Prime Minister's Office (Finland)
The Senate of Finland was founded on 18 August 1809 in the Grand Duchy of Finland when Emperor Alexander I of Russia signed a standing order on its establishment at Peterhof Palace. The Senate was initially called the Governing Council until it was renamed as the Senate in 1816. The Senate of Finland was divided into the Economic and Judicial Divisions; the Economic Division was further divided into departments, such as the Office Administrative Department (; ). On 1 October 1892, the Office Administrative Department was disbanded and the modern equivalent position of Prime Minister in the Senate, the Vice-Chairman of the Economic Division, was granted a support office in its place. The new unit was called the Office of the Economic Division (; ). Following Finnish independence in 1917, the unit was renamed as the Prime Minister's Office on 27 November 1918 with the operations and staff remaining intact.
Architecture of Finland
The cornerstone of Finland as a state was laid in 1809 at the Diet of Porvoo, where Czar Alexander I proclaimed himself constitutional ruler of the new Grand Duchy of Finland and promised to maintain the faith and laws of the land. The creation of a capital was a clear indication of the Czar's will to make the new Grand Duchy a functioning entity. On April 8, 1812 Alexander I declared Helsinki the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland. At that time Helsinki was only a small wooden town of about 4000 inhabitants, albeit with huge island fortress of Sveaborg and its military garrison nearby. The czar appointed the military engineer Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, a former courtier of Sweden's King Gustavus III, as head of the reconstruction committee, with the task of drawing up a plan for a new stone-built capital. The heart of the scheme was the Senate Square, surrounded by Neoclassical buildings for the state, church and university. In the words of art historian Riitta Nikula, Ehrenström created "the symbolic heart of the Grand Duchy of Finland, where all the main institutions had an exact place dictated by their function in the hierarchy."