Pohjola Insurance building

The Pohjola Insurance building is the former headquarters of the Pohjola Insurance Company at Aleksanterinkatu 44 and Mikonkatu 3 in central Helsinki. Primarily designed by Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen and constructed in 1899–1901, it is a prominent example of Finnish national romantic architecture. It was acquired in 1972 by Kansallis-Osake-Pankki, now succeeded by Nordea.

The Pohjola Insurance Company (precursor of OP Financial Group) was founded in 1891 and specialised in fire insurance. They held a competition for the design of their headquarters, which would also house another Fennomane insurance company, Kullervo, with the specification that the building must be of fire-resistant stone. Based on the submissions, they commissioned Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen to design the exteriors and major interior spaces, but Ines and Ernst A. Törnvall were responsible for the plans. It was the first commercial building by Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen.

The building is national romantic in style, with façades of rough-hewn soapstone, red granite and serpentine decorated with sculptures of vegetation, squirrels, and figures from Kalevala, and on the street corner a tower with a pinecone-shaped roof. When it was built, a reviewer dwelt on its "Finnish-naturalistic" style, but in form the exterior may have been influenced by contemporary American buildings: Henry Hobson Richardson's Cheney Building similarly uses a corner tower, and the use of windows resembles that in Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building. Another Finnish architect, Bertel Jung (), criticised the romantic elements as embodying "primitive, partially crude and untamed force". Other reviewers praised it for its comparability to buildings in other countries and to their use of ornament.

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