Precedent Study: Finnish Chancellery

Finnish Chancellery
Heikkinen + Komonen
Washington, DC
1989-1993

The Finnish Embassy in Washington, DC, is built on a site on Massachusetts Avenue, adjacent to the chancelleries of Belgium and the Vatican, and across the street from the Vice President’s residence (note the pixelization on the Google map). Despite being on Embassy Row, the site maintains a sense of isolation; dense trees and steep topography insulate the structure from the pomp of the city. Designed to reflect a particularly Finnish connection to nature and the trees of the site, the building was carefully positioned to minimize the number of trees that had to be removed for construction. The material choices reflect this connection: copper screens skin both the south and north elevations, allowing rose and clematis vines to grow up the façades and create a natural envelope; bands of clear glass and glass block bring the light and color of the forest into the interior space, and green granite reflects the foliage, filtered light and shadows of the site.




The form of the building is simple, characteristic of Mikko Heikkinen and Markku Komonen’s work, relying on combinations of fundamental geometric forms. It is based on a grid, which is expressed on the interior as columns and, continuing beyond the confines of the building mass, extends into the landscape as light: recessed lights in the granite paving in the front, and lights on poles extending into the forest. The building mass itself is basically a cube with a wide longitudial cut through the center. This void, nicknamed the “grand canyon,” runs north-south and fills the interior with light.

The front façade, with its metal screen and glass blocks, mimics the scale of the neighboring embassies while expressing the deep-rooted modernism of Finnish architecture.




The interior combines the minimalist aesthetics of Scandinavian and Japanese design with a high-tech complexity which is not seen from the guardedly transparent exterior, which is typical of Heikkinen+Komonen’s work. The detailing is a careful balance of technological influences and connection to nature, so that polished metal and rich wood tones are in harmony. While the shapes of the rooms themselves suggest a static, rectilinear space, the subtle angles of the walls and the bold curves of the stairways and light fixtures add motion in the center. From the entry level, the main stairs sweep down into the grand canyon, dropping visitors off in Finlandia Hall, with a wall of north-facing glass looking into the forest.

Six feet away from this wall of glass is another skin, which creates an interstitial zone between the indoors and the hall, which is the principal gathering space of the embassy.

Above are two floors of offices for the staff of fifty, a multipurpose room, and a small library, all reached by a winding central stair in the center of the ‘canyon’ and series of steel bridges across the void. The conference rooms, clad in metal panels, are suspended in the center of the space, hovering above the hall below. Outside, the staff café juts into the woods beneath a tensile canopy structure, another Heikkinen+Komonen trademark.