House under Construction 1954

Tuulikki Pietilä created this lithograph, titled "House under Construction," capturing a moment of creation and transformation. The scaffolding, a dominant visual element, speaks to more than just physical construction; it mirrors the scaffolding of ideas, dreams, and societal structures. The grid-like framework appears throughout art history, evoking not only progress, but also constraint. Think of the rigid city plans of the Renaissance compared to Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons," where the scaffolding morphs into labyrinthine entrapments. The unfinished nature of the house, stripped bare, resonates with our own psychological projections onto the blank canvas of the future. This reflects both the potential for growth and the anxiety of uncertainty, as the unfinished structure engages our subconscious, tapping into our deepest fears and hopes about what we build for ourselves and our communities. As we consider our own cultural memory, let us consider how symbols of progress and stability have been continuously reconstructed, reshaped, and reimagined.