Alvar Aalto House of Culture - WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTESeries

Series Window Behaviorology on Nordic Architecture

Alvar Aalto
House of Culture

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory (Institute of Science Tokyo)

13 Oct 2026

Keywords: Architecture; Columns

The office wing of the House of Culture was originally built as the headquarters of the Communist Party, but is now used for the National Museum of Finland. A horizontal row of windows is created by repeating wooden double mullions with built-in vertical ventilation, windows, and louvers at equal intervals. The windows are installed on a spandrel covered in copper sheeting. Blinds–originally installed on the interior side of the windows–were integrated between the two panes of inset glass during the renovation.

House of Culture
Alvar Aalto
Sturenkatu, Helsinki, 1952-58

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.