Around a day has passed in real life since my last post, but in this blog it has been a long day. After the walk around the one family homes, around five cold and dark months had passed before we arrive to my next adventure in the world of urbex. There were a lot of other adventures in the meantime. I bought my first apartment, returned to my old theater group and stuff like that. Nothing very important in terms of abandoned houses, though.
By now it was late March and it was still cold. The theater group’s season had ended a week earlier, and I like half of the group had gotten ill. My covid tests were negative, but back then it was still total isolation, if you had symptoms, so I stayed at home. After a week inside ordering delivery food and asking my friends for wine deliveries to my door I was so sick of being inside, that I asked a friend to start the urbex season of 2022 with me.
We first took a long walk around the old villa and red house without much luck. They were just as inaccessible as they had been six months ago, and I didn’t even bother photographing them again.
There was one more location, which I had never visited but had been tipped of, and although our legs were hurting we decided to check it out. We never got there before spotting something else intersting.
This looks like it has been an interesting place.
The complex was in the middle of small one family houses and low row houses. It looked quite out of place.
According to official city documents it had been a production and warehouse building, which had later been converted into office use. Even they admitted, that it was out of place, and planned new apartments to replace it.
I tried to get a look inside the basement, but it was too dark and the distance was too great.
The building last housed offices of at least an unknown, probably defunct company and the local home care unit.
Is that the stairway, which has been left standing?
It does seem so.
The block of flats seen behind the last ruins of this office building were built in 2019 to replace two business buildings.
There wasn’t really anything to see here anymore. Time to move on to the first discovery of the season.
I’m not sure what the building codes dictate in Finland, but in the United States and Canada, public stairwells like this are often the hardest things to remove, and as such are usually the last things left standing if the building itself gets destroyed or demolished. The reason is that they are made of very heavily reinforced concrete, and often times that concrete is also made thicker.
In cases of construction where the building utilizes flammable materials, or in areas prone to earthquakes or ground disturbances, stairwells are intentionally placed in corners to provide buildings with additional structural reinforcement. For this reason, it came as no surprise that whenever I responded to a commercial or high-density residential building fire, the stairs were always left standing even if the building itself had completely burned to the ground.
Schools in the United States often emphasize that standing in a doorway or laying down in a metal bathtub under a blanket is a safe place during an emergency. Students are taught to seek refuge in such places in the case of an earthquake or a tornado, for example. The truth is, a concrete staircase is the ideal spot if one is available. I don’t know why schools in North America are still teaching children false information in terms of fire safety.
Thank you for sharing this. I believe, that the building codes are far more strict in Finland than in North America. This may really be the reason why they still stand here, although this is the first time I see a building demolished this way.
Europe obviously has different building codes, which I suspect to be far stricter than those here in the United States. It took me years to find a property that someone had built themselves which actually exceeded building codes. People in town thought I was crazy to buy my forever home, but it was built the way I would have built it, if only I had construction skills. 😉
So your construction skills seem to be the same level as mine: they limit to Ikea furniture. The funny thing is that I work in a magazine specialized in the construction business. I spend my days writing about bridge, tram and rail projects, and meeting the heads of construction companies. I spend my summers trespassing their property. They all know about it, my bosses and colleagues know about it, yet nobody does a thing.
My proudest moment came, when we visited the second largest construction company in Finland. I told the hosts, that I was running one of the largest urbex sites in Finland, and one of the directors asked “You are Deserted Finland?” in complete disbelief.
I live in a very small flat built in 1938. It’s so small, that it hopefully won’t be my forever home, but it is in the area and of the architectural style I wanted it to be. It has survived two wars already, so I believe it will survive in the future too.