Dignified Finnish.

An old persons' home which, by brilliant siting and internal planning, offers a great variety of places for its inhabitants, and acts as social centre for the town.

It's the plan that makes the old people's home at Kiuruvesi so interesting. It lies on the edge of the little town on a beautiful gently rising meadow that makes a blunt north-pointing promontory overlooking Lake Kiurujarvi in north central Finland: a staggeringly fine site, marred somewhat by the fact that there is a (non-odorous) sewage works to the south-east, in part between the new building and the town. The centre has therefore been laid out to minimise views of the works, and maximise those of the lake and meadow. It had to be put on the highest part of the site to avoid the lake's floods, and it was curved in plan to make it focus on the lake, and to avoid overlooking the works, while offering views of Kiuruvesi church on its knoll to the east.

The building has to accommodate three interrelated, but different elements. There is a wing of sheltered housing, in which small self-contained flats are located on either side of a central corridor. And there is a wing of bed-sitting rooms in which a north/south central corridor is traversed by a zig-zag strip of individual chambers that open off internal communal areas connected to the central axis. The zigs and the zags form irregular pavilions that stick out at angles to the main thrust of the wing and form small courts which open to the lake and are carefully orientated to make the most of morning and evening sun. The angles of the outer walls of the pavilions ensure that views of the dreaded sewage works are avoided. At the tip of each of these sideways elements is a little sheltered verandah that opens off the tapering internal space.

The parti of this wing is a really brilliant solution to the age-old problem of such buildings, where simultaneously there should be a clear, economical and reassuring overall pattern, and at the same time a gentle gradation of privacy from the public route, through the semi-private space, to the privacy of the individual place.

Between the two long wings there is the centre which combines the entrance and reception, the dining areas and general sitting rooms. These vary from a little cafeteria to a general hall and a long conservatory overlooking the lake; in the middle is an almost enclosed library and 'club-room'. Most of these spaces are intended to serve the community at large, as well as the elderly for whom the centre has primarily been made.

The central piece of the plan also accommodates the offices, main kitchens and laundry. Behind, to the east is the service yard, which by delicate inflections in the plan is obscured from the main public and private spaces, and itself serves as a barrier element against the sewage works.

The corridors that link the two wings and the centre are generous enough in width to deserve that over-used description 'internal street' - well at least they form a sort of genial pedestrian lane that moves picturesquely and purposefully through the complex, uniting it, but never becoming aggressively authoritarian, always full of luminance from the roof lights, and often from unexpected sideways glimpses of the landscape and lake. The section rises in the middle over the public rooms, and occasionally sports an upper floor for staff and some few activities for the residents. But the greater part of the complex is one-storey high, and derives its comfortable internal scale from the gentle section.

Externally, the nature of inside activity is clearly expressed in simple ways. The private rooms in their little protruding wings have the kindly and delicate scale of the best kind of ancient almshouse (without ever trying to copy): the individuality of the inhabitants made clear against the white form of the whole organisation by handling of the windows in both proportion and colour. The main, communal spaces are emphasised against the general whiteness by picking them out in glazing and coloured render: dusky blue and rust - restful but rather cheerful. The sauna's prow pokes eastward in golden ply (one of the few places where the finishes are less than perfect).

The whole place projects kindliness and welcome. It is a small monument to decent social policies, and it was initiated at a time when the country was facing its worst economic predicament for many years. Would it could be an example for harder hearted countries with less successful economies.