Kirjatalo

Alvar Aalto designed Kirjatalo, the Printing House, for the graphic industry's own trade organisations, completing it in 1967 as an office and commercial building in the same stretch of central Helsinki where several of his other late works stand. Like Rautatalo and Sähkötalo nearby, it combines a disciplined street grid of window openings with the darker, more restrained material palette Aalto favoured in his later city-centre commissions, in contrast to the white-rendered functionalism of his earlier career.