On a warm September afternoon in Finland in September, architect Laura Mattila was built eight years ago in the factory town, with her and her 49-year-old Mikko Mertz, an artist colony for an hour's drive west of Helsinki. Matira, 40, has not mentioned the near-perfect symmetry of the building's two 135-square-foot volumes (one in a changing room and the other in a sauna). Or an elegant construction lock joint that folds like a knuckle at the corner of its solid wood wall. Instead, she wants to discuss how the building works. A thin layer of linen packed between logs provides insulation. The residual heat and air circulation of the stove will dry out the sauna between use. The gaps around windows and door jumps allow the wood to shrink over time when moisture is lost. “If you think of Finland's farmers, this is basically how you build it. You'll create a log frame, a baking oven, and then if you've been there for a while, you'll create another log frame and fill in the gaps between them,” says Matila. The project's client is a 54-year-old conductor and a violinist named Jan Söderblom, who recalls his desire for an “timeless, archaic combination” from the architect. So they gave him something almost indistinguishable from the barns and saunas that the Finns built in their fierce homeland for centuries.
The Finnish sauna we know first appeared about 3,000 years ago with an icy transition between bronze and iron age, but sweat flooding was common in many cultures in the millennium before that. With farming becoming more difficult in the pine, spruce and birch hills and forests that make up modern Finland, some agricultural communities began building threshing barns that could be freely demolished and moved using axial logs. By trapping smoke inside those structures and drying barley and rye crops, they infused pine walls, the most common Finnish wood with sparkling heat.
Eventually, the sauna became a place for Finnish society. They were the place where the women gave birth, the sick seeking treatment, and the dying man undergoes the final ritual. Cooked on an open stove in the sauna and the meat and fish were stored in dry, ambient heat. The sauna was open to poor neighbours and unknown travelers seeking a cold escape, as a kitchen, clinic, temple and inn. Although popular throughout the Middle Ages, sweaty sweat in the 16th century was caused by the epidemic of plague, natural po, and syphilis that destroyed Europe. However, around the northern part of the continent – the poor backwaters of Sweden until 1809, and then the backwaters of the Russian Empire for over a century – the wood sauna continued to flourish, and by the time Finland became an independence in 1917 it was transformed into a pillar of domestic identity. Their pride in their baths. ”
Finland currently has a social welfare system comparable to its Scandinavian neighbours, with saunas of around 3 million for a population of 5.6 million. In these spaces, from small lakeside cabins to semi-public spas in the city centre, “it doesn't matter what you have or what you're doing,” says Saiya Siren, a 48-year-old curator at the Central Finland Museum in Zibaskira. “Saunas are the foundation of Finland's equality.”
It is also the foundation of Finnish architecture. This is an ur structure made from ur-materials whenever possible. Like their Nordic neighbours, Finns are growing in “the culture of wood is part of human life.” The forests cover three-quarters of Finland than any other country in Europe. Scientists there have been studying the calm and antibacterial properties of wooden interiors, and in some rural communities known as timber clusters, Millers, Sawyers and builders live side by side to create a “supply chain neighborhood.” Finnish architects have not built wooden skyscrapers like their Swedish and Norwegian friends, but modern offices like Mattila & Mertz, Liberdia Kitect and Oopia Architect use both engineering wood (engineering wood was introduced in 1990). Standalone bus in the city centre. These structures often aim to save and expand ancient technology rather than formal inventions. While architects value practicality and resilience more, the world becomes important to make warm, renewable and recyclable wood more sustainable. “We've been using these methods for hundreds of years,” says Matila. “We know they're going to continue.”
In 1925, a young architect named Alvar Aalto published an essay in a local newspaper, proposing an ambitious civic structure overlooking Jyväskylä, the central Finnish city where he grew up. “What kind of building should it be? Museums, libraries, churches? We don't do these,” he wrote. Instead, he suggested a sauna. The sauna was described as “almost one true Finnish cultural phenomenon.”
Born in 1898 and died in 1976, Aalto lived in Finland during a period of radical change. After World War II, the country was industrialized and urbanized as more than 400,000 displaced people migrated from lost territory to the Soviet Union. They continued to use wood on domestic projects, but Aalto and his colleagues favored manufactured materials such as brick, concrete, glass and steel for public works. Meanwhile, saunas were increasingly moving into private territories. Starting in the 1970s, developers have replaced the communal baths in residential blocks from the early 20th century with an electric heating apartment sauna.
Aalto, who passed away in 1949, and his first wife, Aino, were praised in the early 30s for their functionalist buildings and furniture that tempered the clinical abstraction of modernism with organic curves and natural finishes. But what's less well known today is the 27 independent saunas that Aalto designed throughout his career. Even within the grounds of his most experimental projects, Aalto was relaxed in the old fashioned sequential form, like the Paimio Sanatorium, which invaded the Bauhaus outside the city of Torque in 1933, and the brick summer cottage on Muuraturo, which he and his second wife, Elissa, used as an architectural laboratory. For example, in the latter, rather than alternating narrow edges of logs to form the usual rectangular walls, they were collected like bouquet stems to subtly open the structure into the shape of a bellows. The sauna “is one of the buildings in Aalto, and I said, 'There's no need to redesign everything',” says Timo Riekko, 46, chief curator of the Alvar Aalto Foundation.
Reima and Reiri Pietilla, a couple who exploded Aalto's organicism, which began in the 1960s, into unexpected new forms, are also the architect's most radical Finnish successors. When Pietilla purchased the land 20 years later in the archipelago of southwestern Finland, they used hard pine logs to assemble greasy black sweat. Their gabled eaves were pulled to Expressionist extremes, and the building was read as a pair of jagged silhouettes between juniper and oak trees. However, despite its inexplicable form at first, these saunas are not as revolutionary as Muraturo's Aalto.
What still defines much of Finnish architecture is its sense of consistency – the calm adaptability of wood. Twelve years ago, 55-year-old architect Tuomas Silvennoinen, who runs PES Architects, removed a century-old log sauna on a family property in the Gulf of Finland, and appears to be covered in wood, hanging from a 1,054-square-foot cottage and water-like shingles. However, after storing the logs from the original sauna, he reuses them to build a small guesthouse. “The thing about a timber building is that every part is replaceable,” he says. “You can do it all again.”
Finland was still the country of empire, then Europe, and more recently NATO, two years ago to protect itself from Russian expansionism. “It's not our mentality to try to be at the center,” says Anssi Lassila, the company's 51-year-old founder. When Aalto and Pietilla naturalized their global influence to transform small private log saunas, Lassira and his modern companions often make the opposition within larger buildings that claim that saunas are not the center of Finland, but rather the type of building where they can learn about the entire architectural profession.
In 2016, Lassira designed a 388-square-foot sauna for a summer villa built by Arnervi, one of Aarth's protégés, on the outskirts of Helsinki about 60 years ago. The wood structure, set at the base of a dyed black, grassy slope, looks sturdy and uncharacteristic, like the silhouette of a nearby zero-gravity glass and plaster house. However, with this long, steep gable set low on the terrain, the sauna also resembles the design of Lassila at Konsthall Tornedalen, an exhibition space Oopeaa will begin building this year above the Swedish border in Lapland. Other companies, such as the architects of AOR and Lukkaroinen, are pushing the potential of solid logs in vast schools and cultural centers alike. As Lasila says, “around” is “where change is happening.”
All of these changes are not positive. The rise in high temperatures dried the northern carbon-supporting peatlands of Indigenous peoples, just as they bleached coral reefs in the tropics. Monocultivation planting, which reduces ecosystem diversity, remains common despite Finland's well-managed forestry industry. Still, the country's ambitious climate goals are widely supported by young Finns, the same demographic as when the free guerrilla bathhouse called Sonpasauna in the abandoned corner of Helsinki's port in 2011 re-searched essential citizen buses. That same time, the country barely eradicates homelessness through an exemplary public housing programme implemented in 2008. Many of these government-owned apartment blocks have saunas. For years, Finnish researchers have discovered that saunas can lower blood pressure and improve immune function. Now it is clear that they help improve the functioning of society.
Equality, shared responsibility, mutual support – these values cultivated in saunas are just as crucial to Finland and its sustainable future as the wood itself. Because not only are the buildings and locations, but the sauna is a ritual. Lassila describes the experience as “spiritually washing yourself.” Riekko of the Alvar Aalto Foundation calls the Muuratsalo Sweat bus “holy and holy.” Finnish parents often tell their children to act in the same sauna at church, Siren says. Working with volunteers, I light up the sauna village every summer in the sauna village. “We need to act in the church like a sauna.”
But inside, the sav sauna doesn't feel more like a church than a womb. Daylight barely illuminates the soot black walls. The fragrant air from wood smoke can exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit. White hot stones zuhs pour water over the fire burning, and the Finnish cloud cloud, the word that even bilingual Finns never translates, surges towards the low ceiling. A wave of invisible heat rolls over your scalp, descending the back of your neck. Finally, after 5 minutes or 10 or 20, you'll come out into the cold air. Shadows settle into diagonal roofs and deep eaves, four timber walls, four timber walls, for shelter from the sun, rain and snow. “What,” Shiren asks, “Can it be more eternal?”
