Marja-Leena Ikkala, Cartes, Computer Arts Centre at Espoo, Finland

Virtual WeeGee: Architectural and Local History through an Interactive 3D Model

Keywords: WeeGee, Espoo, Finnish architecture, 3D reconstruction, local history

Virtual WeeGee is an interactive, game-like 3D model of the WeeGee building in Espoo, Finland. The model was created by Cartes, the Computer Arts Centre at Espoo, an organisation which specialises in the creation of electronic and media art. While Cartes has largely focused on creating electronic music using sensor instruments which they developed themselves, they have also worked on visual projects such as video installations. Cartes is funded by the City of Espoo, Finland's second largest city, located close to the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

Espoo has grown rapidly, and has had an influx of new residents. The history of the city is little known to its residents, and very few think of themselves in terms of residing in Espoo, tending to identify with the extended capital, or Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Cultural activities are growing steadily in Espoo, but the local population still looks largely to Helsinki for provision in this sector.

The WeeGee building (243,000 square feet) is in the Tapiola district of Espoo. Tapiola is a well-known Garden City that recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The landscape is a model of good urban planning and architecture. Finland's most outstanding architects designed the buildings, and there is plenty of open space with trees and woodland.

Tapiola is also a place of employment. The name of the WeeGee building derives from the former printing works of the Weilin and Göös publishing company (i.e. "WG", pronounced WeeGee in Finnish). It was designed by Professor Aarno Ruusuvuori in the 1960s and is an icon of Finnish industrial architecture and 1960s constructivism. The first two phases, 1964 and 1966, were true to Ruusuvuori’s designs, although the third phase, in the 1970s was neither designed nor approved by Ruusuvuori. A fourth phase of design was never realised.

The WeeGee building is currently being converted in order to house museums and other institutions of visual and material culture. Renovation work has begun on the building and will be completed in 2006. The WeeGee building already accommodates some museums and the Espoo School of Art. The Espoo Art Museum and Cartes are due to relocate to the WeeGee building in 2006. Some space in the building has also been reserved for business operations in the cultural sector.

Aarno Ruusuvuori's constructivist architecture is highly esteemed by professionals, and there is a scale model of this building in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ruusuvuori used serial structures, duplication and geometry. There is an extensive unobstructed space on the ground floor enabling flexible positioning of machinery. Load-bearing structures were reduced to a minimum (one vertical support for every 7,500 square feet). A module 27 metres square was used as a starting point, and each of the four planned phases consisted of a 54-metre square comprising four such modules. The construction materials were reinforced concrete and glass.

The printing operations of Weilin and Göös gradually declined during the 1990s, and parts of the building were leased to sports businesses. However, artists and their patrons had realised that the building would be an excellent exhibition space, given the lack of appropriate museum and gallery facilities in Espoo. Plans were drawn up for the cultural use of the WeeGee building, and the building was then purchased by the City of Espoo.

As the WeeGee building had become a popular venue for Floorball, the new plans led to some conflict between culture and sport. All official decisions have favoured cultural use, but the debate continues as there has been a delay in constructing new sports facilities.

One issue for the WeeGee building is how to encourage people to take an interest in and appreciate its minimalist architecture. It is essential to explore how new experiences of architecture can be generated

The Virtual WeeGee Project

Virtual spaces and the experiences that they engender are of great interest, as is their relationship to real architecture. I am particularly interested in virtual spaces in the field of new media. When I was introduced to the architectural tool of a computer game, Max Payne, I began to consider its application to other purposes. The company that designed Max Payne is based in Espoo. One of the designers, Saku Lehtinen, teaches in the architecture departement of Helsinki University of Technology. He also found the idea of Virtual WeeGee appealing, and he found two students, Sampo Sikiö and Olli-Pekka Vaija, who were willing to model WeeGee virtually. Saku Lehtinen supervised the modelling work and also worked on the game-like characteristics.

The idea was to render a 3D model of the WeeGee building and to use the gaming properties of the selected engine. The first phase was completed as student course work, and was primarily concerned with modelling space. The game features were provided by a character who moved around within the building. Slide projectors in various rooms presented images of the same room as it was in the 1960s. The character is able to project these images onto the wall with a click of the mouse. The first stage of development was completed a year ago, and was presented at several public events.

Virtual WeeGee then began to progress in a more interactive and game-like direction. A plot was developed featuring a former factory worker and ghosts in Tapiola. The story is conveyed via a series of diaries placed in the rooms, and the ‘player’ cannot progress without reading the diaries. The diary pages offer insights into the history of Espoo and Tapiola. Slides showing the history of the WeeGee building are also available.

Modelling virtual space and virtuality in general

The intention was to render the WeeGee building visually, and to familiarise the audience with the building and its architecture. At present only one part of the building is open to the public, and floorball courts with partition walls obscure the view of the main facility. The building is also very large and difficult to perceive as a whole.

Modelling the internal spaces of the building was a major undertaking, and some parts had to be omitted, such as the basement and spaces behind locked doors. Textures were rendered initially from photographs.

3D modelling offers a way of presenting space and providing a virtual sense of space that still differs greatly from actual experience. The game-like 3D model takes the user into areas where one can walk, move and do various things. The experience is more immersive, and the focus on performing various tasks emphasises this still further. However, it nevertheless remains a virtual experience. How can this be related to real experience and to reality in general?

It is easier to read photographs than 3D models. This ease of comprehension also makes it easier to relate photographs to reality. For example, the ‘reality’ of a faded old photograph is easier to assess than that of a bad 3D model. By bad 3D models, I mean such things as building representations in which surfaces like walls, floors etc. remain plain, and only the shape is accurately presented. While this certainly serves the purpose in certain situations, the experience of space remains bleak and remote from reality.

Good quality 3D representation calls for a great deal of work and special skills - perhaps more than photography - and this casts doubt on the value and usefulness of 3D modelling in many sectors. In researching architecture, for example, the question of how to introduce the subject of study is always present.

The experience of space in a virtual 3D model lacks the sense of physical materials and the feelings that they engender, even when textures are convincingly represented. This is a major loss in representations of the WeeGee building, as the finest experiences in this building arise from the contrast between raw, massive concrete and the lightness of glass.

On the other hand, the unfurnished WeeGee facility does bear a striking resemblance to the landscape and space of many computer games.

When a certain perspective is sought in a work of art, the dimensions and character of reality are adjusted by such means as shrinking or stretching or, in the case of photography, cropping. Surprisingly, these techniques also prove necessary in virtual modelling, for example the size of a doorway may be enlarged or reduced to make it look right.

The Virtual WeeGee building thus establishes a virtual space and a model of a real building. Rob Shields¹ elaborates on the dictionary definition of virtual as "that which is so in essence but not actually so". A better contrast than that between the virtual and the real is that between the virtual and the concrete. According to Shields, the virtual is ideal but not abstract, real but not actual. It is ideally real like memory. He studies the history of this concept and traces it back to rituals, architectural fantasies and settings - to matters impinging on existing, but not tactile and concrete functions, and the nature of objects. This has long been of importance as a cultural category, but is nowadays mainly associated with digital worlds. Virtual worlds are simulations which, while often beginning as reproductions of the actual, take on a life of their own and diverge from their origins: in failing to reach them, they surpass them in perfection and reality.

Virtuality is often presented as a contrast to the real, but according to Shields the real value of the virtual may lie in the fact that we confront the question of what is real. By making virtual models we create new kinds of spaces and realities.

Game-like Character

Game-like modelling enables us to move around and perform various actions. Interactivity is not only a way of stimulating interest, but is part of the very essence of this project.

The target group for Virtual WeeGee was young people, and the aim was to make architecture and historical material visible to them through a game-like model. Young people are familiar with the world of games, and it may be that they identify less with architecture and museums than with computer games. For older people, on the other hand, a way to appreciate games and their culture is offered as part of the architectural exploration

Games typically involve the idea of progress. In the Virtual WeeGee game a user moves forward by opening diaries. A ghost figure is present in the game and young experienced games-players immediately understand that the ghost figure should be followed. Young players also investigate space, and seek out the limits of the modelled space. They are ready to climb the towers on the roof and to slide down the supports. They make the character turn on the ground and jump. Beginners, on the other hand have difficulty in getting the character to move in the desired direction, and various functions have to be explained carefully. The symbols of the gaming world in which young people move and act so freely are often alien to their elders. Virtual WeeGee, however, provides beginners with an easy way to learn how to move around in the game setting. In the real Max Payne game I was shot several times in the very first scene, but here you can learn peacefully and at your own pace because nobody kills you!

The game-like character made it necessary to omit a great deal of historical detail. The remaining historical content is severely limited and confined only to brief glimpses. Large volumes of text are unsuitable for the game context, but images can help to convey an impression of the past. How accessible this is to the visitor is a further question. The young people who have used Virtual WeeGee have shown little interest in old images, and appeared to be more concerned with progressing through the game as rapidly as possible.

History and Time

The real WeeGee building is now partly renovated. The model shows the Espoo City Museum in its current state, but only five exhibits of its extensive collection may be viewed in this virtual space. The museum facilities also include a short series of images showing the development of transport in Espoo. One room provides a panoramic picture of the old open-air peasant museum in Glims, which is likewise in Espoo. This part was motivated by the idea of associating WeeGee with Espoo and its history. The images remain fragmentary, and the authors hope that they may stimulate questions and interest. The museum section is merely for viewing and examination, but does not advance the plot as such.

The broader problem of multimedia products is identifying the needs that they are supposed to address. How extensive can presentations or texts be made before it would be more appropriate to rely on a book instead? As it is generally preferable to avoid long texts on a monitor screen, it becomes necessary to limit the textual content of both websites and CD-ROMs, which inevitably leads to superficiality. This will continue unless our ability to comprehend images improves with respect to grasping their information content.

In Virtual WeeGee the images remain as unexplained fragments, which is reminiscent of the way in which history impinges on everyday life: as fragments, for example buildings, artefacts, the shape of a field or a stretch of old road. They are accessible only to those who are willing to look closely.

Virtual WeeGee is a mixture of fact and fiction. The museum section must be viewed as fact, and alludes to actual space. In the next phase, however, the user moves on to an undeveloped area which incorporates a time shift back to the 1960s. The door is locked: the user cannot go back. Then the user enters a possible history, something which might have happened in reality. The ghosts refer to fiction and to a time shift, but the surroundings allude to the actual setting.

Architecture plays a vital role when everything happens in empty spaces. The action is not as immersive as in many games, and so space retains the leading role.

The historical notes continue in the pages of the diary. There is an image of an official visit by the Shah of Iran to Tapiola, which often hosted official State visits. There is an image of a room with Alvar Aalto furnishings, and of Mongols building moats in the early th century. The building designed by Aulis Blomstedt on the Menninkäisen link road is also shown.

This work has been available for the general public to test on several occasions this year. As noted above, younger players generally seek to complete the game as rapidly as possible. Some players are so young that they cannot yet read, but they nevertheless manage to progress at a good pace through the game. One test group comprised 14 year-olds, who considered the game to be more or less suitably dimensioned and easy to use. One of these was impressed by a picture of an old automobile, as this was something of personal interest. Another gained a feeling of familiarity with the WeeGee building. However, the various time frames that interested the developers of Virtual WeeGee probably went largely unnoticed by the users.

November 2003

Notes

1. Shields, R., The Virtual, London/New York: Routledge, 2003.

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