Background
Wivi Lönn was born as Olivia Mathilda Lönn. She was born on May 20, 1872. Her father was Wilhelm Lönn, a local brewer, and her mother Mathilda Siren.
Wivi Lönn was born as Olivia Mathilda Lönn. She was born on May 20, 1872. Her father was Wilhelm Lönn, a local brewer, and her mother Mathilda Siren.
Wivi Lonn attended the Suomalainen tyttökoulu, a girls’ school in Tampere of which her father, Emanuel Wilhelm Lonn, had been one of the founders.
Her teacher, the architect Georg Schreck, recommended a move to Helsinki as a special-entry student at the Polytechnical Institute of Finland. Lonn studied there for the next three academic years, graduating as an architect in 1896 - the fifth woman in Finland to do so.
Lonn began her career by working in the offices of two of her former teachers. She started at Onni Tarjanne’s office even before graduating, being forced to do so for financial reasons. After her graduation, she worked for over a year in the office of her main teacher of architecture, Gustal Nystrom. Nystrom gave her responsible assignments and helped in the advancement of her career in all sorts of other ways. On Nystrom’s recommendation, Lonn received a grant to study brick and granite architecture and school construction on the Continent and in the British Isles.
The main destination of her study trip, conducted in the summer of 1898, was Scotland, which had become known in the Nordic countries for its noteworthy granite architecture. Lonn also toured schools in the Aberdeen area and was greatly impressed by the importance given to hygiene and a homely atmosphere in British school design. After this trip, she began to adapt the design principle that she had picked up in Britain, by which the rooms of a school were grouped around open halls. This was something fairly new in Finnish school design.
And the emphasis in Lonn’s career in fact continued to lie heavily on school design. She planned more than 30 schools throughout the country; the first were for her home town Tampere. The second trait that characterised Lonn’s career was her success in architectural competitions.
The first joint building plans by Lonn and Lindgren were competition entries for a building for the student associations (‘Nations’) at the University, a building that was subsequently erected. This was followed by new competition projects for a theatre and concert-hall complex in Tallinn, which was also built, as well as plans for a shopping arcade in Helsinki, work in which a third architect, Bertel Liljeqvist, was involved.
One such early commission was for the design of the Tampereen Talouskoulu, a household management school, which went to Lonn in 1902. Another important step in Lonn’s career was her planning of the Ebeneser training institute for kindergarten teachers at Sornainen in Helsinki in 1906, thanks to which she became a well-known architect among various womens organisations. The most notable ol these was the Helsinki Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which commissioned its large central building from Wivi Lonn in the early 1920s.
Success in competitions also brought Wivi Lonn a large amount of work in the design of private villas.
Lonn made a name for herself as an architect mainly through her competition victories and her designs for schools. As far as floor plans for schools are concerned, she may be regarded as an innovator in her profession. Despite this, the written history of architecture consigned her to oblivion for decades. Lindgren’s and Lonn’s great joint achievements were generally attributed only to the male architect. Before her death Wivi Lonn did, however, receive at least partial recognition for her life’s work when in 1939 she was made an honorary professor.
