used in the water treatment facility. It may well be that the drawing of the bedside table
has disappeared or that the architect paid a visit to the workshop and directly instructed
the manufacturers. In addition, the architectural drawing of the patient room light fitting
does not correspond to the actual one made. There is, however, a modest pencil sketch that
is very close to the actual light fitting design. The drawings, in other words, do not fully
reveal how certain features came into being. Some of the drawings, such as the detailed
working drawings for the steel windows were created at the drawing department of the
subcontractor, Crichton-Vulcan. The series of engineer’s drawings in the Paimio Hospital
Archive is incomplete. Only part of the series of structural drawings that were used at
the building site of the main building has been preserved. These drawings had markings
that were made on site, including dates, which provided a great deal of new information
and enabled their comparison to architectural drawings and decision-making documents.
Some drawings were missing, such as the overall structural drawing of the sundeck wing,
which the engineer most likely drew. Similarly, drawings were missing from water and
sewage piping plans, such as the interim-stage drawings indicating space requirements for
the sewage system for the patient room. Drawings on the biological treatment plant were
also missing. Owing to the gaps in the drawings, I was obliged to rely on other, mainly
written documents, as sources.
The architectural drawings included standard drawings, which were idealised pres-
entations of a feature and which were not as such reliable sources for establishing the
developments during the construction process, but which were interpreted as more
general expressions of the architect’s intents.
Aalto was highly aware of the power of mass media and he exploited it to commu-
nicate his ideas, as prescribed by CIAM’s mission. The visuality of Aalto’s articles on
Paimio in the Swedish journal Byggmästaren (The Master Builder), the Finnish journal
Arkkitehti (The Finnish Architectural Journal) and the publication Varsinais-Suomen
tuberkuloosiparantola (The Tuberculosis Sanatorium of Southwest Finland) was analysed.
Special attention was paid to which characteristics he highlighted, and which aspects he
gave no attention to. This visual material revealed which characteristics Aalto considered
worth presenting, and is discussed in Chapter 2. Photographs of Paimio Sanatorium
from Aalto’s office, including photos taken by Aino Marsio-Aalto and Gustaf Welin,
have been used as factual evidence on how a part of the building was constructed.
Emil Henriksson’s working drawings on the reinforced concrete skeleton^219 were
arranged in chronological order according to their date. When drawings were organised
in this way and compared to the minutes, the drawings revealed, among other things,
the steps and the approximate schedule according to which the reinforced concrete
skeleton was built. In this study the architectural drawings and the constructional
designs were set side by side in order to visualise interaction.
219 Copies of the original working drawings are located in the PSA. The selection is, however, incomplete. Some of
the Paimio Hospital archive (PSA) was transferred to the Turku University Central Hospital main archive between
2013 and 2014.