Looking back at it, I’ve been photographing architecture pretty much since my first black-and-white film roll at college. The first semi-amateur photo exhibit I put up consisted of studies of French Gothic cathedrals and pre-historic megaliths.

Growing up in Vyborg, formerly the second-largest city in Finland, which became Soviet territory after the Second World War, I couldn’t help but notice the differences between buildings and districts from the two eras. They clearly spoke different architectural languages, or, if you will, transmitted and implied different states of mind. Vyborg is layered from the medieval castle at its heart out through the old city to the panel housing at its outer limits. But the layer that has always caught my attention was somewhere in the middle — the slender and bare architecture of the 1920s and 30s, the Finnish functionalism.