- Exhibitions
13 Stories about Humane Design
- Aika 24.04.2026
- 10.01.2027
The Alvar Aalto Museum’s summer exhibition in the Aalto2 Museum Centre’s Gallery tells 13 stories about Alvar Aalto’s design and human-centred thinking.
”In the afternoon, I reach a floor where, unlike all the others, the surface is wood. People unknown to me sit in chairs in a queue along the corridor. They are waiting to get into the closed rooms on the other side. I catch onto the brass of the low-hanging lamps and fall onto the faces of those waiting, leaving gold beneath their tired eyes.”
The summer exhibition, 13 Stories about Humane Design, tells stories about architecture. The Alvar Aalto Museum has invited writer Sanna Puutonen to empathise with Aalto’s buildings via the experiences of their users: the result is thirteen fictional stories. The stories are snapshots that bring the buildings to life. They add a human layer to the architecture, the main character in and around the built space can be someone settling into a house, sensing its atmospheres or, for instance, watching the play of light on the surfaces of its different materials.
The exhibition stages an intriguing dialogue between Aalto’s designs and fictional users’ experiences. What does a new home look like through the eyes of a child? What does it sound like when architecture resonates? How does a hospital building boost patients’ sense of community? The exhibition seeks new approaches to architecture – and, above all, it views Alvar Aalto’s buildings from a humane perspective.
“As an artform, architecture is like music. Like a symphony that has its beginnings in the composer’s pen. For it to be created, architecture, too, requires cooperation between professionals from different fields. It only takes on its final form in interaction with its audience or its users. It’s impossible to write about architecture – and especially about Alvar Aalto – without taking the human factor into account,” Sanna Puutonen says.
“Aalto’s buildings came about during a period of transition, when Finland developed into the welfare state that we know today. The texts in the exhibition each offer one perspective on the significance of Aalto’s works, not just in the lives of individuals, but in Finnish society as a whole,” Puutonen says of the process involved in producing the exhibition texts.
The idea of interdisciplinarity in art originally came from Alvar Aalto, who hoped that the museum that bears his name would become a vital, functional art institution, a shared forum for different branches of art. The museum is responding to Aalto’s wishes with an exhibition that highlights the conversation between different artforms by combining architecture with literature – and also by creating a reading experience out of responses to architecture.
The exhibition’s visual identity was designed by architect Justiina Mäenpää.
View from the living room of Villa Mairea (1938–39) towards the garden. Maire Gullichsen and Aino Aalto in the doorway in the 1940s.
Photograph by Gustaf Welin © Alvar Aalto Foundation.
Alvar Aalto’s 13 key buildings
The 13 sites of the series include key symbolic buildings in Finland’s development as a Nordic welfare state and member of the international community. Such are the Social Insurance Institution Main Office in Helsinki as the “headquarters of the welfare society”, as well as the Aalto Centre in Seinäjoki and the Säynätsalo Town Hall as centres of everyday democracy serving the needs of the local population.
The Finlandia Hall in Helsinki served as a stage for world politics at the time of its completion. The House of Culture is a landmark of the Helsinki working-class district built in the 1950s, a gathering place for all enthusiasts of intellectual and physical culture. The Paimio Sanatorium served as a model for the consideration of developments in medicine and psychology as well as utilizing architecture as an institution that supports the patient’s quality of life and treatment.
The Sunila housing area in Kotka is an early forest suburb that showed a new direction in the design of traditional factory workers’ housing areas. The Aalto Campus, part of the Jyväskylä University’s Seminaarinmäki campus that received the European Heritage Label in 2022, represents the possibilities for spiritual development of both society and individuals. Many citizens of Imatra can name the Church of the Three Crosses as their baptismal, confirmation or wedding church, where everyday life and sacred life come together, and which realises the ideas of diversity and accessibility of parish work for everyone.
The places of everyday work and creativity of the architects are represented in three nominated sites. The Aalto House, a combined home and office built by the Aalto architect couple in Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, embodies the combination of modern family living and creative work. is Located within walking distance of the Aalto House is The Studio Aalto, whose architecture promotes the atmosphere of the working community and provides an egalitarian framework for work. The Experimental House in Muuratsalo in Jyväskylä, which preserves the Aaltos’ brick, tile and masonry experiments, is located amidst wild nature and borrows from the landscape as part of its architecture. In Villa Mairea in Pori, which the Aaltos designed as a home for their friends Maire and Harry Gullichsen, interior design and architecture are inseparable.
More information on the exhibition:
Mari Murtoniemi
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