Alvar Aalto Living room of Kantola House - WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Series Window Behaviorology on Nordic Architecture

Alvar Aalto
Living room of Kantola House

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory (Institute of Science Tokyo)

08 Jan 2026

Keywords: Architecture; Columns

This is a residence for the manager of Sunila’s pulp mill in Kotka. The stone bench connecting to the fireplace receives and stores heat from the sunlight, while a gap is kept between the bench and the window to allow warm air up from the radiator below. The built-in furniture is made of pine and oak from Kotka, where the forest industry is thriving, and the pillars around the windows are wrapped with rattan. Outside the windows is a pine forest and beyond that lies the ocean.

Living room of Kantola House
Alvar Aalto
Kantokatu, 1937

This article is an excerpt from “Windows Stranding the Ethnological and Industrial Networks,” a joint research project concerning windows and the behaviors around them done in collaboration with Institute of Science Tokyo’s Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory.