March 24: Rovaniemi

We explored around Rovaniemi for the morning, but in the afternoon we had to drive up to Inari, in the heart of Lapland.

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The train at Rovaniemi just after we got out.

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A lone snowflake.

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Some steps up to the road from the station grounds. Um.

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Aalto designed a civic center for Rovaniemi in 1965, which consists of a theater, a library, and the town hall. This is the theater.

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A whimsical (and chilly) reindeer nearby.

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A lot of Rovaniemi's architecture is rather severe and metallic, typified by this spiral stair.

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This a main pedestrian street. It's probably a lot more lively when it's not enormously cold out.

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The info center. I got one of the owls as a souvenir.

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We headed to the edge of town to see the Arktikum museum, which has to do with the natural world and cultures of the Arctic. This is the quite grand stairway toward its entrance.

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And here is the entrance. (The design screams late 80s, but it's still a well-thought-out building.)

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The spine of the museum is this long atrium.

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PTARMIGAN

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A cold room, where I think there was a display about ice or snow.

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Here's a look down most of the length of the atrium.

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A shopping mall that some of us had lunch at afterward. I don't think I'd ever seen a rampscalator before.

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We took a little time to explore the library. These sunken zones are quite typical in Aalto's library designs.

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Lots of light being scooped in.

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Plus some good ol' round skylights.

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A slightly wider view.

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From one of the sunken areas.

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Same here. The artificial light is diffused in a nice way, similar to the daylight.

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Here's the theater again.

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This is part of the theater lobby; this varied, large, horizontal open space is similar to the circulation of the TKK main building.

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Looking back at the library.

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A rare in-the-field cross-sectional view of these pipe-tiles that Aalto used quite frequently, here on the overhang in front of the theater.

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Here's what the tiles look like from the front.