Qualla: Nakkila Church

Nakkila Church: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niera, CC BY-SA 4.0. J. W. Suominen intended to give his parish a church for his sixtieth birthday. He had the money and the plan, and two years to arrange it. Then, in August 1935, a shooting accident left him badly injured, and the gift became a deathbed dictation: lying in his own house, the tanner talked through the terms with the vicar, Antti Perheentupa, and left the parish of Nakkila three million marks. He asked for one thing in return. Beneath the new church there was to be a crypt — an idea he had picked up from churches he had seen abroad — where his family would be buried, and the parish's vicars after them.

Read more: Nakkila Church on Qualla

Image: Niera | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nakkila Church: A Will Dictated in a Hurry

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jorma Lindqvist, CC BY-SA 4.0. Suominen was born in 1877 and had built his fortune out of hides. On 16 April 1898, at twenty-one, he opened a tanner's workshop on the Tattaranjoki, making leather by hand for the local shoemakers. The site suited the trade: Pori was twenty kilometres away, the Tampere–Pori rail...

Read more: Nakkila Church on Qualla

Image: Jorma Lindqvist | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nakkila Church: It Must Look Like a Church

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikkoau, CC BY-SA 4.0. Six architects were invited to compete: Elsi Borg, Erkki Huttunen, Carolus Lindberg, Yrjö Lindegren, Bertel Liljequist and Jalmari Peltonen. The brief was almost comic in its caution — the entries had to look like churches, but they were not to be cruciform. Huttunen's answer too...

Read more: Nakkila Church on Qualla

Image: Mikkoau | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nakkila Church: The Grain Silo Argument

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hotarju, CC BY 3.0. Not everyone was pleased. The church was called strange, unchurchlike, a factory in disguise; the rounded end of the chancel, in particular, was said to look like a grain silo. Others saw exactly what Huttunen intended, a form language that belonged to the present rather than to ...

Read more: Nakkila Church on Qualla

Image: Hotarju | CC BY 3.0

Nakkila Church: White Walls, Oak Cross

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe K., CC BY-SA 4.0. Huttunen's nave runs forty-five metres long, sixteen wide and thirteen high, seating about a thousand with another hundred and eighty in the gallery and a chapel for a hundred in the basement. The walls are brick, fifteen metres tall, rendered and whitewashed, carried on reinforc...

Read more: Nakkila Church on Qualla

Image: Joe K. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nakkila Church: What Came After

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kilaseell, CC BY-SA 4.0. The church has aged into consensus. Docomomo, the international body for documenting modern architecture, lists it among the landmark works of Finnish modernism, and in 2004 it was formally protected, along with its surroundings, as part of a nationally significant built cultural...

Read more: Nakkila Church on Qualla

Image: Kilaseell | CC BY-SA 4.0