Jyvaskyla Audio Tours

Jyväskylä occupies a specific place in Finnish cultural mythology. Elias Lönnrot, who compiled the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, called it the Athens of Finland, a reference to its role as the first city in the country to establish Finnish-language schooling in the 1860s when Swedish was still the language of administration and culture. The teacher's college founded in 1863, the first in Finland, started a tradition of educational seriousness that the University of Jyväskylä perpetuates today -- over thirty percent of the current population are students. The city was built on learning before it was built on anything else.

Alvar Aalto was born in Kuortane, a few hours away, but he studied and set up his first practice in Jyväskylä, and he built more structures here than in any other single city in the world.

The university campus is substantially his work; the Aalto-designed City Theatre opened in 1982. The Alvar Aalto Museum, designed by Aalto himself in 1973, documents his career with drawings, models, and furniture. Walking Jyväskylä with an awareness of the architecture is an education in Finnish modernism -- the way light enters the buildings, the way the forms respond to the terrain and the water.