Sylvan sauna: a small geometric structure among trees suggests a child-like vision of a building undone by disruptive forces.

The sauna belongs to a private house, both designed by David Salmela on a sylvan Minnesota site. His design of the house refers to the traditional Finnish farmhouse. Steeply gabled roofs, broad overhangs, white walls and tree-like columns recalling the vernacular architecture of his childhood are familiar but rendered abstract. Varying rooflines, floor levels and windows, and changing textures create the impression of a series of buildings, a farmstead that has grown up over time. In a forthcoming book on Salmela's work, Thomas Fisher (1) notes the architect's debt to Alvar Aalto whose idiosyncratic Modernism also drew on Finnish vernacular housing and on nature.

Unlike the house, the little sauna set against trees has a self-contained jewel-like presence. Built of brick it has a main axis running north-south and is clearly composed of simple Platonic forms. On the north is an inscrutable box punctured by square openings and surmounted by a central chimney. This contains the sauna and changing rooms. On the south a steeply pitched roof appears to be propped up by a big semi-circular column (enclosing a shower) and a triangular block (which turns out to be the staircase to an upper chamber for relaxing).

Viewed from the south, the building looks like a drawing by Aldo Rossi, a child-like elemental vision of a building. Indeed, the upper room is elemental, for it consists of a wooden triangle with no interior trusses, its steep gable filled with glass. On the north, the gable gives onto the flat grass roof of the brick box.

Although composed of severe geometric forms, there is a disturbing hint of chaos about the sauna. As Fisher remarks, the roof seems to have slid off its base, exposing the chimney at its centre, and requiring the semicircular prop to keep it from falling off completely. It suggests, he says, a traditional building hit by a storm.

I Dean of Architecture, University of Minnesota and former editor of Progressive Architecture.

Architect

Salmela Architect, Duluth, Minnesota

Project architects

David Salmela, Soullyahn Keobounpheng, Tia Salmela Keobounpheng

Landscape architect

Coen + Partners

Photographs

Peter Bastianelli Kerze