Seeing Alvar Aalto’s Buildings in Finland Changed How I Think About Midcentury Design

When Finnish architects Alvar and Aino Aalto completed their Paimio Sanatorium in 1933, the streamlined building must have looked like an emissary from the future, set down in a forest of fragrant pine. Finland, which had emerged just 16 years earlier from centuries of rule by the Swedish and Russian Empires, remained, for the most part, a rural backwater—a far cry from the affluent Nordic state it is today. Particularly in the countryside, architecture consisted of wood-framed cottages, rustic lakeside saunas, and the occasional granite church.

Paimio was something else entirely. A tall, slender slab of blazing white, the sanatorium exemplified the radical functionality of Modernism, at that time still in its infancy. The Aaltos, a husband-and-wife duo, conceived every detail of the building to improve the day-to-day lives of the tuberculosis patients who would one day be cared for there. They set ceiling lights in inverted glass calderas so they wouldn’t gather dust, designed door handles that wouldn’t catch doctors’ coat sleeves, and brightened the stairs and corridors with linoleum in shades of turquoise and canary. As Alvar famously declared: “The main purpose of the building is to function as a medical instrument.” 

The sanatorium, which took its name from the town of Paimio, put the Aaltos on the world’s cultural map. After more than 80 years as a working hospital, it opened to the public for visits in 2021; last year it began hosting overnight guests in seven restored rooms.

Finland is often thought of as a land of forests, lakes, and endless snow, illuminated by the fluorescent currents of the aurora borealis. But the country offers so much more, including the opportunity to immerse oneself in the world that Alvar Aalto built, first with Aino and then, after her death in 1949, with his second wife and collaborator, Elissa. Where the cool, rigorous rationality of other famed Modernists, such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, can feel alienating, Aalto’s human scale and natural materials—wood paneling, brass door handles wrapped in leather—make him one of the most universally beloved builders of the 20th century. I’d never visited any of the Aaltos’ buildings, so when an opportunity arose to visit Finland, I decided to go and see as many as I could. I’d also, where possible, spend the night in the Aalto-designed structures that have, in recent years, opened rooms for guests.

My trip started in the calm, orderly capital of Helsinki. I saw Aalto everywhere—in the marble glacier of his late-career Finlandia Hall, in the city center, and the moving simplicity of his own home and studio in the suburb of Munkkiniemi. I also noticed his influence in the ubiquitous birch furniture around the city, based on designs for Artek, the company that he and Aino founded. Then there were the sleek, geometric façades, created by his contemporaries and successors, clad in brick, wood, and copper: Aalto’s materials as the national vernacular.

The true Aalto heartland, however, lies three hours north of the capital, where the architect grew up and started his career. On my way, I stopped in the mill town of Säynätsalo. Aalto designed Säynätsalo Town Hall, which was completed in 1952 and soon became emblematic of his middle period. With its central piazza, tranquil community library, and a soaring council hall—as hushed as a Gothic church—the red-brick structure was modest in scale but expansive in its vision of a shared civic life. 

Yet when Harri Taskinen, who had worked in Helsinki as a graphic designer, moved there in 2016, the population had shrunk and the town hall had fallen into disuse. After noticing disconsolate tourists wandering the perimeter, Taskinen proposed installing a café on the ground floor and restoring the building’s four spacious apartments into modest but comfortable rooms filled with Artek furniture. Since it reopened to the public in 2018, the town hall has received more than 33,000 visitors—10 times the town’s population, and proof of Aalto’s enduring draw. After checking in, I sat out in the building’s grassy piazza reading until sundown.

I woke early the next morning to dappled autumn sunlight filtering through pine trees. I biked to the neighboring island of Muuratsalo, where Alvar and Elissa built their summer home in 1954. They wrapped its central courtyard in a brickwork quilt. Today those walls read as an architectural language in the making. “It was a working laboratory,” said Timo Riekko, the head of collections at the Alvar Aalto Foundation, the institution charged with conserving Aalto’s material and intellectual legacy.

My next stop was the city of Jyväskylä, where I visited the dazzling Aalto2 Museum Center, near the monumental red-brick campus he designed for the city’s university. In its sun-washed galleries, the permanent exhibition follows the arc of his career, which mirrored Finland’s transformative 20th century: plans on display for 1930s factory towns manifested socialist ideals for an industrializing state; civic centers for the cities of Seinäjoki and Rovaniemi from the 1950s and 60s demonstrate the scale of the country’s postwar urbanization. Aalto’s story and Finland’s seemed inseparable.

Leaving Jyväskylä, I headed southwest toward the factory town of Kauttua, along highways that skirted slate-blue lakes and gold-leafed birch trees. There, Aalto built prefabricated housing, a laundry, and a sauna. But his best-known project is Terraced House, constructed in 1938, with six apartments that cascade down a wooded hillside. (One now serves as a gallery of vintage Artek furniture, most of it for sale.) Rather than soaring skyward like a Modernist tower, his ideal multifamily block “dances with nature,” as Aatu Kavalto, my guide at the Aalto2 Museum Center, put it, describing the low-profile building set amid the trees.

I stayed that night in Villa Aalto, a low-key, 11-room lodging originally designed as a dormitory for Kauttua’s secretaries—part of the Finnish visionary’s wide-ranging master plan for the community. Villa Aalto, with its modest rooms, charming front portico, traditional hip roofline, and wooden beams, speaks to the easy sincerity of his early designs: vernacular elements at odds with the Modernist dogmas of the day. The next morning, after a steam at the Jokisauna—the only one of Aalto’s two dozen or so saunas still in public use—I continued south to the picturesque village of Ekenäs, where he built his last private home, Villa Skeppet, for his friend and biographer Göran Schildt.

A blanket of clouds was dropping a fine mist over Ekenäs, and the inside of Villa Skeppet, which opened to the public in May 2021, felt like a warm embrace. Though it’s smaller than some of the more famous homes—such as Villa Mairea, in Noormarkku—Skeppet unfurls off a luminous central hall in a sequence of compact but graciously proportioned rooms. Jennifer Dahlbäck, executive director of the Christine and Göran Schildt Foundation, described it to me as “a jewel box that opens again and again.” Every surface was carefully considered, from the navy-and-black ceramic tiles in the open kitchen to the sculptural plaster mantelpiece in the upstairs living room, where a raked ceiling reaches skyward to grasp at the scant rays of northern sun. 

By the time he completed the house in 1970, six years before his death, Aalto had gone from being a charismatic wunderkind to a prolific patriarch of Nordic design. He may have built bigger, more important buildings in his late career, but the Schildts’ intimate home felt to me like an apotheosis.

The next morning, I drove an hour northwest—and 40 years back in time—to the Paimio Sanatorium. I spent the afternoon gathering wild blueberries in the surrounding woods where, 90 years ago, patients took the resinous air as part of their treatment. The forest was a medical instrument, too—as much a part of the hospital’s architecture as any lamp or chair.

That night, my palms still stained a lurid purple, I wandered through the building. No less than at Villa Skeppet, the silent halls exuded empathy, care, and even contentment, which I’d come to recognize as the through line of Aalto’s work—and of Finland’s egalitarian culture. It’s said that architecture, like any art form, reflects the society that makes it. Aalto proved that architecture, at its best, can shape society, too. 

A version of this story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Built to Last.”