Committee on Design

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  • 1.  Finland Design Study Group

    Posted 10-30-2025 12:08 PM

    Finland Design Study Group

    Human-Centered Modernism: Finnish Architecture of Culture, Craft, and Care

    AIA Knowledge Communities are an opportunity for you to experience learning in an immersive way – in place. When you explore a city or region in a deep and meaningful way, you find out there is a sense of tradition and cohesion as well as new ideas. This is what we try to find in our programs. Several of our committee members participated in a Design Study Group in Finland this August with Peter MacKeith, AIA and in collaboration with the University of Arkansas School of Architecture. 

    Tour video

    Read letter from the Chair Craig Brandt, FAIA



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    Susan Parrish
    Director, Knowledge Communities
    The American Institute of Architects
    Washington DC
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  • 2.  RE: Finland Design Study Group

    Posted 10-31-2025 05:44 AM

    Nice video.  Thanks.



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    Jeffrey Abrams AIA
    Jeff Abrams, Architect
    Columbia SC
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  • 3.  RE: Finland Design Study Group

    Posted 11-01-2025 09:38 PM
    Finland is inspiring, and has been for me since I was a student at the
    Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Architecture School in Copenhagen. My
    future wife and student of planning and our friend became Turkey's
    equivalent of our Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. We
    visited all of south Finland. In Helsinki, we also went to the office
    of Alvar Aalto while still working but not in his office that day.
    His works are all impressively creative and function so well.
    We were very fortunate to have an excellent guide, an executive staff
    lady of the Enzo Gutzeit Paper Mill company. That connection gave us
    very special access to their paper mills, their lodges, and all the
    wonderful places. It was a wonderful experience. Your excellent video
    brough all that back to mind. Thank you


    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Finland Design Study Group

    Posted 11-03-2025 06:17 PM
    My wife was a Russian historian. We took a trip in 1989 to Moscow and then Leningrad. We exited the USSR by rail, entering Helsinki at Eliel Saarinen's Helsinki Central Station. I toured Aalto works within the city only; enjoying his bookstore and coffee shop, and then accidentally getting into a back row for 20 minutes of orchestra rehearsals at the Finnish Symphony Hall. 
     
    We (my wife and our seven and eleven year old daughters) loved walking around the city and especially at the waterfront. The overall visual quality of the city was beautiful; both on the macro urban design scale and at the micro level viewing the high design quality of the 5-6 story scaled buildings and all the different goods on display in the shop windows. 
     
    Then we went home, landing at JFK and driving home through the urban desert of eastern Queens, NY.   

    Edward R. Acker | Emeritus AIA | LEED AP 

    3330 Boulder Circle, Unit 101

    Broomfield, CO 80023
    703.635.8968
    edacker39@comcast.net




    Original Message


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