Step into the sanatorium’s colour palette and experience its iconic colour combinations. On the custom-built, reclining sofa, you can sit back and experience Aino Marsio-Aalto and Alvar Aalto’s idea of the horizontal body.
Through accounts from doctors, nurses, and maintenance staff, multiple perspectives on Paimio Sanatorium emerge in Ilona Sagar’s work Other Actors. Together with some twenty design objects and archival material from the sanatorium, the exhibition offers a deeper insight into one of the Nordic region’s most acclaimed modernist buildings.
A groundbreaking idea in the design of the sanatorium was to adapt its rooms for patients who spent long periods in bed. The Aaltos conceived the building as a “medical instrument”, designed around the needs of the reclining body rather than the standing one. Here, a more humane and softer form of modernism emerges, in which light, ventilation, and heating were shaped with the body in its most vulnerable state in mind. The sanatorium also became known for its distinctive palette of green, blue, red, orange, and yellow.
“Omsorg is a Swedish word for care, but also concern, expressing a form of attentive, holistic care historically embedded in civic structures that shapes both people and the spaces they inhabit. This ethic of care lies at the heart of the exhibition Ilona Sagar: Omsorgens arkitektur.” – Ilona Sagar.
Ilona Sagar
Moving image, text, performance, and installation are central to the practice of London-based artist and filmmaker Ilona Sagar. Drawing on archival research and interdisciplinary collaboration, her work explores how civic and social identities are constructed and contested through the infrastructures of health, technology and the body. Sagar approaches historical archives and institutions, not as an encounter with a safely sealed past, but as something current and unstable that speaks urgently to our present condition.
Aino Marsio-Aalto and Alvar Aalto
Aino Marsio-Aalto (1894–1949) and Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) are among Finland’s most influential figures in modern architecture and design. Together, they developed an approach in which architecture, furniture, and everyday objects were conceived in relation to one another. During the 1920s and 1930s, they designed several pioneering buildings centred on human needs. Their international breakthrough came with the tuberculosis sanatorium in Paimio, Finland, completed in 1933. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Alvar Aalto’s death.
The exhibition is supported by Kulturfonden för Sverige och Finland.
The exhibition is designed by Adrien Rovero.
Top image: Ilona Sagar, Other Actors, 2025.
