Aalto did not put the building on a hill. He put it in one — specifically in a disused gravel pit below Skovbakken, at the edge of parkland and woods, so that the structure rises out of a dip with wooded slopes standing behind it like a backdrop. Roughly 6,000 square metres are arranged on a square plan, galleries laid out on the ground level around a central exhibition space. There is a sculpture gallery, a cluster of sky-lit halls, seven small display rooms, an entrance hall and the offices. Over the central hall the roof lifts into a pyramid and finishes in a crown-shaped lantern. Flexible partitions at the rear let the big rooms be broken into smaller ones. The outside is marble, glass, wood and copper sheeting; underfoot, most of the floors and paving are Carrara marble.

This far north, daylight is the whole design problem. It comes in low and sideways for much of the year, and it changes character between one hour and the next. Aalto's answer was a system of two-sided, elongated skylights that behave differently depending on which way they face: on the southern side, incoming sun is restricted to an angle of 56 degrees, while on the northern side the aperture opens fully to 90 degrees. The effect is to draw in the soft northern light and hold back the harsh southern glare. Inside, suspended fixtures with double parabolic reflecting surfaces throw light without casting shadows across the work. In the music room, the skylights are prism-shaped. Visitors rarely notice any of this, which is the point — what registers instead is that the paintings look better here than they have any right to.

The collection runs from the late nineteenth century to the present. One of its anchors is an 1890 canvas by the Danish painter J.F. Willumsen, made under Gauguin's influence, showing two women parting after a conversation. Around it sits a roll call of Danish modernism: Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Edvard Weie, Jens Søndergaard, Erik Hoppe, Wilhelm Freddie, Ejler Bille, Egill Jacobsen, Victor Isbrand, Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Richard Mortensen and Robert Jacobsen. Later generations bring Willy Ørskov, Poul Gernes, Mogens Møller, Kirsten Christensen, Kirsten Ortwed, Kehnet Nielsen and Ingvar Cronhammar. Max Ernst and Chagall represent the world outside Denmark. Private holdings are folded in as well — the Anna and Kresten Krestensen Collection, assembled in 1967 and acquired with a grant from the Kirsten and Palle Dige Foundation — along with surrealists, work from the Fluxus circle, and the Danish "wild young artists" of the 1980s.

In 1995 the museum was listed as a protected building — the first property in Denmark to receive that status before reaching a hundred years of age. It is one of relatively few Aalto works outside Finland, and the Danish authorities evidently decided not to wait around for the anniversary. Protection did not mean freezing it. Between 2014 and 2016 the museum went through a thorough renovation: new exhibition halls, teaching spaces, café and shop, a reworked sculpture park and terrace, and the replacement of 317 tonnes of Italian marble inside and out. It reopened in January 2016 after eighteen months closed. The name changed too. Until 2008 it was Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, the North Jutland Art Museum; since then it has gone simply by Kunsten — "the art."

The grounds do a lot of the work. A sculpture park sits in the trees with an amphitheatre and a terrace, holding pieces by Gunnar Aagaard Andersen, Willy Ørskov, Lene Adler Petersen and Mogens Møller, so the collection continues past the doors and into the grass. Around 104,500 people came through in 2022. The building is close enough to Aalborg's centre to be an easy walk and far enough into the parkland that the city drops away behind the trees. Aalto set a white marble object into a green bowl and let the woods hold it — a piece of Nordic modernism that, more than half a century on, still looks like it was placed rather than built.