Alvar Aallon Maison Aho ja Ahon asuinliiketalot

English translation (from the Finnish)

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Description

The private house Maison Aho designed by architect Alvar Aalto and the Ahon asuinliiketalot are high-quality representatives of the residential design of their era.

Maison Aho (1965), designed by Alvar Aalto, is a northern and small-scale example in Aalto's series of private houses. Maison Aho and its well-known predecessors, Villa Mairea (1939) and Maison Carré (1959), were designed for a family with a private art collection.

Like many of Aalto's private houses, Maison Aho is closed and restrained on the outside, while its interior is both homely and festive. Maison Aho, located in a small-house area, has a parklike setting along Pohjolankatu. The red-brick residential building is fan-shaped in plan. In addition to red brick, the building materials include granite in the plinth, copper in the monopitch roof, and hardwood in the details of the facade and the interiors. The main rooms of the low building are located at the entrance level, with the service rooms in the lower storey. The living room and dining room, located one after the other, open in a fan-like manner onto the hall, which is a few steps lower than the main rooms. The windows of both the living room and the dining room project from the facade surface, and they open onto a view of the inner courtyard enclosed by walls.

According to its client, the three red-brick apartment buildings from the late 1950s and early 1960s, known as the Ahon asuinliiketalot, are located in the same block along Koskikatu and Jaakonkatu. The two buildings on Koskikatu form a unified whole. The ground floors of the four-storey buildings contain commercial premises. Red brick is used richly as the external material of the buildings: the cold attic storeys are marked by using header bricks, and the window grilles are made from field drainage pipes. The plinth material is dark granite. On the wall of Koskikatu 20 is the relief Aurora Borealis, designed by Alvar Aalto and executed by sculptor Heikki Häiväoja, whose subject is the northern lights and a leaping salmon.

History

Architect Alvar Aalto drew up the general and town plan that guided the reconstruction of Rovaniemi in 1945, the so-called Poronsarvikaava. At the same time as the construction of the Korkalorinne residential area, the Aho business family from Rovaniemi commissioned designs from Alvar Aalto for three apartment blocks in the town centre. Of these buildings, Koskikatu 18 was completed in 1959, and Koskikatu 20, which is closely linked to it, was completed three years later. Jaakonkatu 3 was completed in 1963 in the same block.