Martti Välikangas

Martti Välikangas (born Martti Buddén, August 1, 1893, County of Kuopio – May 9, 1973, Helsinki) was a Finnish architect renowned for the design of so-called "Puu-Käpylä" [Wood-Käpylä], the Garden City housing area in Käpylä near Helsinki, designed in the Nordic Classicism style.

After qualifying Välikangas worked in Yuzovka (present-day Donetsk in Ukraine), but had to leave in a hurry with the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Among his many other positions, he was chief architect at the National Board of Building from 1937 until the Winter War in 1940, from 1942 to 1944 he was head of the office responsible for post-war reconstruction, he acted as the director of the board responsible for the restoration of Turku Castle, he was the chief architect at the Helsinki Workers' Savings Bank, and from 1928 to 1930 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Finnish Architectural Review, in doing so influencing the spread of Modernist architecture in Finland.

The mostly 2-storey semi-detached timber houses are arranged around sheltered courtyards, where originally the tenants’ vegetable gardens were sited.

Käpylä was threatened with demolition in the 1960s, and even Välikangas himself drew up plans for the wooden housing to be replaced by a multi-storey development.