Finlandia: the greatest architectural mistake ever made? Aalto’s benign errors

I’ve been to Helsinki a couple of times this year. (Ed. This piece written in 2010.) It’s one of my favourite cities — civic, compact, cultured, curious, crafted. Charming but not overly so. Pale yellows, pale greys, pale whites, pale blues. Sea-borne and wrapped in rock and forest. Jugend and modern, eastern and western. Solid sometimes stolid. A quiet riot of componentry. Literate in most senses, especially in design. Cold and beautifully bleak in autumn and winter, crisp in spring, soft and warm in summer.

I’ve visited many times over the years, yet for some reason I’d never got round to visiting Finlandia, the concert hall designed by Alvar Aalto.