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Finland proposes 13 Alvar Aalto sites for UNESCO World Heritage List

2021-02-03T15:06:00-05:00

Finland is updating its tentative list in line with the World Heritage Agreement [...] At the request of the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Finnish Heritage Agency has produced a proposal for the tentative list, “The Architectural Works of Alvar Aalto – a Human Dimension to the Modern Movement”, which has been created in close collaboration with experts from the Alvar Aalto Foundation and ICOMOS Finland.

According to an announcement by the Alvar Aalto Foundation, the tentative list of Alvar Aalto-designed modern Finnish buildings and districts to be nominated for the UNESCO World Heritage List includes these 13 sites: Studio Aalto; The Aalto House; Finlandia Hall; Social Insurance Institution Main Office; House of Culture; University of Jyväskylä, Aalto Campus; Muuratsalo Experimental House; Paimio Sanatorium; Seinäjoki Civic Centre; Sunila Pulp Mill Residential Area; Säynätsalo Town Hall; Villa Mairea; and the Church of the Three Crosses, Vuoksenniska.

"The full series is still limited, and in practice cannot include all the sites that are considered important," said the foundation's Managing Director Tommi Lindh. "Nevertheless, it will add to interest in Aalto’s production as a whole, and in the Finnish architectural heritage."

The challenges of saving Alvar Aalto's architecture

2019-07-22T17:40:00-04:00

In his 50-year career, Aalto completed some 300 buildings, most of them in Finland. That’s an embarrassment of riches for a country of just 5.5 million people. About half of them are landmarked, and 14 of them, including Säynätsalo Town Hall, have “national monument” status—meaning they are covered by the country’s Act on the Protection of Buildings. Yet many of Aalto’s structures have outlived their original purposes.

The Wall Street Journal just published a captivating long-read by Fred A. Bernstein about the challenges of preserving Alvar Aalto's sizable built body of work when some of the aging buildings no longer serve any practical purpose or become too costly to maintain, including celebrated structures such as the 1933 Paimio Sanatorium, the Säynätsalo Town Hall completed in 1951, or his Finlandia Hall from the early 1970s.

"That puts them in a preservation limbo," writes Bernstein, "too important to tear down, but too expensive to be maintained merely as shrines to their creator."

Putting its future preservation into question, owner of Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium in Finland extends bidding period

2018-09-25T17:54:00-04:00

Considered one of Alvar Aalto's most important works, it came as little surprise that news of a Finnish district's plan to sell the architect's Paimio Sanatorium was met with shock and attempts at appeal.

Architects from the Finnish Association of Architects formed the Pro Paimio Committee and, along with the Alvar Aalto Foundation, have been working to ensure that any future owners commit to preserving the original architecture, interiors and furnishings in their entirety.

Photo: Maija Holma, Alvar Aalto Museum.

The Sanatorium is a protected site and any buyer will have to abide by the restrictions this implicates. However, those advocating on behalf of the key work of modern architecture are concerned that certain new usages could wreck the original interior, which was uniquely tailored to the needs of tuberculosis patients for whom the facility was built.

"Paimio is an integrated oeuvre d’art of architecture: only when all these parts are kept together, do they show the beauty ...

Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium is now for sale

2018-06-06T15:44:00-04:00

Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium in Finland is now for sale. Currently owned by the Hospital District of Southwest Finland, the district has announced its plans to sell the building by fall of 2018. The bidding period will end on August 23.

Paimio Sanatorium by Alvar Aalto, 1933, located in Paimio, Finland. Image: LeonL/Flickr.

Considered a national heritage site, Aalto's Sanatorium was completed in 1933 bringing international recognition to the country. His modern design was carefully tailored to the needs of tuberculosis patients for which the facility was built.

Paimio Sanatorium by Alvar Aalto, 1933, located in Paimio, Finland. Image: LeonL/Flickr.

Paimio Sanatorium by Alvar Aalto, 1933, located in Paimio, Finland. Image...

Exploring Alvar Aalto's "benign errors"

2016-08-30T12:56:00-04:00

Could one of Alvar Aalto's most sublime works be the result of a mistake? And more intriguingly, did Aalto exploit error to acheive a certain aesthetic/politically pointed effect? In this thoughtful piece on Medium, Dan Hill explores the role of "benign errors" in Aalto's work, a term the architect himself coined. Hill centers his focus on the concert hall known as Finlandia, taking particular issue with (but not limiting his scope to) the building's marble facade, noting that:

"Even more remarkably, this apparently uniform and utterly wonderful bowed marble grid appears to have been a mistake, an outcome of the temperature extremes in Helsinki (I’m reminded of the Dali-esque images of failing façades from Jeffrey Inaba's talk at Postopolis regarding Kazakhstan’s -40ºC to +40ºC, though it’s not quite that bad here.)"

For more on the legacy of Alvar Aalto:

For Alvar Aalto's 118th b-day, a museum extension + a few enduring favorites

2016-02-04T14:10:00-05:00

Fittingly for Furniture February, Alvar Aalto would have turned 118 this month, which has prompted Archinect to celebrate his paradigm-defining designs. We're not the only ones: the existing Alvar Aalto Museum and the Museum of Central Finland will be getting an extension (the winners of the competition can be viewed here: http://www.alvaraalto.fi/ruusupuisto). One of the proposals that didn't win features Aalto-specific materiality ("light color clay bricks in grid pattern for the floors and the circulation elements to the original masonry bricks walls in a way to match the colors but announce the new building with a different texture" according to a press release by the design firm Architensions). Here are renderings of Architensions' proposed museum extension:

And, just because we can, a quick tour through some of Aalto's masterful furniture work:

February is furniture month here on Archinect! Send us your furniture musings, interviews, reviews, designs, projects and investigation...

Turning Alvar Aalto's Mount Angel Abbey library into a concert hall

2015-09-25T18:03:00-04:00

Music ensemble Third Angle will team up with choir group Cappella Romana for a new project, “Frozen,” on Oct. 3-4. They’re giving a voice to one of Oregon’s most famous buildings...the Mount Angel Abbey library in St. Benedict, Oregon [...] “We’re going down into a stairwell and we started singing, and we found a pitch that really resonated the hell out of the building...We want this to be, in effect, a harmony of the building. We want to reimagine the building as an instrument.”

A photographic tour of Alvar Aalto's restored Viipuri Library

2015-09-01T14:29:00-04:00

For almost twenty years, The Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library worked to restore Alvar Aalto's rarely seen Viipuri library. Located in Vyborg, Russia, which was under Finnish rule when the library was originally conceived (hence its occasional moniker of the Vyborg Library) the newly restored interior and exterior of the library has been comprehensively photographed by Denis Esakov.

The stark white rectilinear forms of the exterior are counterbalanced by a series of elliptical, curvaceous elements, from the 58 skylights over the reading room to the elegant sweep of the circulation desk and the gradually ascending central staircases.

An auditorium, complete with original furnishings, features a gentle, undulating wooden ceiling.

Built in the pre-digital era, the library has retained some space-saving features from that time, including movable stacks that can be adjusted with a rotating lever.

On the exterior, the placement of the windows within the expanses of wal...

Restoration of Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri Library wins 2014 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize

2014-11-04T17:51:00-05:00

The Finnish Committee for the Restoration of the Viipuri Library with the Central City Alvar Aalto Library in Vyborg recently won the 2014 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize for restoring Alvar Aalto's historic Viipuri Library in Vyborg, Russia. Established in 2008, the prize is awarded biennially for an innovative architectural or design solution that has preserved or enhanced a modern landmark or group of landmarks.

The biennial Knoll Prize will be presented at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City on December 1, followed by a free public lecture from the winners. The prize includes a cash award of $10,000 and a limited edition Mies van der Rohe-designed Barcelona Chair from Knoll.

The Viipuri Library, c. 1935 ↓

Find more photos and other details on Bustler.

NIMBYs go to court over "modern" home; Zaha gets an apology; global warming rages on: News Round-Up for August 25, 2014

2014-09-02T20:07:00-04:00

Friday, August 29:

MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike: The prototype is currently being used to create a mental-map and guidebook for NYC, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign will attempt to fund the project for commercial sale.
In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass: Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war made much of Beirut's green space inaccessible or dysfunctional. The Beirut Green Project is trying to bring at least a modicum of green space back to the city's residents.

Thursday, August 28:

Norwegian artists plan to open art academy in North Korea: Nothing's final yet, but the school is committed to its disbelief in sanctions or boycotts on art.
Alvar Aalto gets a close look from Google's Cultural Institute: Google's cameras go inside the famous Finnish architects studio, as well as a selection of his works, for a curated photo-exhibition.

Wednesday, August 27:

China considering drastic ban on coal: Chinese news outlets claim that work is underway to ban coal in Bei...

Alvar Aalto gets a close look from Google's Cultural Institute

2014-08-28T15:53:00-04:00

Google's satellite imaging allows us to virtually tour remote or inaccessible locales the world over, and with recently improved resolutions and initiatives from the Google Cultural Institute, our gaze can go farther and more intimately into places we may never physically visit. Google's interest in maintaining this visual resource has implications as far-reaching as its imagery, but it's also a boon for architecture education, where access to imagery and certain spaces can be highly exclusive, and retaining a global (and historical) perspective is exceedingly important.

To this end, Google's Cultural Institute has partnered with the Alvar Aalto Foundation in order to make the famous Finnish architect's spaces (and of course his famous stool no. 60) available online in 360-degree panoramas, detailing every surface. The partnership's collection focuses on eight sites, including Aalto's studio, Säynätsalo Town Hall, and the House Kantola, as well as an exhibition at the Aalto Museum in...

Editor's Picks #261

2012-04-22T22:54:00-04:00

In anticipation of the Publish Or... bracket [GOES SOFT] event at WUHO Gallery this past Thursday, April 19, Archinect showcased a few select projects from the book including GROUNDING: Landslide Mitigation Housing Jared Winchester / Viktor Ramos. Orhan Ayyüce opined “Let the earth slide. don't build in land slide areas. another anology to this is seminal article by mike davis, ‘let malibu burn’ meaning don't build in areas where nature has a way of acting up."

For current feature 525 Golden Gate Seismically and Systematically Sustainable I spoke with architect David Hobstetter, of the San Francisco firm KMD Architects. David made the case for seismic resilience as a key factor in discussing his building’s sustainability. Particularly, within a regional context and as part of a rating system like LEED.

On a related note Bill Lascher wrote Disaster Resilience Part of Sustainability, Too, an article for Miller McCune wherein Erik Kneer, an associate engineer at Degenkolb argues that LEED scoring should "be more closely tied to a project’s regional context. Along the Pacific Coast, for example, regionalization credits might be based on a building’s seismic performance, while in the Southeast credits might be issued for the ability to withstand hurricanes". Lascher reports that "many regional chapters have advocated for such credits, and chapters can adapt their guidelines somewhat to address regional concerns, but disaster resiliency hasn...