The red-brick Säynätsalo Town Hall, completed in 1952, has an atmosphere which has a warm, medieval feeling, but is nevertheless stripped-down modern at the same time. Alvar Aalto designed Säynätsalo Town Hall for a small industrial community of only 3000 inhabitants. Aalto combined these disparate space requirements by arranging them into a miniature hilltop city, which subtly communicated the hierarchy of different purposes.

In addition to administrative offices, the building’s layout plan included a municipal library, residential apartments, and shops. The mundane shop premises with their display windows were naturally at street level. Hidden away at the back of the building, enjoying its own peace and quiet, was a wing with eight apartments. Public services, i.e. the library and municipal office, were located prestigiously on the floor above. These were reached by ascending a stately granite stairway to an inner courtyard framed by creepers.

The dominant element of the building is the council chamber, which soars tower-like above the complex. The main material used for the exterior as well as for the representative areas of the interior is bare red brick.

The chief architect on the town-hall construction site was Elsa Mäkiniemi, who was still fairly new to Aalto’s office staff at the time. In 1952, she married Alvar Aalto and adopted the name Elissa Aalto.