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
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."
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