The Finnish Pavilion is a small but perfectly formed space at the Venice Biennale, recently reopened after restoration works. Designed by Alvar Aalto in 1955, it was originally designed to be temporary while the Giardini awaited a pavilion for all of the Nordic countries. The blue and white wooden structure took inspiration partly from Sámi tents- a temporary dwelling used by the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia- and partly from Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel in Florence. Even after Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion, built a little later in 1962, Aalto’s structure survived for another fifty years, until a tree fell on the pavilion in a storm last year. Since then, architect Gianni Talamini has carefully restored and reassembled the pavilion to its former glory, just in time for this year’s Biennale.
To celebrate the reopening of the Aalto Pavilion, the Finns decided to showcase an exhibition celebrating the use of wood in Finnish architecture today. Six young architects were chosen to exhibit a work: ALA Architects, Avanto Architects, Eero Lunden and Markus Wikar, K2S Architects, Lassila Hirvilammi Architects and students from the wood program at Aalto University. As part of a long standing tradition of wood building in Finland, the exhibition shows how technologies and treatments are developing to inform contemporary architecture, showing at the same time, how Aalto’s treatment of wood is still as relevant as ever.
