11/16/98 WIRED TO THE WORLD--WITHOUT WIRES

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WIRED TO THE WORLD--WITHOUT WIRES

Finnish architect and industrial designer Jari Salmela does some of his best work sitting in a pine forest about 60 feet from the Baltic Sea. With his Toshiba 300CDD Satellite laptop close at hand, he's free to enjoy nature, reinvigorate himself with a plunge in the sea, and create when the inspiration strikes. ''In architecture and design, the work is impulsive,'' says Salmela, 34. ''You have to be able to switch on the computer when the idea comes to you, and this is where ideas come.''
Salmela's two-year-old company, Space Plan, designs everything from furniture to new interiors for 100-year-old buildings. While he still sketches with pen and paper at times, Salmela's passion is virtual 3D modeling, which can be as realistic as a photograph. At Space Plan's headquarters in Helsinki, Salmela has a custom-built desktop with an Intel Corp. (INTC) Pentium II processor (266 MHz) and 128 megabytes of memory.
TALL ORDER. On the road or at his cottage, Salmela depends on his Toshiba laptop to run all of his powerful software. Although the 3D modeling is a bit slow, the mobility is worth it. Two years ago, he received a wave of remodeling projects for executive office suites in Russia. Working mostly at the cottage, he created dozens of photo-like designs that showed clients what the remodeled offices would look like.
And even though the cottage has no phone line, Salmela can send designs to clients from his hideaway. How? He zaps the information over his wireless phone. With his Nokia (NOK.A) 9000 cell phone and a data card in the portable, he can transmit a weekend's worth of designs in seconds to another electronic address or to a printer.
Still, Salmela wants more out of his tech tools. ''The ideal computer should learn my handwriting,'' he says. ''And when I draw an arch, it should say, 'Do you really mean that? Or do you think it should be like this?''' That's a tall order. But Salmela's work is sure to keep him testing the creative limits of computers.
By Gail Edmondson in Paris

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