Helsinki Cathedral

Twelve zinc apostles stand watch from the roofline of Helsinki Cathedral, each clutching their traditional emblems – Peter with his keys, Thomas with his right-angle, Simon with his saw. They weren’t supposed to be there. Carl Ludvig Engel spent years perfecting his elegantly austere design for Helsinki’s Lutheran cathedral, a monument to architectural restraint. He then inconveniently died in 1840 before anyone could stop the building committee from deciding his nearly-finished masterpiece looked “unbalanced.”

Enter Ernst Lohrmann, who remedied this alleged problem by adding four corner domes, two pavilions, and twelve three-meter apostles cast in Berlin. Engel’s exercise in simplicity became a neoclassical cathedral with a dozen metal apostles watching from the roof – presumably including one patron saint of design-by-committee.

The modifications proved oddly appropriate for a building that spent most of its life reinventing itself. Construction dragged across 22 years, outliving its architect and surviving Finland’s political transformation from Russian imperial outpost to independent nation. Consecrated in 1852 as St. Nicholas’ Church to honor the Tsar, it spent 65 years as a symbol of imperial rule before Finland’s 1917 independence prompted a rebrand: out with the royal namesake, in with the considerably less controversial “Helsinki Cathedral.”

Today it anchors the neoclassical city center Engel designed himself – making him one of history’s rare architects who lived to see his urban vision realized, if not his cathedral completed as planned. Twelve apostles still keep watch overhead, eternal proof that sometimes the best monuments to restraint are the ones that didn’t quite stay restrained.