal designer", or authorities defining what is built, where and why. The meaning and purpose of our environment have always risen from the values, worries, hopes and interactions of us, the scattered mass. Perhaps that is where it should remain.

Read more about the crowdfunding campaign run by the friends association of Puistola Primary School until 31 October from this link.