Buildings disappear faster than you expect.
In 2019, I set up a tripod on Siltasaarenkatu in Hakaniemi and shot a 30-second exposure of an unremarkable office block. Functionalist facade, mid-century bones, nothing you would photograph twice. Four years later, that building was gone. In its place stands Lyyra, a mixed-use quarter designed by ARCO Architecture Company and Cederqvist & Jäntti Arkkitehdit. Same street corner. Completely different city.
Shoot what exists, not what matters
We photograph buildings because a client needs images now. But the secondary value of architectural photography is documentation. Every building we shoot becomes a record of a specific moment in a city's life. Hakaniemi's old office block had no architectural significance. Nobody commissioned that 2019 shot. But that photograph is now a record of what stood on that corner for over 50 years.
Lyyra rewrites the corner
Developed by Ylva for the University of Helsinki's student union, Lyyra stacks offices, a 178-room hotel, apartments, restaurants, and a metro entrance into two buildings connected by a pedestrian street. Light brick facades with patinated copper trim, each section at a different shade. The project won the 2024 Tekla BIM Awards Global in the commercial category and targets both LEED Platinum and WELL certification. We returned to the same corner with the same focal length to document what replaced what we had already recorded.
