Last year saw the Alvar Aalto Foundation experience a record-breaking number of visitors at each of its four sites ? a total of 42,755 as opposed to the 36,744 people that toured the sites in 2015.

© Samuel Ludwig

Last year saw the Alvar Aalto Foundation experience a record-breaking number of visitors at each of its four sites ? a total of 42,755 as opposed to the 36,744 people that toured the sites in 2015.Of those numbers, The Alvar Aalto Museum and the Muuratsalo Experimental House in Jyväskylä received a total of 20,005 visitors combined, half of which had arrived from outside of Finland to explore the Museum, while also continuing the recent trend of an increasing number of visits over the past five years.

Muuratsalo Experimental House / Alvar Aalto. Image © Nico Saieh
Meanwhile, in Helsinki, the Finnish architect?s Aalto House and Studio Aalto had 11,682 and 7,068 tourists respectively, both approximately accommodating an additional 1,500 people to the previous year.  According to the foundation, the steady growth in numbers of visitors is partly due to an extended summer tourist season, coupled with greater media coverage of Aalto-related topics.

Säynätsalo Town Hall. Image © Flickr user singhkumar licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Image

The sites have also been given more public exposure and are as of late, hosting small functions and conferences, including a popular exhibition on the works of Somo and Jussi He...