Finlandia Hall

Finlandia Hall is a concert hall with a congress wing in Helsinki, by Töölönlahti bay. It was designed by Alvar Aalto and completed in 1971. The main features of the building's exterior are the great horizontal mass of the building proper and the towering auditorium that rises above it. Notable also is the exterior cladding, done in Carrara marble. The relatively thin marble slabs tend to acquire curvature in the course of time and have needed to be replaced with great expense.

Design and Building

Alvar Aalto was commissioned by the City of Helsinki to design a concert and congress building, the first constructed part of a great central city plan. The earliest sketches show features of what were to be the main features of the design. The principal set of blueprints are dated 10th May 1967.

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Contemporary to the designing of the Essen Opera house, the design for Finlandia Hall shows some of the same features: asymmetricity, acoustical wall structures and the contrast between the marble balconies and cobolt blue walls in the concert hall interior. The Essen project was however endlessly delayed, to the benefit of Essen Opera, because as that building began construction in 1987, two mistakes made in the construction of Finlandia Hall were avoided. The first was the use of thin slabs of Carrara marble for the exterior, which have not held their form and have had to be replaced. The other was an acoustical feature of the concert hall tower: the slats intended for controlling the acoustic environment of the hall had to be completely closed for the acoustics to work at all.

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