Aalto's crown jewel opens up to the city of Helsinki

On 3 February, flags were flown across Finland for the celebration of architecture and design held each year on Alvar Aalto’s birthday. Later that same week, an exhibition of work by the 2024 Alvar Aalto medallist – Belgian architect Marie-José Van Hee – opened at the Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki. And, just a month earlier, in perhaps the biggest Aalto-related event of the lot, his late masterpiece, the Finlandia Hall, reopened after an extensive three-year renovation.

Aalto’s close relationship with the Finnish capital began slowly but, as his reputation grew, so did the number of commissions and winning competition entries. As a result, Helsinki today has a total of 19 Aalto buildings, all of them listed and recognised as significant parts of the city’s landscape and built heritage. They range from housing to small pavilions, from industry headquarters to Aalto’s own home and studio. The crown jewel, the congress and concert venue Finlandia Hall, was commissioned by the City of Helsinki in 1962, intended as part of Aalto’s masterplan for the city centre. The masterplan proposed a series of monumental buildings to run alongside the Töölö Bay, but the hall was the only part to be realised.

Finlandia Hall was completed in two parts. The main building with its magnificent concert and event spaces opened in 1971; the congress wing followed in 1975 shortly before Aalto’s death in 1976. Before its renovation, it was already a busy venue, housing 900 events annually, with visitor figures reaching 200,000. But those numbers are expected to double given the hall’s newly upgraded facilities, and the increased activities it will be able to accommodate.

Many of Aalto’s landmark design themes are apparent in Finlandia Hall. There is the union of white marble and cobalt-blue tiles that runs through the building; the asymmetric shapes of the main concert hall, with its fan-like balconies, continue into the facade; the main foyer with its majestic marble stairs leading to the first floor remains one of the most significant interior spaces designed by Aalto; and, of course, furniture, lighting, railings and other details were designed in a holistic fashion with utmost care.

The project has been overseen by Helsinki-based Architects NRT. The practice is not new to Aalto renovations. It recently led the restoration of Helsinki’s House of Culture, an event space originally built in the 1950s as the headquarters for the Finnish Communist Party. In 2017, it won the Finlandia Architecture Award, along with JKMM Architects, for the transformation of the Helsinki University of Technology’s campus library in Espoo into the Harald Herlin Learning Centre.

Finlandia Hall’s renovation included extensive technical and sustainability upgrades, as well as thorough restoration of original surfaces and furnishings. In addition, a large space was carved under the park next to the building to allow for both technical facilities and additional kitchen space. ‘In collaboration with the other partners, we managed to find solutions that didn’t alter the protected building’s appearance and design features,’ explains partner and lead architect Teemu Tuomi. These included the renovation of the hall’s famous marble facades, which had suffered from the Finnish weather. After careful research, an alternative marble from Lasa in Italy was identified, which should be able to last at least 50 years in Helsinki’s climate.

Importantly, the renovation has created new spaces that will be open daily to the public. For Tuomi, this is a significant step: ‘This is a change of direction for the building, previously only accessible to businesses and congress guests,’ he says. ‘With the renovation, we succeeded in bringing to life Finlandia Hall’s new strategy of opening itself to the city.’ These new spaces include a café, restaurant and curated design shop. In addition, two apartments originally intended for employees have now been transformed into accommodation available for anyone to book. Come June, these new facilities will also include a large exhibition space, which has been created in the original rehearsal space for the city’s two orchestras, now relocated to the nearby Helsinki Music Center.

This focus on accessibility was already in evidence during the course of the renovation. Finlandia Hall’s event and congress functions were housed in a temporary 2,700m² wooden building dubbed Pikku-Finlandia (Little Finlandia), designed by Jaakko Torvinen, Havu Järvelä and Elli Wendelin in collaboration with Pekka Heikkinen and Architects NRT. This pavilion will remain in place until the end of the year, when it will be disassembled, moved and re-erected to provide additional space for a local Helsinki school. Its current site at the back of Finlandia Hall was a railway yard at the time of the hall’s opening. Aalto’s original plan to create a massive open terrace here was never realised – some might say fortunately – although the rail tracks are long gone.

Today, Finlandia Hall opens onto the adjacent Töölö Bay park connecting Helsinki’s downtown to a long green finger heading north. Alongside the park there are numerous landmarks, including Oodi Central Library by Helsinki-based practice ALA Architects, completed in 2018, and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art by Steven Holl Architects, completed in 1998. Pikku-Finlandia has proved highly successful as a temporary event space, but perhaps even more importantly has paved the way for Finlandia Hall to lend itself to the park, further establishing the latter as an axis for the cultural institutions it adjoins, and as resource for the city as a whole. The entire park is undergoing an overhaul – landscape architect MASU Planning created a blooming summer garden in 2024 and, once Pikku-Finlandia is relocated at the end of the year, its redesign will be completed.

Simultaneous to this reimagining of Finlandia Hall’s place in Helsinki’s cultural and urban landscape comes a move to recognise its significance for the country’s heritage – its reopening coincides with a new campaign to recognise a series of Aalto buildings scattered across the country as a single UNESCO World Heritage Site, entitled Aalto Works. Discussions around nominating work by Aalto for inclusion on the World Heritage List have been ongoing for around 40 years but only now has this application, prepared by the Finnish Heritage Agency and signed by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, finally been submitted to UNESCO. A decision is expected in 2026.

If successful, Finlandia Hall will be a key part of Finland’s eighth World Heritage Site, in combination with four other Aalto buildings in Helsinki (the Social Insurance Institution Main Office; the House of Culture; the Aalto House; and the Aalto Atelier) and eight other sites across the country (the Sunila housing area in Kotka; Paimio Sanatorium; the Experimental House, Säynätsalo Town Hall and Aalto Campus in Jyväskylä; the Aalto Centre in Seinäjoki; the Church of the Three Crosses in Imatra; and Villa Mairea in Pori). 

All have had an impact on the international development of modern architecture and help to support their local communities today. Importantly, they also highlight architecture’s place in the development of Finland as a Nordic welfare state, and as a member of the international community. For instance, Helsinki’s Social Insurance Institution Main Office can be seen as the ‘headquarters’ of the country’s welfare state while the Aalto Centre in Seinäjoki and the Säynätsalo Town Hall are often described as centres of everyday Finnish democracy. As a well as being a key project for international modernism, the Paimio Sanatorium mirrored advances in medicine and embodied Aalto’s own architecture of care.

With a similar weight in the national story, the Finlandia Hall stands as a key site for the strengthening of Finland’s relationship with the international community. In 1975, soon after the opening of the congress wing, the hall was used to conclude the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, at which 33 heads of state from East and West came together to sign the Helsinki Accords under conditions that have generally become known as the ‘spirit of Helsinki’.

Following this year’s reopening, someone said to me that they could sense a very strong energy inside the building. ‘Perhaps there are ghosts?’ this visitor tentatively asked. Peace-making spirits lingering from 1975’s political meetings would certainly be very welcome today. This magnificent hall will, in any event, now serve as an important backdrop for encounters between the people of Helsinki, carrying with it the message of architecture’s ongoing power to unite.

Hanna Harris is chief design officer at the City of Helsinki 

In numbers:

Total area of renovation 31,140m2
Nominal output of solar panel system 49kWp
Doors repaired 412
Windows repaired 213
Facade panels renewed 11,000