Back from Holiday Again (part 5)

Two nights in Espoo gave us a chance to visit Hvittrask, a collection of houses built by the Finnish architects and designers Geselius, Lindgren and Saarinen, of which the most famous is probably Eliel Saarinen, father of another architect Eero Saarinen. The buildings are in what we would call the "Arts and Crafts" style and only open for a few days each week. Before emigrating to the USA, Eliel's most significant design was probably for the railway station in Helsinki which has been said to have formed the basis for the design of Gotham City in the Batman films. 

Son Eero made his name in the US, with numerous well known designs, of which the most significant are the Gateway Arch in St Louis and the TWA terminal at JFK airport.

The front of Saarinen's house at Hvittrask

Looking at the house from the side garden

Some of the design detail inside the house. In such a cold winter climate, fireplaces become important 

The main sitting room in the the house. There is a curious blend of styles with (at least to me) influences of Gaudi and William Morris

Helsinki's railway station as designed by Saarinen senior. It is a stunning design

The main entrance under the arch is bordered by two figures on either side each holding a globe, more detail of which can be seen in the picture below

 What to do next? We found a car museum with this parked outside!

A long way from home and it only has one previous owner. Inside, the museum is huge with cars on two floors. The exhibits are not pristine, but represent what the cars would have been like when nearly new. Here's just a small selection of what we found:

Dating from the end of the 1940s, the DKW Schnellaster was a mixture of the ancient and modern. An ancient pre-war 2-stroke engine provided power for the monocoque body that featured trailing arm suspension. I can remember these still smoking their way through Germany in the early 1980s

NSU designed their K70 to complement their rotary engined Ro80, but having run out of money were acquired by VW, hence the badges on this, the first front engined, water cooled VW . Having also acquired DKW and Auto-Union, a new company, Audi, emerged and the design of the original Audi 80 and first generation VW Passat can be seen in the K70

Citroen's management obviously permitted their designers free rein when deigning their "Ami" model, a larger version of the 2CV. For many years in the 60s, this was the biggest selling car in France. Pity Citroens are now just bland boxes - much better when they had some individuality.

1970s Datsun 100A Cherry. At one time, these were seen everywhere, often as cheap second cars, but they didn't like salt on the roads and the body work rapidly returned to its organic origin

Morris Marina 1.8TC - one of the world's most maligned cars. Yes - it wasn't anything special, but it was designed in no time on a shoestring and stayed in production for too long. But it did sell in large numbers to both fleet and private buyers and wasn't really that much worse than the opposition of the time. The press hated it due to the original front suspension design, but this was improved prior to production even if the 1.8 litre cars did prefer to continue straight on at corners.

Originally an Opel design, this was built by Moskvitch as their 400 model, basically claiming the Opel design and tooling as war reparations.

Rear engined and with a body design by Giovanni Michelotti, the BMW 700 was pretty much the model that saved the company. It set the style for BMW from the 60s and if you look at it quickly, there is a slight hint of the Triumph Herald, also designed by Michelotti to it.