The House ern world, they could provide a vocabulary of forms and motifs for designers seeking an indigenous design language. At the beginning of the century, Finland formed part of the Russian empire. Eager to separate themselves from Russian hegemony—both cultural and political—Finnish intellectuals sought to establish a distinctive national identity. The Finnish national epic poem, The Kalevala, provided linguistic models for writers and iconographic source material for artists, while the vernacular architecture of remote regions such as Karelia provided architects with “unspoiled” models of indigenous design and construction. One of the greatest examples of Finnish National Romanticism is the complex designed by Eliel Saarinen, Herman Gesellius (1874–1916), and Armas Lindgren (1874–1929) at Hvitträsk, near Helsinki (images). The three young architects met while students at the Polytechnic Institute in Helsinki and eventually started a professional practice together. They conceived of Hvitträsk as a combination home and studio, where facilities were arranged around a courtyard and sited dramatically along a rocky ridge. In contrast to the elegant refinement of the Palais Stoclet, there is a rugged, rustic quality to the design at Hvitträsk, yet the desire to create a gesamtkunstwerk is common to both. The log construction employed for parts of the complex evokes the Finnish vernacular tradition. However, Saarinen, Gesellius, and Lindgren handled the wood in unconventional ways and blended native forms with ideas imported from British and American models of domestic design. The use of wooden columns capped with short segments as capitals to frame the stairway in the main living room is an invention of their own (images).
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