ON A WARM September afternoon in subarctic Finland, the architect Laura Mattila kneels in the grass beside a sauna that she and Mikko Merz, her 49-year-old partner in life and work, built eight years ago in the factory town turned artists’ colony of Fiskars, an hour’s drive west from Helsinki. Mattila, 40, doesn’t mention the near-perfect symmetry of the building’s two 135-square-foot volumes (one a changing room, the other the sauna), separated by an open void that frames the forest; or the construction’s elegant lock joints, folded like knuckles over the corners of its solid timber walls. Instead, she wants to discuss how the building works: Thin layers of linen packed between logs provide insulation; the stove’s residual heat and air circulation below dry the sauna between uses; gaps around the windows and doorjambs allow the timber to contract over time as it loses moisture. “If you think of a Finnish farmhouse, this is essentially how you build it: a log frame, an oven for baking and, once you’ve lived there for a while, you make another log frame and fill the gap between,” Mattila says. The project’s client, a 54-year-old conductor and violinist named Jan Söderblom, recalls asking the architects for “a combination of timeless and archaic.” So they gave him something virtually indistinguishable from the barns and saunas that Finns have built in their hardscrabble homeland for centuries.
The Finnish sauna as we know it first emerged some 3,000 years ago in the icy transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages, though sweat bathing had been common to many cultures for millenniums before that. As farming became more difficult in the hills and forests of pine, spruce and birch that comprise modern-day Finland, some agrarian communities began using ax-hewn logs to erect threshing barns that they could deconstruct and move at will. By trapping smoke inside those structures to dry their barley and rye crops, they imbued the walls of pine, the most common Finnish timber, with radiant heat — the same method used today in the savusauna, or smoke sauna.
Eventually, saunas became the locus of Finnish society. They were where women gave birth, where the sick sought treatment, where the dying received their last rites. Families cooked over saunas’ open stoves and preserved meat and fish in their dry, ambient heat. Saunas served as kitchens, clinics, temples and inns, open to destitute neighbors and unknown travelers seeking escape from the cold. Although popular through the Middle Ages, sweat bathing dissipated in the 16th century as plague, smallpox and syphilis epidemics ravaged Europe. But on the continent’s northern periphery — an impoverished backwater of Sweden until 1809 and then of the Russian Empire for more than a century after that — timber saunas continued to thrive, transforming into a pillar of domestic identity by the time Finland won independence in 1917. As the Norwegian American writer Mikkel Aaland notes in “Sweat,” his 1978 history of global sauna traditions, “No other country has attached so much national pride to their bath.”
Finland now has a social welfare system that rivals those of its Scandinavian neighbors, and about three million saunas for its population of 5.6 million people. In these spaces — from tiny lakeside cabins to semipublic spas in city centers — “it doesn’t matter how much money you have or what you do,” says Saija Silen, a 48-year-old curator at the Museum of Central Finland in the city of Jyväskylä. “The sauna is the foundation of Finnish equality.”
It’s also the foundation of Finnish architecture: the ur-structure made, whenever possible, from the ur-material. Like their Nordic neighbors, Finns grow up in “a culture of wood being part of human life,” says Lindsey Wikstrom, a 36-year-old architect and the author of “Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures” (2023). Forests cover three-quarters of Finland, more than any other country in Europe. Scientists there study the calming and antibacterial properties of wooden interiors and, in some rural communities known as wood clusters, the millers, sawyers and builders live side by side to create “neighborhoods of supply chains,” Wikstrom adds, “where everyone relies on each other.” Although Finnish architects haven’t built wooden skyscrapers like their peers in Sweden and Norway, contemporary offices like Mattila & Merz, Livady Architects, OOPEAA and PES-Architects have used both solid logs and cross-laminated timber (an engineered wood introduced in the 1990s that’s as strong as concrete or steel) for everything from minuscule smoke saunas to sprawling stand-alone baths in city centers. These structures often aim not for formal invention but rather to conserve and expand upon an ancient technology: As architects place more value on practicality and resilience while the world continues to warm, renewable and recyclable timber has become crucial in making a polluting industry more sustainable. “We’ve used these ways of building for hundreds of years,” Mattila says. “We know they last.”
IN 1925, A young architect named Alvar Aalto published an essay in a local newspaper proposing an ambitious civic structure overlooking Jyväskylä, the central Finnish city where he grew up. “What kind of building should it be? An art museum, a library, a church? These won’t do,” he wrote. Instead, he suggested a sauna, which he described as “almost the only genuinely Finnish cultural phenomenon.”
Aalto, who was born in 1898 and died in 1976, lived in Finland during a period of radical change. After World War II, the country industrialized and urbanized as over 400,000 displaced people migrated from territories lost to the Soviet Union. Though they continued to use wood in domestic projects, Aalto and his peers favored manufactured materials like brick, concrete, glass and steel for their public works. Saunas, meanwhile, had moved increasingly into the private sphere: Starting in the 1970s, developers traded the communal baths of early 20th-century housing blocks for electric-heated apartment saunas, while the emergent middle class indulged its nostalgia for the recent, rural past at summer cottages with stand-alone log-built saunas.
Aalto and his first wife, Aino, who died in 1949, gained acclaim starting in the early ’30s for functionalist buildings and furniture that softened Modernism’s clinical abstractions with organic curves and natural finishes. But less well known today are the 27 free-standing saunas that Aalto designed throughout his career. Even on the grounds of his most experimental projects — like 1933’s Bauhaus-inflected Paimio Sanatorium outside the city of Turku and the 1954 brick summer cottage on the island of Muuratsalo that he and his second wife, Elissa, used as an architectural laboratory — Aalto made only modest adjustments to an age-old typology. At the latter, for instance, rather than alternating the narrower ends of the logs to form an ordinary rectangular wall, he gathered them together, like the stems in a bouquet, to subtly open the structure into the form of a bellows. Saunas were the “one place in Aalto’s architecture where he said, ‘I don’t have to redesign everything,’” says Timo Riekko, 46, a chief curator at the Alvar Aalto Foundation.
The same was true for the architect’s most radical Finnish successors, Reima and Raili Pietilä, a couple who, beginning in the 1960s, exploded Aalto’s organicism into unexpected new forms. When the Pietiläs bought a piece of land two decades later in Finland’s southwestern archipelago, they used solid pine logs to assemble a pair of brooding black sweat baths. With their gabled eaves pulled to expressionist extremes, the buildings read as a pair of jagged silhouettes among juniper and oak trees. But despite their initially inscrutable forms, these saunas are no more revolutionary than Aalto’s at Muuratsalo.
It’s that sense of consistency — the sober adaptability of wood — that still defines much of Finnish architecture. Twelve years ago, the 55-year-old architect Tuomas Silvennoinen, who runs PES-Architects, removed a century-old log sauna at his family’s compound on the Gulf of Finland and replaced it with a 1,054-square-foot cottage and bathing pavilion that seems to float over the granite outcropping below, like a wooden dock washed up on the rocks. But after storing the original sauna’s logs, he’s reusing them to build a small guesthouse. “The thing about timber buildings is that every part is replaceable,” he says. “You can do everything again.”
FINLAND IS STILL a nation on the edge, first of empires, then of Europe — and most recently of NATO, which it joined two years ago to protect itself against Russian expansionism. “It’s not our mentality to try and be at the center,” says Anssi Lassila, the 51-year-old founder of the firm OOPEAA, or Office for Peripheral Architecture. If Aalto and the Pietiläs naturalized global influences to transform small, typically private log saunas, then Lassila and his contemporary peers do the opposite, often within larger buildings that offer public programs, arguing that saunas aren’t only central to Finland but, rather, are a type of building the entire architectural profession could learn from.
In 2016, Lassila designed a 388-square-foot sauna for a summer villa that had been built by one of Aalto’s protégés, Aarne Ervi, on the outskirts of Helsinki some six decades earlier. Stained black and set into the base of a grassy slope, the timber structure looks sturdy and featureless, like a silhouette of the weightless glass-and-plaster home nearby. But with its long, steep gable set low in the terrain, the sauna also resembles Lassila’s design for the Konsthall Tornedalen, an exhibition space that OOPEAA will start to build this year just over the Swedish border in Lapland. Other firms, like AOR and Lukkaroinen Architects, have similarly pushed the possibilities of solid logs in sprawling schools and cultural centers. “The periphery,” as Lassila says, “is where change is happening.”
Not all of these changes are positive. Rising temperatures have dried out carbon-absorbing peatlands in the Indigenous north just as they’ve bleached coral reefs in the tropics; reforestation with monoculture, which diminishes ecological diversity, remains common despite Finland’s well-managed forestry industry. Still, the country’s ambitious climate goals are widely supported by young Finns, the same demographic that has — since 2011, when a free guerrilla bathhouse called Sompasauna popped up in a deserted corner of Helsinki’s harbor — reclaimed communal baths as essential civic infrastructure. In that same period, the country has all but eradicated homelessness through an exemplary public housing program, implemented in 2008, and many of those government-owned apartment blocks have saunas. For years, Finnish researchers have found that saunas can reduce blood pressure and improve immune function; now it seems clear that they help society function better, too.
Equality, shared responsibility, mutual support — these values, cultivated in the sauna, are as essential to Finland, and to its sustainable future, as timber itself. For, more than being a building or a place, the sauna is a ritual. Lassila describes the experience as “mentally washing yourself.” Riekko, of the Alvar Aalto Foundation, refers to the Muuratsalo sweat bath as the “holy of holies.” Finnish parents will often tell their children to behave in a sauna the same way they would in a church, says Silen, who works with volunteers to light a dozen or so smoke saunas every summer Saturday at the Sauna Village in Jämsä, a cluster of historic buildings that were reconstructed outside Jyväskylä beginning in 2012. But “I tend to think it was originally the other way around,” he says. “You should act in church like you would in a sauna.”
Inside, though, a savusauna feels less like a church than like a womb. Daylight barely illuminates the soot-black walls. The air, fragrant with wood smoke, can exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit. White-hot stones hiss as you pour water over the brazier and a cloud of steam — löyly in Finnish, a word that even bilingual Finns never translate — surges toward the low ceiling. An invisible wave of heat rolls over your scalp and down the back of your neck, a ghostly presence as alive as the people gathered beside you in the dark. Eventually, after five minutes or 10 or 20, you step out into the cool air. The shadows resolve into four timber walls, a sloped roof and deep eaves for shelter from sun, rain or snow. “What,” Silen asks, “could be more eternal?”
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