Rautatalo

Alvar Aalto won the 1951 competition for the Iron House with an entry code-named "Casa," built by 1955 for the federation of hardware and iron merchants who commissioned it and gave the building its name. Its street facades are sheathed in copper and glass, with the display windows of the ground-floor shops and the office windows above aligned into a single unified grid, while exposed red-brick firewalls mark where the building meets its older neighbours. Inside, a marble stair descends past a light well faced in hand-glazed ceramic tiles in a range of blues and greens, one of Aalto's most refined interior sequences from the period.