The Rice Design Alliance’s annual international study tour, held June 6-13, focused on the architecture of Finland. Organized by Rice architecture professor Carlos Jiménez (whose Carlos Jiménez Design Studio is Houston’s most internationally renowned design practice), the tour spotlighted the buildings of Finland’s greatest 20th-century architect, Alvar Aalto (1898-1976).

The tour began with a festive dinner at the Savoy Restaurant atop a 1930s office building in downtown Helsinki. Designed by Aalto and his first wife and collaborator Aino in 1937, the Savoy retains its warmly appointed interiors, replete with Aalto furniture, lighting fixtures, and glassware.

Finnish architect and professor Juhani Pallasmaa led the group on a walking tour of downtown Helsinki on the first full day of touring. Pallasmaa guided participants past buildings representing the various cycles of Helsinki architecture: ebullient Arts and Crafts buildings from the early 20th century (Eliel Saarinen, who immigrated to the United States in 1923 and ran the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, was the most famous architect associated with this episode), Alvar Aalto’s low-key urban buildings of the 1950s and ‘60s, which fit into the cityscape with surprising modesty, and monumental neoclassical buildings from the first half of the nineteenth century, built when Finland was part of Russia’s empire.

The first-day our concluded with a visit to Kiasma, the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by American architect Steven Holl in association with Pallasmaa (1998).

The next day, RDA hit the road with stops in Helsinki at one of Aalto’s masterpieces, the National Pension Institution of 1956, a government office building that astonishes with its ingenious siting, thoughtful details, and sensuous combination of materials. Lunch was outside Helsinki at Hvitträsk, the country house and studio that Eliel Saarinen and his partners, Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, built in 1903.

Inspired by the romantic Arts and Crafts ideal of a community of artists that also led Frank Lloyd Wright to build Taliesin in rural Wisconsin in 1911, Hvitträsk was where Saarinen designed his Finnish masterpiece, the central train station in Helsinki of 1914. Participants learned that even after Saarinen left Finland, he and his family returned annually to spend their summers at Hvitträsk. The day ended with a stop at the building complex that first brought Aalto international recognition, the Paimio Sanatorium, a Functionalist style tuberculosis hospital completed in 1933.

Day three was spent in Turku, which from the end of the 1200s until 1809 was the Swedish capital of Finland (it did not become an independent nation until 1917). A highlight was a visit to one of Finland’s comparatively rare medieval landmarks, Turku Castle, built in the 13th century. A spatial maze, the castle put into perspective the fascination that early 20th century Finnish Arts and Crafts architects had with their medieval past. Jiménez led the group to an intensely moving site, the Resurrection Chapel at Turku’s city cemetery, completed in 1941 by architect Erik Bryggman, a contemporary of Aalto’s. The cemetery chapel was an allusive space that Bryggman shaped to respond poetically to the emotional longings of those attending funerals.

The fourth day of touring was spent visiting the historic wood-built town center of Rauma, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One window display in Rauma saluted the Galveston Historical Foundation’s tall ship Elissa, which, in her multinational career, had once sailed under the Finnish flag.

From Rauma, the RDA transited to Pori for a stop at the Pori Art Museum, a customs warehouse recycled by the contemporary architect Kristian Gullichsen and now one of Finland’s most highly regarded contemporary art spaces. Pori lies at the threshold to another Aalto masterpiece, the summer house he designed in 1939 for his major patrons Maire Ahlström and her husband Harry Gullichsen. The Gullichsens were the Finnish counterparts of Dominique and John de Menil: he was the leading progressive businessman of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s; she was Finland’s first modern art collector. Their Villa Mairea is preserved with its furniture by Alvar and Aino Aalto (Maire Gullichsen was their partner in the Artek furniture company, which produced the couple’s designs), and the Légers and Calders the Gullichsens acquired.

The fifth day (a Sunday) was spent exploring several remarkable churches: Lars Sonck’s Arts and Crafts cathedral in the city of Tampere (with Symbolist murals by Hugo Simberg), Reima and Raili Pietilä’s awe-inspiring Kaleva Church of 1966 in Tampere, and a medieval country church in the little town of Hattula, which preserves its medieval wall paintings and the largest collection of Catholic devotional sculpture in Finland to survive the Reformation.

On the concluding day of the tour, Jiménez led participants to churches in the Helsinki suburbs of Vantaa, by the architect Juha Leiviskä, and Tapiola, by the architect Aarno Ruusuvuori. Gray skies and intermittent rain (the only non-sunny day of the tour) did give participants a sense of what atmospheric conditions were like for most of the year in Finland—and why Aalto and the architects who succeeded him were so sensitive to the need to enhance the effects of natural light inside buildings. The group was not deterred by rain from strolling through the pastoral landscape of Aalto’s campus for what is now called Aalto University in suburban Espoo. Returning to Helsinki, the group concluded its introduction to the architecture of Finland with a tour of Aalto’s 1936 house and a convivial farewell dinner at his nearby studio of 1955, both now administered by the Alvar Aalto Foundation.

Tour participants included RDA executive director Linda Sylvan (and husband Dick), RDA travel coordinator Lynn Kelly (and husband Ty), Houston architects Natalye Appel and John J. Casbarian (he is professor of architecture at Rice) and Joyce and Larry Lander, Houston designer Marlys Tokerud, Houston retail merchants Pam Glosserman and Josie and Michael Jones, and San Antonio landscape architect Sarah Lake. Houston Chronicle columnist Rick Casey and wife Kristen and philanthropists Susan Garwood and Dr. George Peterkin were among the 35 tour members.

Kelly hinted that the next RDA international tour just might be to Rio de Janeiro and Brasília in late February-early March 2012.

Architectural historian Stephen Fox is a Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas.