Alver Aalto Museum

Jyväskylä is a college town and our hotel is right in the middle of its largest university. The University of Jyväskylä sits on both sides of Lake Jyväsjärvi with a beautiful suspension bridge joining the two sides. The buildings, including the hotel, have an industrial look to them, but the hotel is beautiful inside and our rooms had a private sauna.

University buildings

Lake Jyväsjärvi

After an excellent dinner in the hotel we drove downtown to find a place we could purchase some wine. In Finland, as in Scandinavia, this means finding a liquor store. That wasn’t a big problem and we made our way back to the hotel with a few bottles to last us until we can access the duty free store on the ferry to Äland Island where we will be looking for ancestral connections.

Interesting sculpture

We seem to see locks anywhere there are young people.
Locking up their love forever.

We decided to walk across the bridge the next morning before checking out the Alvar Aalto Museum. Aalto is one of Finland’s best known architects and may be known by Americans as he designed a dormitory at MIT in Cambridge, MA and the library at Mt. Angel in Silverton, OR.

He designed many of the buildings in Jyväskylä. It would have been fun to look them up, but with our limited time, we chose to learn more about him in his own museum. Born in 1898, he earned his credentials at the Helsinki University of Technology. Over the years he worked out of Jyväskylä, Turku, and Helsinki and served as a professor at MIT from 1946-48.

His architecture is notable for its smooth, often curved lines and his attention to the human needs of those who would live and work in the spaces he created. He also designed glass and furniture in the same flowing style as his buildings.

As we made our way through the exhibition, we were treated to some beautiful housing complexes and individual homes that showed off his concern for the living, breathing human beings expected to live in them. He believed that too often architects get so enamored by their designs that they forget about the humans involved and his work shows his ability to overcome that tendency. I would have been happy to live in any of the spaces he created.

Of course, as with any architect, much of his work remains in drawings as funding or zoning rules too often impede the implementation of the beautiful design work.

Oh, yes, we did enjoy the sauna.