The Heritagization of Different Building Types in a Finnish Rural Town

Sustainability is supported by both cultural and aesthetic values, along ecological, economic, and social lines. This paper presents four heritage processes with the purpose of revealing heritagization differences in town planning over the past six decades, aiming to support cultural sustainability today. The study is applied to four different buildings in Lapua, a typical small rural town in Finland. Lapua Cathedral, designed by architect C.L. Engel in the neoclassical style, was completed in 1827 and listed as one of the nationally important cultural heritage environments. Vernacular houses in Ostrobothnia used to be two-storey, red wooden houses until the 1960s, but they were obviously too modest to be appreciated as cultural heritage. Lapua Town Hall, designed by architect M. Björklund, was completed in 1924 and nearly demolished in the 1960s, but the municipal council decided to repair it. Even though administrative buildings usually have been highly respected, seen as symbols of power, the architectural values of this building were not acknowledged until the 1990s when the first historical building inventory was done in the town. The latest building types recognized as having historical value are factories and other production buildings. The example in Lapua is the old cartridge factory from the 1920s, now known as Old Paukku, the culture centre. The conservation town plan in 1994 was not accepted by the municipal council, but the regional plan raised the value recognition, and it is now listed as a national-level heritage site. The paper aims to compare how the heritagization of distinct building types differs in one town, as a case study, and through this it aims to support cultural sustainability.