The timber pavilion
A long glass-walled structure in the lakeside forest.
Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because Finnish industry was built in the countryside rather than in the cities. The paper and timber mills went where the forest and the water were — that is, to small towns — and their owners built schools, hospitals, housing and museums around them, on the same industrial paternalism you see at Finlayson in Tampere. **Serlachius** at Mänttä, **Aalto** at Noormarkku and the **Verla** mill are examples. The result is that the best of Finnish art and architecture is not all in Helsinki — much of it is in towns a visitor has never heard of, and reaching them needs a car.
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The Serlachius Museums are in the small town of **Mänttä** north of Tampere, and they are a surprise: a world-class art collection in an industrial town of ten thousand people. The reason is the **Serlachius** family, owners of the paper mills that built the town. Gösta Serlachius collected Finnish and European art across his life and placed it in a foundation in 1933. The museum is on two sites. **Gösta** occupies the family manor on a lake shore, beside which a **modern pavilion** opened in 2014 to the design of a Spanish practice chosen by international competition: a long timber structure with glass walls in the forest, among the finest buildings put up in Finland this century. And **Gustaf** occupies the old mill administration building in the town. The collection holds Gallen-Kallela, Schjerfbeck and Edelfelt, and European work from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. **About 75 km north of Tampere, an hour by car** — a half-day trip, and it needs a car.
A long glass-walled structure in the lakeside forest.
The original collection in the family house.
Mänttä-Vilppula, north of Tampere