Aalto 90 Pavilion

To mark the 90th anniversary of Alvar Aalto's vase, Iittala and Hydro bring the Aalto 90 Pavilion to Helsinki Design Week: a seven-metre aluminium structure built from the vase's silhouette.

Designed with Lars Beller Fjetland and TABLEAU CPH and built in low-carbon aluminium from Hydro, the pavilion sits at the meeting point of Finnish design history, architecture and material innovation. For Helsinki Design Week, it becomes the setting for an exhibition by photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, presented by Iittala as part of The Spirit of Aalto.
For more than five decades, Minkkinen has photographed the relationship between the human body and the natural world, working without assistants or digital manipulation. Here he turns to another lasting Finnish form: the Aalto vase.

He returns to selected works from his archive and pairs them with new photographs made for this project. Shown as diptychs, the images move between past and present, body and object, nature and design. Rather than photographing the vase itself, Minkkinen responds to the spirit of the vase.

The exhibition is part of The Spirit of Aalto, Iittala's anniversary-year series inviting contemporary artists to interpret the vase's legacy in their own practice.

Inside the pavilion, architecture, photography and design meet across generations. It's a reminder that an icon isn't fixed in the past, but a form still capable of producing new ideas, 90 years on.