Usko Nyström

Usko Nyström: The Castle Above the Rapids

In 1903, on a granite shelf beside the roaring Imatrankoski rapids in eastern Finland, a stone castle opened for business. It was not a castle. It was a hotel — the Grand Hôtel Cascade, later Imatran Valtionhotelli — and it remains the only castle in the Nordic countries ever built as one from the ground up. Finns have since voted it the most beautiful building in their country. The architect was Usko Nyström, and the building tells you almost everything about him: romantic in silhouette, ruthlessly modern in its guts.

A Provincial Boy and Three Educations

He was born on 6 September 1861 in Virrat, in the Finnish interior, and schooled at Hämeenlinna. In 1880 he entered the Imperial Alexander University of Finland — not to study building, but mathematics, the humanities and aesthetics. That order matters. Nyström came to architecture already trained to think about beauty as a subject with a literature, and about form as something with a history that could be argued over.

Only afterwards, from 1885 to 1888, did he take architecture at the Polytechnic Institute in Helsinki. Then, in 1890–91, he went to Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts, and travelled Europe extensively, studying antique, medieval and contemporary work directly. By the time he was thirty he had a Finnish provincial upbringing, a Russian-imperial university degree in aesthetics, a technical qualification and a Beaux-Arts finish. Very few of his contemporaries carried that combination.

The Firm

In 1895 he founded a practice with Albert Petrelius and Vilho Penttilä — Usko Nyström–Petrelius–Penttilä — which ran until 1908 and, at fifteen people, was a substantial office by Finnish standards. In that thirteen-year window the firm put up eighteen bourgeois apartment buildings in central Helsinki and a string of bank branches for KOP.

These are the buildings a visitor to Helsinki walks past today without necessarily knowing whose they are: the Wuorinen building of 1896, Schalin in 1902, Mielikki in 1906, Kointahti in 1907. Watch them in sequence and you can see a style being invented in real time. Nyström started in the safe neo-Gothic and neo-Renaissance of his training, moved through Art Nouveau — he was among the first in Finland to work in Jugendstil — and arrived at the heavy, granite-faced, boulder-based National Romantic manner that would come to stand for Finland itself. His last work carried hints of Expressionism. He did not settle.

What Imatra Actually Was

The hotel at Imatra was a state project. Wooden hotels had stood beside the rapids and burned; by 1901 the site was clear, and the Senate of Finland ordered a replacement in stone. Nyström gave them turrets, mass and a fortress silhouette, which is what everybody photographs. What is more revealing is that from the day it opened the building had central heating, running water and electric light — luxuries then, and a statement that romantic form and mechanical modernity were not opposites. A private Emperor's Hall was set aside for the Romanovs, who came to see the rapids like everyone else.

The building then absorbed the century. It served as a military hospital in the Finnish Civil War of 1918. In the Second World War it became army headquarters, with an anti-aircraft defence centre in the basement. It was restored to its original appearance by the architect Aarne Ervi between 1985 and 1987, given a congress centre and later a spa, and it is still a working hotel.

Nyström's other work spread across the country: the Hollola municipal house of 1902, the Cygnaeus School in Pori in 1912, and the long restoration of Lammi Church, which occupied him from 1918 until 1929, past his own death.

The Teacher

From 1892 Nyström taught at the Polytechnic Institute as an assistant lecturer, becoming lecturer in architecture in 1901 and receiving the honorary title of professor in 1922. He also taught at the Central School of Applied Arts in Helsinki. His subjects were the unglamorous foundations: linear and freehand drawing, the architecture of antiquity and the Middle Ages, ornament, design, the history of style.

He was, by all accounts, extremely popular — a formidable draughtsman with a sharp sense of humour. And he taught, across several generations, the students who became Finnish architecture: Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto both passed through his classes. It was Aalto who, in 1928, designed his old teacher's gravestone — white marble, cut with the Latin phrase *Bene latuit*: he hid himself well.

He never married. Alongside the practice and the teaching he wrote roughly three hundred entries for the eleven-volume Finnish encyclopaedia *Tietosanakirja* between 1909 and 1922, an act of national reference-building that fits the man exactly.

Why Usko Is Called a Genius

The case for Nyström is not that he was the greatest designer of his generation — Lars Sonck and Saarinen were arguably stronger form-givers — but that he had two abilities that rarely coexist. The first is stylistic mobility without incoherence. He moved from neo-Gothic through Jugendstil to National Romanticism and toward Expressionism across roughly twenty-five years, and each phase looks assured rather than imitative. That requires understanding *why* a style does what it does, not merely how it looks, and it is the direct payoff of having read aesthetics at university before ever drawing a plan.

The second is the fusion at Imatra: a building that reads as a medieval keep while running on 1903's most advanced services. That synthesis — the emotional register of the past delivered through the technology of the present — is the central problem of turn-of-the-century European architecture, and Nyström solved it cleanly enough that Finns still vote the result their most beautiful building.

The honest counter-case: much of his best-known output was produced by a partnership, and disentangling his hand from Petrelius's and Penttilä's is not always possible. He wrote no manifesto and founded no movement. His most lasting influence may be indirect — delivered through Saarinen and Aalto, who then eclipsed him. The Latin on his grave, chosen by a former student, half-admits it: *bene latuit*. He kept out of sight. That is a strange epitaph for a genius, and it is probably the accurate one.

What Remains

Nyström died on 6 January 1925 in Kotka and was buried at Hietaniemi cemetery in Helsinki, under Aalto's marble. Finland was spared the wholesale urban destruction that erased so much of the architecture of his Central European contemporaries, and his record survives unusually well: the Helsinki apartment blocks still house people, the Pori school still teaches children, Lammi Church still stands restored, and the castle at Imatra still takes bookings. In 2014 the Museum of Finnish Architecture mounted an exhibition of his work — a belated public look at a man who had spent his career being the reason other architects were good.

Achievements

• Notable work: Imatran Valtionhotelli
• Trained at Beaux-Arts de Paris and Helsinki University of Technology