Tb sanitarium full#
Tb sanitarium free#

Tb sanitarium free#

The main building stands on the highest part of the 40-hectare site and takes the form of a free composition of linked wings. They share this very much larger structure’s expression in white-painted concrete offset by brightly coloured metalwork and projecting blinds – a treatment that contrasts dramatically with the trees.

Tb sanitarium full#

At Paimio that newfound enthusiasm came into full bloom.Īpproaching through the woods, the visitor passes between brief outlying terraces housing the sanatorium’s senior staff, planned so as to present no view of the main building. However, with the design for the concrete-framed and strip-windowed headquarters of the Turun Sanomat newspaper in Turku (1927-29), Aalto had recently undergone a Damascene conversion to the Functionalist cause.

These employed a spare Neoclassical style that related closely to work being built by Asplund and Lewerentz across the border in Sweden. A progressively minded young architect could hardly wish for a more sympathetic environment in which to embark on a career.Īalto was 30 when he won the competition for the Paimio Sanatorium in 1928, by which point he had already secured a substantial reputation within Finland through projects such as the Workers’ Club (1924-25) and Defence Corps Building (1926-29) both in his home city, Jyväskylä. Such projects not only represented the building blocks of an aspiring welfare state but provided one of the central means by which Finland consolidated its nascent national identity. By the early 1930s, the country had established 3,700 patient places for victims of lung tuberculosis. Having secured independence from Russia in 1917, the Finns rapidly committed themselves to a nationwide programme of public construction in which regional hospitals, old people’s homes, mental health facilities and tuberculosis sanatoriums featured prominently. Kauria colour chart credit artist eino kauria. As Aalto himself would later explain: ‘The main purpose of the building is to function as a medical instrument.’ This was a work of architecture that addressed its programme with quasi-scientific rigour. In an article that concludes by lauding the project as ‘the most revolutionary hospital building erected within the last decade’, P Morton Shand catalogued its numerous technical innovations, from its optimisation of daylight, heating and ventilation to its structuring of the patient’s social interactions over the course of what would frequently prove a stay of years. It was only with the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1946 that patients finally began to have access to an effective cure.Īmong the buildings featured in the AR’s survey, none was of more pioneering design than the facility that Alvar Aalto had completed earlier that year at Paimio in Finland. However, the success of such treatment was at best partial: to enter a sanatorium in the first decades of the last century was to face a 50 per cent likelihood of death within five years. An argument for the rehabilitative effects of exposure to light and air lent weight to the subsequent construction of residential facilities in often very remote locations. The sequestering of TB patients only became common practice after the disease was discovered to be contagious in the 1880s. Tuberculosis may have blighted mankind since at least as far back as antiquity, but when the AR devoted its September 1933 issue to a survey of recent tuberculosis sanatoriums, it turned its attention to a building type with a far shorter history. Completed in 1932, Alvar Aalto’s Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium’s programme was revolutionary