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PA I M IO SA NAT OR I U M
AALTO’S TUBERCULOSIS FACILITY OPENED IN SOUTHWESTERN FINLAND
IN 1933. IT L ATER SERVED AS A HOSPITAL AND IS NOW PARTIALLY USED
AS A CHILDREN’S REHABILITATION CENTER. L AST YE AR ITS OWNER PUT IT
UP FOR SALE BUT FOUND NO SUITABLE BUYERS, AND A COMMIT TEE WAS
ESTABLISHED TO DEVISE A VIABLE FUTURE FOR THE BUILDING.
LOCAL COLOR
From top: Signature orange and
green awnings; the sanatorium’s
cafeteria. Opposite: The main
lobby, furnished with Aalto chairs.NEXT STEPS
Left: A stairway,
painted yellow
to lift the spirits
of the sanatorium’s
patients during
Finland’s long, dark
winters. Below: The
building’s exterior.Säynätsalo building, up to a point. “Harri is keeping it going, but in
the long term it needs a real user,” says Lindh, who calls the current
arrangement “very, very temporary.” Yet asked whether he has seen
a viable plan for the building, Lindh answers, “Not yet.” Säynätsalo’s
remoteness—it’s on an island about 135 miles north of Helsinki—
makes many proposed uses for the building unrealistic.
Sampo Terho, the Finnish minister for European affairs, culture
and sports, says that Aalto’s buildings are “a very valuable cultural
legacy.” But that doesn’t mean the government can simply buy the
buildings and preserve them. “The resources of the Finnish state are
not ample enough to extend to maintaining large property assets
with little or no function for the state,” Terho wrote in an email.
“State ownership is not automatically the best solution.”
To some Finns, Aalto is a national hero, along with the composer
Jean Sibelius and the runner Paavo Nurmi. At the same time, Aalto’s
Finnish fans have the sense that they’re in the minority. “It’s a curi-
ous thing,” says Juhani Eskola, a retired principal who now serves
as a guide to the architect’s buildings, suggesting that Aalto is less
highly regarded in Helsinki than in, say, New York. (Aalto himself
may have felt the same way: He named his boat Nemo Propheta in
Patria—“No man is a prophet in his own land.”)
It’s true that Aalto’s renown was strongly tied to the New World.
Born in 1898, he set up his practice in Jyväskylä in 1923. Just 15 years
later, i n 1938, he beca me one of t he fi rst a rc h itec ts to have a solo show
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. And his Finnish Pavilion at the
1939 New York World’s Fair was called “a work of genius” by Wright.
During the postwar years, Aalto was the de facto leader of a group
of designers who helped Finland wield outsize cultural influence
abroad. In the 1950s and ’60s, a Connecticut hostess might have
worn a Marimekko dress, drunk from a Tapio Wirkkala glass and
reclined in one of Aalto’s Paimio chairs, created for tuberculosis
patients but later sold by Artek, a company co-founded by Aalto and
his first wife, Aino Marsio-Aalto. Design, with Aalto’s help, became a
leading Finnish export.
Yet Aalto only occasionally built outside Finland. At the same time
his products were becoming popular overseas, he was busy blanket-
ing his home country with buildings. Säynätsalo Town Hall is one of
the most admired, and Aalto wanted it to remain pristine. According
to the architect’s biographer, Göran Schildt, in 1954 Aalto saw that
a local savings bank had hung a neon sign on the building. Aalto
found the sign “so disfiguring,” Schildt wrote, “that he smashed it
by throwing stones at it. The action was reported to the police, and
Aalto was sued for damages, but the sign did not go up again.”
Yet it is easier to protect a building from misuse than from creep-
ing disuse. Aalto’s magnum opus ceased to be a town hall in 1993,
when Säynätsalo was absorbed into Jyväskylä. Over time, the
building emptied out; the council chamber hasn’t housed a council
meeting in more than a decade.
Taskinen says renting its guest rooms can bring in up to 800
euros a night. (His organization, Tavolo Bianco, pays a percentage
of its revenue to the city.) A cafe below the council chamber—a sepa-
rate business—has become popular with locals; the menu includes a
cake made with black currant and vanilla, said to be two of Aalto’s
favorite ingredients. But the building is hardly the center of activity
it was meant to be. Aalto’s buildings can be poor candidates for reuse
because, unlike Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, Aalto wasn’t
looking to create easily adaptable “universal” spaces.
The Paimio Sanatorium is a case in point. With its white stucco
exterior, pipe railings and strips of metal-framed windows, it may
look like a Corbusian building, a kind of detail-less machine for con-
valescing. But as the critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen has noted,
“Aalto’s design emerged only after he projected users’ daily rituals
and routines, their psychological reactions to room forms, to shades
and degrees of colors, to types and intensities of light, variations in
temperature, types or degrees of ventilation, and levels of noise.”
Aalto went so far as to design special sinks for the sanatorium’s77