Carl Ludvig Engel

Biography

In the spring of 1814 Engel came to Turku to build a sugar refinery for a local businessman. The commission was private and modest, but there he met Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, who was directing the rebuilding of Helsinki and had been looking in vain for an architect.

Engel was born on 3 July 1778 in Berlin (some give the exact place as Charlottenburg), into the family of a mason, Johann Philipp Engel. From 1800 to 1804 he studied at the Berlin Bauakademie, the architectural academy: first he qualified as a surveyor, then as an architect. He served in the Prussian building administration and worked on very practical things: churches and commercial buildings, a bakery in Berlin, mills, dams. Among his early works he is credited with a share in building St Mary’s Church in Neuruppin (1801–1804). After Prussia’s defeat in 1806 commissions dried up, and in 1808 he applied for the post of town architect of Tallinn, then called Reval, starting work there in 1809. It seems that in Tallinn he became acquainted with the St Petersburg Empire style. Little remains from the Tallinn years: only a few buildings can be securely attributed to Engel, and most of them have been demolished. After Turku he travelled to St Petersburg, was there again in March 1815 and found private work. Engel seriously considered returning to Berlin, where he had been offered a post. But Ehrenström obtained approval for his appointment, Engel’s plans for Helsinki were shown to Emperor Alexander I, and in February 1816 he became architect of the committee for the reconstruction of the city. Helsinki had been the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland for only four years. To my mind, what convinced Ehrenström, who distrusted the local military engineers, was that Engel could design complex public buildings.

Senate Square was laid out on the model of the Capitol in Rome: two symmetrical buildings at the sides, the Senate House (1818) and the main building of the university (1828), and above them, on a high flight of steps, St Nicholas’s Church, now Helsinki Cathedral, begun in 1818. For the cathedral Engel took as his models the churches on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin and, beyond them, St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. On the façade of the Senate House he used the Corinthian order, which the classical tradition regarded as the symbol of power, and crowned it with a dome that alludes to the Pantheon. He owned Palladio’s “The Four Books of Architecture” and used it constantly. To the square were added the Old Church in the Kamppi district (1826), a theatre (1827) and the University Library (1836): its entrance hall recalls a Roman atrium, and the reading rooms are arranged around a large transverse barrel vault, after the Baths of Diocletian.

In 1824 Engel succeeded the Italian-born Carlo Bassi as head of the Intendant’s Office, the building authority for Finland, and held the post until his death. The office was responsible for public buildings across the country: during his years in charge it produced drawings for 51 churches and 33 bell towers. Town halls, provincial administration buildings, schools, hospitals, customs houses and lighthouses were built to his designs. Among his works outside Helsinki are the Lutheran church in Hamina, the town hall in Kajaani, the town hall in Pori, the Orthodox Church of St Nicholas in Suistamo, the rebuilding of the cathedral in Oulu and the post and customs house at Eckerö in the Åland Islands.

After the great fire in Turku Engel drew up a new plan for the city (1828). Streets at least thirty ells wide, about eighteen metres; division of the city into fire zones by esplanades; tree-lined firebreaks within blocks; a ban on multi-storey wooden houses. The same rules were adopted in the plans for Tampere (1830), Hämeenlinna (1831), Porvoo (1832), Jyväskylä (1833) and Mikkeli (1837).

Engel died in Helsinki in May 1840 and is buried in the Sandudd cemetery. Many of his designs were completed without him: the University Library and the cathedral were finished after his death.