Spirit of Paimio 2025: Echoes of the Future will address the delicate relationship between heritage and innovation.

Nearly a century ago, Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium was conceived as a bold experiment in an architecture of healing where tuberculosis patients were offered a form of “environmental therapy” in an era before antibiotics. The building itself became Alvar Aalto’s international breakthrough, a functionalist “total work of art” that pioneered design with empathy and humanity.

Today, this modernist masterpiece stands on the verge of a new era. No longer active as a hospital, it hungers for new ways to fulfil its original purpose as a place of rest, healing and encounter.

As the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation steers it towards the beginning of a new journey of becoming, the legacy of Paimio – its gentle, humane design ethos and integration with nature – resonates strongly as a guiding light for thinking more broadly about how well-being and serenity can be afforded through design.

Echoes of the Future asks how the visionary ideals embedded in this landmark can inform our collective path forward, inspiring new approaches in architecture and design while engaging broader cultural, societal, and ecological questions.

Echoing Alvar Aalto’s belief that “building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form… all in harmony together”, Echoes of the Future embraces and embodies a multiplicity of viewpoints on contemporary spatial practice.

Over the course of the conference, we will explore how design and architecture – at their best – unify diverse threads of human experience and knowledge. In the spirit of Paimio’s founders, who saw design as a means to address collective challenges, the conversation will bridge past and future, asking: What can we learn from the echoes of yesterday’s ideas to create a more compassionate, sustainable tomorrow?

By convening creative minds and changemakers in this historic setting, Spirit of Paimio Conference 2025 offers an inspiring forum to imagine new paradigms of living – a future where the wisdom of design heritage and the urgency of innovation come together to multiply one another.