St. John's Church

This guide to St. John's Church in Helsinki examines its title as the largest stone church in Finland and the trick behind it: granite footings that give way, above head height, to plastered brick doing the work of stone. It follows architect Adolf Melander's builders through the 1888 to 1891 construction on Punanotko hill, weighing the cost of quarrying granite against shaping brick into Gothic Revival tracery. The finished church could seat as many as three thousand people, and its Walcker organ was, that same year, the largest in the country.