ABSTRACT
Säynätsalo is a very unique place, a gathering of forces that together established a working community symbolically represented by the architecture of Alvar Aalto’s Town Hall. The community was established around a birch plywood factory on the shore of Finland’s second largest inland lake: Päijänne. The Town Hall is a mixed-use programme of spaces for administration, community library, meeting, commercial use and housing for municipal employees, all gathered around a raised courtyard and comprising informal volumes in brick, wood and copper. The window described here is the high-level slot window, or clerestory, within the three-storey volume and it illuminates the stair and corridor leading to the meeting chamber on the upper floor. Aalto’s masterful brick stair and corridor, traced by the light from clerestory window, is a crafted moment of delineation, as well as an outward expression of the ceremonial route to the building’s most important space. Everything about the building demonstrates a level of care and craft that is sometimes taken to the excess in beautiful and poetic ways. It’s a very unique building that has been made for a specific place and as an imagined expression of community.
