Viipuri Library

Aalto’s library in Viipuri has round skylights that spread an even light over the reading room and a lecture hall with an undulating wooden ceiling. The building was completed in 1935, and since the Second World War it has been in Russia. After a long period of decay it was restored with Finnish help.

Viipuri was one of Finland’s largest cities when Alvar Aalto won the competition for a city library in 1927. His design was at first classical, but he reworked it several times, and the library was built in 1933–1935 in functionalist style. It stands in a park in the city. After the Winter War and the Continuation War Viipuri ended up in the Soviet Union, and the building became a Russian library.

The library consists of two rectangular volumes. The reading room is lit by 57 round skylights, whose light falls evenly and without shadows on the books. The floors are at different levels, and the lending desk stands lower than the surrounding shelves. In the lecture hall the ceiling has an undulating form of wooden battens, which Aalto designed to give good acoustics. Aalto also designed furniture, lamps and door handles.

The building was damaged during the war and decayed in the Soviet period. From the 1990s a restoration was carried out with support from Finland and other countries, and it was completed in 2013. The library is regarded as one of Aalto’s early masterpieces, in which functionalism was softened by natural light, wood and organic forms.