The Eliel Square (, ) is a

square In geometry, a square is a regular polygon, regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal si ...

on the west side of the

Helsinki Central Station Helsinki Central Station (, ) ( HEC) is the main station for commuter rail and long-distance trains departing from Helsinki, Finland. About 200,000 people "pass through the station" every day, half of whom are train passengers. The station serves ...

in the heart of

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

, Finland. It is named after the railway station designer

Eliel Saarinen Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1873 – July 1, 1950) was a Finnish and American Architecture, architect known for his work with Art Nouveau buildings in the early years of the 20th century. He was also the father of famed architect Ee ...

. The square is for the most part the departure and arrival platforms for regional buses. At the northern end of the square is the

Holiday Inn Holiday Inn by IHG is a chain of hotels based in Atlanta, Georgia and a brand of IHG Hotels & Resorts. The chain was founded in 1952 by Kemmons Wilson (1913–2003), who opened the first location in Memphis, Tennessee. The chain was a division ...

Hotel and at the southern end is the restaurant

Vltava The Vltava ( , ; ) is the longest river in the Czech Republic, a left tributary of the Elbe River. It runs southeast along the Bohemian Forest and then north across Bohemia, through Český Krumlov, České Budějovice, and Prague. It is com ...

. On the west side are the and

Sanomatalo Sanomatalo () is a commercial and office building in central Helsinki, Finland, to the north of Postitalo and the Helsinki Central railway station and to the south of the Helsinki Music Centre. It has twelve floors of which three are undergroun ...

History

On the site of the square used to be a small

railway yard A rail yard, railway yard, railroad yard (US) or simply yard, is a series of tracks in a rail network for storing, sorting, or loading and unloading rail vehicles and locomotives. Yards have many tracks in parallel for keeping rolling stock or ...

, an express luggage wing, which served as a kind of wholesale arrangement area. After its demolition, the area was used as a

parking space A parking space, parking place or parking spot is a location that is designated for parking, either paved or unpaved. It can be in a parking garage, in a parking lot or on a city street. The space may be delineated by road surface markings. The ...

. The new

town plan Urban planning (also called city planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportatio ...

south of Töölönlahti was completed in 1996, and it also included the Eliel Square. The area then passed into city ownership in accordance with an agreement between the city and the country.

New Eliel

The New Eliel (; ) is a project launched in 2017, in which the square will be developed, among other things, through new construction. Construction can be a business,

operational An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." F ...

service Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a ...

and cultural space, but it should take into account the historical nature of the area and preserve the Vltava building, which is more than a hundred years old. The upper limit of the building height is about 44 meters above sea level, i.e. the construction must not be higher than the Post Office. The area enables the creation of new jobs in the city center with good public transport connections. The project is also intended to develop the flow of pedestrian traffic around the railway station. The total construction target in the planning area was initially 40,000 square meters, but it has since been decided to reduce the volume target for the project by about a quarter. An international architectural competition was held at the end of 2020 to develop Eliel and also the adjacent Railway Square, of which five proposals for the competition were announced in March 2021.

Gallery

References

External links

New Eliel
(in English) {{coord, 60, 10, 18.01, N, 024, 56, 21.98, E, region:FI-18_type:landmark_source:dewiki, display=title Squares in Helsinki Bus stations in Finland Kluuvi Eliel Saarinen