Chapter 1 | Introductionclearly adopted this new systematic approach in their work.^94 According to Henttonen,
another imprint that Taylorism and Fordism left on hospital design was the new focus
on the work processes taking place in the building. As a result, the number of treatment
rooms was increased and their importance was brought to the fore. Henttonen argued
that rationalisation had a strong impact on hospital building in the early 1900s, and it
gave rise to a new, centralised idea of space and hospital type, the block hospital. The
older pavilion-hospital did not, however, disappear altogether, instead it was incorpo-
rated into the new type.^95
Despite the fact that Henttonen’s study discussed the specialist hospital of the
same period as the present dissertation, the research questions were markedly different.
Henttonen’s point of departure was a certain building type, while the present study was
focused on the relationship between architecture and technology within one project.
Her research context was hospital buildings, while the context for the present study
was technology in construction. Henttonen studied social networks and discourse
taking place within them, while in this study material entities were included alongside
social relations in the analysis of networks. Henttonen’s findings regarding women’s
and children’s hospitals were not all directly applicable to a specialist hospital of a dif-
ferent kind, such as a sanatorium, because the patients and forms of therapies were
significantly different. The treatment in a pulmonary tuberculosis sanatorium was more
passive and was based primarily on rest, diet and physical exercise.^96
Many other monographs on Finnish architecture of this period have also touched
upon the impact of rationalist management methods on architecture, but in these works
rationalisation has not been put forward per se as a determining factor in the research
problem as it was for Henttonen.^97 For example, Finnish art historian Anne Mäkinen
has highlighted in her study Suomen valkoinen sotilasarkkitehtuuri 1926–1939 (White
Military Architecture in Finland, 1926–1939) both the older, more conventional,
and the new, rationalist design principles adopted in the construction of the defence
94 Henttonen has paid attention to the different, sometimes conflicting and contradictory pursuits of the doctors,
state institutions or private owners and the architect. She found that drawing a clear boundary between the
architect and doctor was difficult in hospital design. Doctors were the ones to draw up the room programme and
they had their own ideas of a rationally organised workspace. In Henttonen’s interpretation, translating ideas into
spaces and designing the elevations was left to the architect. Henttonen 2009, p. 321.
95 Henttonen 2009, pp. 321–322.
96 See e.g. Forsius 2002a and 2002b.
97 For example, Henrik Wager discussed the increased efficiency of work in his doctoral dissertation on Bertel
Liljeqvist’s production facilities. Wager 2009; Aino Niskanen’s analysis built on modernity as architect Väinö
Vähäkallio’s personal project and on the influences of modernisation on the remit and networks of the architect.
In Niskanen’s study, rationalist principles were only one factor among many. Niskanen 2005.