Centered on a blossom-shaped peninsula, Helsinki is as cool and calm as the slate-gray waters that surround it. For centuries, the city, like the rest of present-day Finland, was under foreign rule, first as a provincial outpost of the Swedish Empire and then as the capital of a Grand Duchy under Russian control for most of the 1800s. In the lead-up to independence in 1917, Finnish writers, artists and musicians drew on their singular language and regional folklore to assert a distinctive national identity. Architects played their part, too, combining decorative allusions to Finland’s sprawling landscape of lakes and forests with modern technologies like steel frames and electric lights: a new idiom for a new country. For the past century, design — from the modish floral-print fabrics of Marimekko to the Nokia cellphone — has been one of modern Finland’s most recognizable exports.
For many design enthusiasts, a visit to Helsinki begins with Alvar Aalto, one of the 20th century’s most influential architects, who left his mark across the capital, with buildings ranging from the monumental and recently restored concert venue Finlandia Hall to the modest yet exquisitely detailed home that he built in the central suburb of Munkkiniemi with his first wife, Aino, an essential collaborator until her death in 1949. Yet Aalto represents just one part of a much larger and more diverse architectural culture in Helsinki, one that includes graceful neo-Classical churches and Art Nouveau apartment blocks, as well as formally experimental public spaces like the 2018 Oodi Central Library. Here, listed in the order in which they were completed, are ten buildings that illustrate Helsinki’s evolution as a global design capital.
1. Suomenlinna
The Swedish crown started building this sea fort in 1748 on a cluster of six islands in Helsinki’s harbor and named it Sveaborg, or “Castle of the Swedes” (“Viapori” in Finnish). Developed gradually over the centuries, the fortress now contains 18th-century stone bastions, austere neo-Classical houses along gravel- and cobblestone-paved streets and 19th-century barracks covered in pale pink plaster. The fort got its current name — Suomenlinna, or Castle of Finland — in 1918, immediately after the country’s transition to independence. Used as a marine base during World War II, Suomenlinna was fully demilitarized in 1972 and has since become a residential district and an open-air museum accessible by ferry.
2. Central Railway Station
The architect Eliel Saarinen’s Central Railway Station, initially designed in 1904 and finally completed in 1919, marks an essential transition between Finland’s National Romantic style — an offshoot of the Art Nouveau movement — and modernist rationalism. In his original design, Saarinen, who was Finland’s best-known builder after Aalto, incorporated a steepled tower and bear statues, nodding to the country’s historical stone churches and its forests. After widespread debate over what kind of building should symbolize Finland’s technological future, Saarinen reworked the project completely. He replaced the bears with large granite figures holding electric lanterns, designed by the sculptor Emil Wickström, which flank a vaulted entry hall. Instead of a steeple, the slender clock tower is topped with a copper dome — a beacon visible throughout the city center. With its pared-down, geometric detailing, the Central Railway Station was an aesthetic bridge to the 20th century.
3. Kotiharjun Sauna
There’s only one Finnish word that’s used commonly abroad: sauna. For thousands of years, Finns have gathered to enjoy sweat baths in peat-roofed huts, timber lodges and, in the first half of the 20th century, log-heated communal saunas often set on the basement levels of apartment buildings — essential social spaces for the city’s middle-class residents. The oldest public bathhouse in Helsinki, the Kotiharjun Sauna, first opened in 1928 and continues to receive visitors throughout the year. Though modern baths by important architects have opened across Helsinki’s city center in the past decade, Kotiharjun’s wood-paneled locker rooms and dim, timber-heated saunas are still popular among locals, whom you’ll find relaxing and drinking beers on the sidewalk outside, even in the dead of winter, in nothing but their towels.
4. Olympic Stadium
Finland was meant to host the 1940 summer Olympics in a stadium designed by the early Modernist architects Yrjö Lindgren and Toivo Jäntti. (In 1948, Lindgren would go on to win an Olympic gold medal in town planning, one of the erstwhile arts categories eliminated from the Games in the mid-20th century.) Although the structure was completed in 1938, World War II forced Finnish authorities to postpone the Helsinki Games until 1952, the same year the country finished liquidating its war debt to the Soviet Union. With its slim, 236-foot-tall tower and the streamlined sweep of its bleachers, the Olympic Stadium was built to reflect a young nation’s global aspirations as it transformed from a poor rural country into the affluent, democratic welfare state it is today. The stadium remains Finland’s largest outdoor sports venue and has served as a public ice rink in the freezing winter months.
5. National Pensions Institute
Initially designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto in 1948 and completed in 1956, the National Pensions Institute maintains its original use as the center of Finland’s sprawling welfare system. The Aaltos became known internationally for their rigorous Modernist structures and warm, handcrafted interiors. At the institute, the brick, copper and granite of the strictly orthogonal exterior give way to sumptuous interior spaces that include a customer service hall, a cafeteria, offices, meeting rooms and a library, their straight lines softened with colorful ceramic tiles, marble floors and brass and wood detailing.
6. Dipoli
Aalto’s most radical successors, Reima and Raili Pietilä, made a name for themselves beginning in the 1960s; like Aalto, the couple used forms found in the natural world, but the Pietiläs pushed them to new structural extremes. Their second permanent building, the Dipoli Student Center (1966), with its jagged roofline jutting out over irregular swaths of glass, seems to crawl off a low hilltop at Helsinki University of Technology (renamed Aalto University in 2008) in the capital’s western outskirts. Originally owned by the school’s student union, the space, now officially known just as Dipoli, was sold to the university in 2013. It reopened after renovations in 2017 and today functions as a multiuse meeting space and events center. The angular facade in copper, glass, timber and stone takes its inspiration from the granite boulders that surround it, like a primeval landscape come to life.
7. Helsinki City Theatre
In 1960, Helsinki’s most important municipal theater institution, in need of a permanent home, launched an open competition to design a building in the waterfront Tokoinranta Park. The winning entry, by the young architects Timo Pentillä and Kari Virta, was completed in 1967 and seamlessly integrated with the city’s natural landscape. Covered in bone-colored tiles, the City Theatre traces the curve of a low hillside bordered on one side by the park’s shaded lawns. Staircases connect the surrounding greenery to a walkable roof at street level. Save for its sculptural fly tower, the structure hugs the ground, reimagining Helsinki’s gentle topography as a horizontal sweep of ceramic and glass.
8. Temppeliaukio Church
In 1961, the architect brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen designed a Lutheran church for a rocky building site in Helsinki’s wealthy Töölö neighborhood. Rather than create a structure that would sit atop the granite outcropping, surrounded by elegant apartment blocks, the brothers chose to view the plot itself as a religious space and sank the Temppeliaukio Church (better known as the Rock Church) almost entirely into the landscape. A cavelike entrance opens off the street into a spacious chapel topped with a copper dome and surrounded by rugged stone walls. At once earthy and ethereal, the church, which still hosts regular prayer services and chamber concerts, has become an icon of Finnish Modernism’s intimate relationship with the natural world.
9. Artek 2nd Cycle
Since its founding in 1935 — by the Aaltos, the artist and patron Maire Gullichsen and the historian and critic Nils-Gustav Hahl — the design company Artek has defined the look and feel of interiors across Finland. Originally created to promote the Aaltos’ furniture abroad and cultivate modern tastes at home, Artek has expanded its collection to include pieces by essential designers from the 1930s to the present day, including Ilmari Tapiovaara’s stackable beechwood Aslak chair and the curved Karuselli chair by Yrjö Kukkapuro. The Artek 2nd Cycle project was started in 2006 to recover and restore used pieces; in 2011 the company opened a showroom in Helsinki’s design district — a few blocks away from its flagship store — featuring iconic furnishings from throughout Artek’s history.
10. Amos Rex Museum
Before his death in 1961, the entrepreneur Amos Anderson accumulated 438 paintings and sculptures, mostly by contemporary Finnish artists; together, they became the basis of what is now the most significant private art collection in Finland. In 2018, the Amos Anderson Foundation expanded with a contemporary art space set in the Lasipalatsi, or “Glass Palace” — a jewel of functionalist design built in 1936 in Helsinki’s central Kamppi neighborhood as a temporary visitors’ center for the Olympics. Rather than forcing flexible display spaces into a protected building, the Helsinki-based firm JKMM Architects restored the original structure and installed new subterranean galleries under an existing open plaza. Inside, an undulating ceiling is punctuated by periscope-like windows, carefully placed to frame key elements of the surrounding neighborhood. At street level, the rooftop creates a whimsical urban playground, open to the city at large.
