Monday, September 5, 2016

Museum of Worker Housing, Amuri, Tampere


The Museum of Worker Housing, in Amuri, an inner suburb of the second largest Finnish city, Tampere, preserves a block of late 19th-century residences in situ, calculated to spin a narrative of different (fictional) lives led in the rooms and other spaces of working-class domiciles up until the postwar period (all but this one block in Amuri was demolished for high rise buildings in the 1970s). The sequence from private to public citizen is clear from these buildings: individuals would share, or occupy alone, small rooms including bare essentials for sleeping and dining; they would then venture outside their doors into shared kitchen spaces which all rooms adjoined; they might then emerge into shared courtyard spaces, where lavatories and other communal ablution facilities were located, and which seemed to function as community spaces unique to the blocks themselves. While there are some gates to the street on the extant Amuri block, the majority of the block street frontage is taken up by the external walls of the housing and one or two shops.
Note image above includes ghost plasma of creepy playing children - us historians are used to them





The benches below are presumably for school or other tour groups - there is also a room approximating a classroom which would seat far fewer.




A place to put your entry stickers as you leave. Handy.


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