Alvar Aalto Museum

The Alvar Aalto Museum is a Finnish museum operating in two cities, Jyväskylä and Helsinki, in two locations each. All four locations are open to the public. The are:

This museum, which is specialised in architecture and design, is located in Jyväskylä. It was founded in 1966 to foster the legacy of the architecture of Alvar Aalto. The museum is located in a building designed by Aalto and completed in 1973.

The museum functions as a centre of information on all things related to Aalto, and it organises exhibitions both in Finland and abroad and produces publications on Alvar Aalto. The museum houses a permanent exhibition on the life work of Alvar Aalto. The current permanent exhibition was opened in 1998, the centennial of Aalto's birth.

The mission of the building heritage section of the museum is the protection of buildings designed by Alvar Aalto. It maintains a national register of protected Aalto buildings and gives expert assistance on matters relating to Aalto buildings. The building heritage section works in close cooperation with the Finnish National Board of Antiquities.

Before the Jyväskylä Art Museum was established in 1998, the Alvar Aalto Museum also hosted exhibitions of visual arts.

The museum, designed by Alvar Aalto and completed in 1973, is located on a slope which lies next to Lake Jyväsjärvi. Together with the Museum of Central Finland (Alvar Aalto, 1961), these buildings form a cultural centre in the immediate vicinity of the University of Jyväskylä (Alvar Aalto, 1951–71).

Both museums represent Aalto's "white period". The ten years' difference in the design of the buildings can be seen especially in the façades — the façade of the Museum of Central Finland, rising from a slope of a hill, shows the geometric practicality of early functionalism, whereas the Aalto Museum is more closed in, but at the same time more free in its form.

The outside walls of the Aalto Museum are clad in light-coloured ceramic tiles named "Halla" ("frost"), manufactured by the famous Finnish porcelain manufacturers Arabia. The high concrete socle was painted white. The vertical bands of baton-shaped, glazed tiles divide up the rampart-like elevations to form a relief that gives a strong effect of depth when the surface is washed with light. The rampart-like quality is emphasised by the vertical battens on the roof windows of the exhibition galleries, which cause the roof lights to merge into the façade when looked at from a certain angle.

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