Travel solutions: Helsinki

Time Out finds echoes of the great Nordic modernist Alvar Aalto throughout Helsinki – and discovers the best place to bag a bargain on one of his famous wavy vases

Finlandia Hall © Markku Juntunen

Depending on one’s age and interests, Finland’s most popular cultural exports may include the steamy experience of sauna, the hippo-like Moomintrolls from Tove Jansson’s well-loved children’s books, the composer Sibelius or last year’s fright-masked, heavy metal Eurovision winners Lordi. Also up there in the top five is architect and designer Alvar Aalto.

One of the founding fathers of Nordic modernism, Aalto created buildings, furniture and products from the 1920s to the 1970s with a humanistic approach to colour, contours and materials. Ubiquitous classics include the three-legged birched stacking stool and the wavy, hand-blown glass Aalto (or ‘Savoy’) vase. With a major show reinterpreting Aalto’s work currently on at the Barbican, a weekend visit to Finland’s capital Helsinki – home to some of Aalto’s best-known buildings – seems well timed.

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It’s early morning on the north side of Senate Square (Helsinki’s equivalent of Piazza San Marco in Venice) and the imposing white columns and distinctive green domes of the Helsinki Cathedral are shrouded in grey drizzle. The square once made a convincing stand-in for a frosty
St Petersburg in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film ‘Reds’ but on this day, it’s rather more wet than winter wonderland.

A short walk away, the old market hall by the harbour is the ideal place to warm up with coffee and a doughnut and buy a range of Finnish food. In the long days of summer, outdoor stalls line up to sell their wares but, while the weather’s still chilly, only the indoor hall opens, selling breads, cheeses, preserves and an impressive array of cheap fresh, smoked and pickled fish. Having decided against the tins of bear and elk meat and the reindeer kebabs, I leave with a bag full of dense brown rye bread and jars of lingonberry and cloudberry jam – the latter traditionally eaten on slices of baked or grilled cheese called leipäjuusto (literally bread cheese) that’s referred to by Finns as ‘squeaky cheese’ because of the noise made when biting into it.

First stop on the Helsinki design trail is an introduction to Aalto’s contribution to the city’s architecture with a visit to three of his most significant buildings. The Kulturhuset (House of Culture), built in the 1950s, has an exterior that’s part free-form red brick and part copper-clad rectangle, with an interior that highlights Aalto’s trademark use of plain wood, smooth rounded ceramic tiles, light wells in the ceiling and subtly curved brass handrails and handles. Appropriately it’s also Helsinki’s equivalent to the Barbican, with an auditorium that has played host to Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and regular meetings of the Communist party. More striking is the concert and conference venue Finlandia Hall.