The Alvar Aalto Museum’s exhibition calendar for 2014 is an intriguing mix of past and future. Aalto’s building and design heritage has been integrated more fully than ever into the changing exhibition programme. The year culminates in a show about the Alvar Aalto Library in Vyborg, which takes an in-depth look at the birth, decay, and newly restored glory of this key work of modernism. In addition to Aalto-related topics we are also promised such delights as an architecture opera and Ulla-Maija Alanen’s photographs of the architecture of the human body.

“The connecting thread running through this year’s exhibition programme could be described as a meeting of old and new, and of past and future. For example, in the untiringly executed and brilliantly successful repair project on the Alvar Aalto Library in Vyborg we can see something old being born again,” says Katariina Pakoma, Chief Curator at the Alvar Aalto Museum.

The spring season opens with visual artist and architect Ulla-Maija Alanen’s exhibition Human Space in which the viewer is given a glimpse into the underwater world, the body and architectural space in photographs. These fascinating colour and black-and-white shots will be on display to the public in the Alvar Aalto Museum Gallery in Jyväskylä 7.2.–30.3.2014.

In April, Let´s build the school! exhibition brings opera to the Alvar Aalto Museum. For a month, the Museum will be the stage for an architecture opera put on by pupils at the Onerva Mäki School, in which other forms of sensory perception will be placed alongside the visual experience. Apart from the exhibition, there will be opera performances and accompanying architecture workshops.

Alvar Aalto Library in Vyborg. 15.11.2013. Photo: Maija Kairamo / The Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library.

The restored Alvar Aalto Library in Vyborg will be prominently on display in the Alvar Aalto Museum’s summer exhibition 23.5.–14.9.2014. This focuses on the repair and renovation of the Alvar Aalto Library in Vyborg and on building conservation. It provides an in-depth view of this exemplary restoration project that spanned national borders, and which was aimed at reviving the original architectural value of this library that had fallen into disrepair after the second world war. The exhibition is being mounted in collaboration with the Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library.

The autumn will begin with an exhibition produced by the Centre for Creative Photography, Photographs of the Kangas Factory District. This documents Jyväskylä’s old factory district, which is now becoming a new residential area.

The Palazzo Strozzi and other Aalto posters from different decades exhibition is on display at Studio Aalto in Helsinki until the end of March. In April, it is the turn of The work of Alvar Aalto’s collaborators – Kaarlo Leppänen, Jaakko Kontio & Eric Adlercreutz, which profiles three of the architects who worked in Aalto’s architects’ office, and analyses their designs. The exhibition is based on Miguel Borges de Araújo’s doctoral thesis, due for publication at Tampere University of Technology in autumn 2014.

Alvar Aalto Museum exhibition calendar 2014

Further information:
Producer Mari Forsberg, +358 45 6790920,
mari.forsberg(a)alvaraalto.fi, Alvar Aalto Museum

Requests for photos:
Producer Tommi Summanen,
tomi.summanen(a)alvaraalto.fi, Alvar Aalto Museum