Senaatintori

This guide to Senaatintori in Helsinki traces architect Carl Ludvig Engel's design for Senate Square, begun in 1818 after the tsar made Helsinki Finland's capital, and left unfinished at his death in 1840 partway through the cathedral's construction. It follows what he actually built with: bare granite bedrock blasted to lay foundations, and cheap brick buildings dressed in stucco to imitate the marble he admired in Berlin and Saint Petersburg. His successor, Ernst Lohrmann, kept building the square the same way, following the same plaster trick Engel never lived to see finished.