75

BY FRED A. BERNSTEIN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GIULIO GHIRARDI

The 20th-century Finnish architect created some of the world’s most studied and revered

structures. What happens when they no longer serve any practical purpose?

Can Alvar Aalto’s Greatest

Buildings Find New Life?

W

HEN HARRI TASKINEN, a graphic

designer and editor from

Helsinki, moved to the central

Finnish village of Säynätsalo in

2015, to be near his mother, he

discovered that the local town

hall had been shuttered. Säynätsalo had merged with

the neighboring city of Jyväskylä, which “didn’t have

the resources to keep it open,” Taskinen explains.

But the Säynätsalo Town Hall, completed in 1952,

couldn’t be ignored: A red brick compound arrayed

around a raised courtyard, in an arrangement that

mimics the contours of an Italian hill town, it’s

considered one of the three or four most important

works of Alvar Aalto, Finland’s greatest architect

and a peer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van

der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Taskinen sent an email to

the town, offering to open the building for tours, rent

its bedrooms (which originally housed municipal

employees and guests) through Airbnb and run his

business out of its offices. The local government, he

says, “saw a win-win situation.”

Taskinen signed a contract with the town, and three

years later his business is booming. An affable jack-

of-all-trades, he recently got a taxi license so he can

shuttle visitors to other Aalto buildings in the area,

including the architect’s summer house in nearby

Muuratsalo. Meanwhile, those visitors, mainly for-

eign architects and architecture students, have been

teaching him about his countryman. “When I moved to

Säynätsalo, I knew almost nothing about Alvar Aalto,”

he admits. Now Taskinen, 56, is a convert who recently

published a book about Aalto in Finnish.

One of the greatest architects of the 20th century,

Aalto was also one of the most expressive. As Mies and

Le Corbusier were finding ways to standardize archi-

tectural elements, Aalto was taking another tack. “He

was the first architect to show that it was possible to

employ craft and natural materials in ways that were

consistent with the tenets of modernism,” says Barry

Bergdoll, a Columbia University architectural histo-

rian and MoMA curator. According to architect and

Harvard professor Toshiko Mori, Aalto “imbued oth-

erwise canonical modern architecture with humanist

values and perspective.”

In his 50-year career, Aalto completed some 300

buildings, most of them in Finland. That’s an embar-

rassment 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 pur-

poses. That puts them in a preservation limbo: too

important to tear down, but too expensive to be main-

tained merely as shrines to their creator.

Among these buildings is the Paimio Sanatorium,

a seven-story pinwheel-shaped structure in south-

western Finland, completed in 1933 as a tuberculosis

treatment center. These days, the sanatorium, also

a national monument, is only partially used, and its

owner, the local hospital district, “wants to abandon

its ownership,” says Aalto’s grandson Heikki Alanen,

who is part of a committee charged with finding a sus-

tainable operating model for the building. Meanwhile,

Aalto’s workers’ housing in Kauttua, north of Paimio,

is on the market; it was built for a Finnish company

that has sold its main Kauttua operations to a Japanese

conglomerate. And in Helsinki, Aalto’s Hall of Culture,

where everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Lady Gaga has

per for med, a lso sits pa r t ia l ly empt y. Its ow ner, a n a r m

of the Finnish government, is considering selling it.

“We’re losing the owners, and that’s a new thing,”

says Tommi Lindh, the managing director of the

Alvar Aalto Foundation, a private organization that

receives funding from the Finnish government. At

his office upstairs from the Alvar Aalto Museum in

Jyväskylä—the city where Aalto spent much of his

childhood—Lindh points out that, though many of

Aalto’s buildings are landmarked, the “designation

only works if you have someone to turn the heat on in

the winter, to do the hands-on maintenance work.” No

law can force owners to spend millions of dollars to

maintain a building, no matter how many architecture

books it appears in. “If the owner doesn’t want to own

the building anymore, we’re in trouble,” Lindh says.

Lindh appreciates what Taskinen is doing for the

MASTER BUILDER

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1957. Opposite: A terrace

at Paimio Sanatorium, one of his best-known works.

ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES