Built to Last

On a tour of southern Finland, Michael Snyder visits the enduring masterworks of architect Alvar Aalto.

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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 (doubles from $135).