Tampere Cathedral

Lars Sonck won the 1899 competition for Tampere Cathedral and completed the building in 1902, working in the granite-and-timber National Romantic style that had made him one of the most sought-after church architects in Finland at the turn of the century. Its dark, rough-hewn stone exterior and asymmetric massing were a deliberate break from neoclassical church design, while the frescoes by Hugo Simberg and Magnus Enckell inside — including Simberg's unsettling "Garden of Death" — made the interior almost as controversial as the exterior when it was unveiled.