Alvar Aalto

Finnish architect

• Born: February 3, 1898
• Birthplace: Kurotane, Finland
• Died: May 11, 1976
• Place of death: Helsinki, Finland

Aalto was one of the founders of the International Style in architecture, but he went beyond the geometrical cubism that was the hallmark of this style by incorporating into his mature work classical and Romantic elements. In the process, Aalto became not only Finland’s most famous architect but also a national hero, a symbol of the Finnish ideal of sisu, or fortitude.

Early Life

Alvar Aalto (AHL-vahr AHL-toh) was born in the small village of Kurotane in west-central Finland, where his father was a land surveyor. Sometime before 1907, the family moved to Jyväskylä, the administrative and trading center for the densely forested lake region of central Finland. Aalto went through secondary school there, graduating in 1916; he served on the so-called White side in the civil war that followed the declaration of Finnish independence in the wake of the Russian Revolution. He first showed his interest in and bent for architecture by his involvement in the design and construction of his parents’ summer home in Alajärvi (1918). He studied architecture at the Helsinki Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1921. There were two major influences from those years that would play a significant role in shaping his future career. One influence was Armas Lindgren, a former partner of Eliel Saarinen and, with Saarinen, a leader of the Finnish National Romantic movement. Inspired by Finland’s medieval stone churches and Karelian loghouses, that movement expressed itself architecturally in a monumental rough-hewn stone style. The other influence on Aalto was the architectural historian Gustaf Nyström, Finland’s leading exponent of Greek architecture and champion of the classical model as the appropriate style for the newly independent nation.

Aalto’s early practice consisted primarily of designing buildings and facilities for exhibitions and fairs. His first independent architectural work was a complex of exhibition pavilions at the Tempere (Finland) Industrial Exposition in 1922. The following year, Aalto opened his own office in Jyväskylä. Probably the most important turning point in his career was his partnership with and marriage to Aino Marsio in the spring of 1924. Their honeymoon trip to Greece and Italy reinforced the attraction that classical models had for him. By the later 1920’s, Aalto had achieved a growing local reputation. His projects included the railway employees’ housing project (1923-1924) and Workers Club (1923-1924) in Jyväskylä; the Civil Guards’ House (1925) in Seinäjoki; the Villa Väinölä (1925-1926) and Municipal Hospital (1927) in Alajärvi; the Civil Guards’ House (1926-1929) in Jyväskylä; and the Muuarame Parish Church (1927-1929).

Life’s Work

The beginning of Aalto’s meteoric rise from a local to an international figure dates from his winning in 1927 first place in the competition for design of the headquarters of the Southwestern Agricultural Cooperative in Turku; his accompanying relocation of his office to that city, Finland’s oldest and its former capital; and his friendship (later partnership) with Erik Bryggman, one of Finland’s most respected and sophisticated architects. A multipurpose structure housing a theater, offices, a hotel, restaurants, and shops whose sharp and bold exterior lines appear to have reflected the influence of the so-called Wagnerschule (the disciples of the Viennese architect Otto Wagner), the Southwestern Agricultural Cooperative building (1927-1928) established Aalto as an architect of the first rank. That reputation was further solidified by two follow-up Turku projects. The first was an apartment block utilizing a system of precast concrete devised by its developer, Juho Tapani. Aalto’s major contribution was the facade, where broad steel window sashes provide a strong feeling of horizontality and give the appearance of a continuous glass band. Even more significant was the Turan Sanomat newspaper plant and offices (1928-1929), a reinforced concrete structure with a white facade marked by long strips of steel window sash, plate glass display windows, and geometrical regularity. The work was widely hailed as Finland’s first International Style building and established Aalto as a leading figure in the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne.

The most important single commission of Aalto’s career was the tuberculosis sanatorium at Paimio, near Turku. The distinction of the Paimio sanatorium (1930-1933) lay not so much in its individual details striking as each was but rather in Aalto’s success in creating a unified and integrated total environment for the comfort and convenience of the patients, including furniture, beds, lavatories, window arrangements, ventilating systems, room color schemes, and even washbasins designed to be splash proof. The international acclaim that the sanatorium attracted was reinforced by another masterpiece Aalto’s 1933 design for the Municipal Library at Viipuri (now Vyborg). The library (1933-1935, destroyed when the city and the entire province of Karelia was ceded to the Soviet Union after the Russian-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940) strikingly demonstrated Aalto’s technical virtuosity in its concealed natural-gravity ventilation, circular lightwells piercing the ceiling, and the superb acoustics of the auditorium with its wavelike wood ceiling. At the same time, the work revealed Aalto’s shift from the rigid and spartan geometrical forms of the International Style to use curvilinear forms, exposed wood textures, and irregular spatial arrangements. The building represented “the most advanced fusion of aesthetic and technological considerations of any example of modern architecture of its time.”

From the first days of their practice, Aalto and his wife-partner Aino were involved in the design of furniture. Aalto’s first major success in this area was his folding chair; there followed his development of bent plywood chairs, culminating in the cantilevered spring leaf supported chair of 1935. From 1933 on, Aalto’s furniture sold widely throughout the world. The expansion of his involvement beyond furniture to include the design of fabrics, glassware, and lighting fixtures led to the formation of the Artek Company, a partnership with Maire Gullichsen to produce and distribute Finnish-designed household furnishings.

Many of Aalto’s architectural commissions in the 1930’s grew out of his association with Maire Gullichsen and her husband, Harry, the heads of one of Finland’s largest industrial combines. One of the most famous of those projects was the Sunila Pulp Mill (1934-1935). Aalto not only dealt brilliantly with the difficult technical problems involved such as smokestacks, conveyors, ventilators, processing facilities, and the like but also achieved an aesthetic quality rarely found in industrial plants. Along with exploiting the visual contrast between the brick cubic form of the manufacturing plant and the white concrete storage sheds, Aalto successfully adapted the complex to the rough Baltic granite outcropping of the site. Further evidence of Aalto’s movement from the pared-down functionalism of the pure International Style to the more Romantic use of natural materials was shown by his own home and studio in Helsinki (1935-1936) and his all-wood Finnish Pavilion for the Paris World’s Fair of 1937. The masterpiece of his mature architecture, however, was the summer house he designed for the Gullichsens near Noormarkuu, approximately one hundred miles northwest of Helsinki, called the Villa Mairea (1937-1938). The L-shaped, two-story house consisted of a series of articulated rectangular volumes, accented and augmented by the free-form shape of the entrance shed, the irregular volume of Maire Gullichsen’s painting studio, and the kidney-shaped swimming pool. To provide privacy, the interior was partitioned into living and service areas. Its most striking feature was Aalto’s use of wood and natural stone to harmonize the structure with the surrounding fir forest. The house given wide publicity by the exhibition of Aalto’s architecture and furniture put on by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1938 became the model (lamentably watered down in practice in most instances) for post-World War II domestic architecture throughout the world and nowhere more so than in the United States.

Aalto’s first project done in the United States was the Finnish Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940. He was sufficiently attracted by the possibility of relocating to the United States that in 1940 he accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a Finnish patriot, however, he returned to his homeland that fall because of the threat of renewed war between Finland and the Soviet Union. At the war’s end, he taught part-time at MIT until 1951. His Baker House dormitory (1946-1949) for that institution a Z-shaped structure to maximize the number of rooms with windows facing on the Charles River, with undulating walls, dark, rough, brick facades, and cantilevered, twin, straight-run stairways stretching the length of its main entrance (rear) facade is the foremost example of Aalto’s work in the United States.

Aalto was hit hard by the death of his wife Aino in January, 1949. In 1952, however, he married Elissa Mäkiniemi, a member of his office staff, and, like Aino, she became his partner in his architectural practice. Aalto’s international reputation brought him in the 1950’s and 1960’s a series of major Finnish commissions, including the National Pension Bank (1952-1956), the “Ratatalo” office building (1953-1955), and Finlandia Hall (1962-1965), a concert hall and conference center complex (all in Helsinki); the main building of the Helsinki Technical University at Otaniemi (1955-1964); the Vuoksenniska Church in Imatra (1956-1958); and the Seinäjoki Civic Center (1952-1965). The masterwork of the last phase of his career was the Cultural Center (1958-1962) at Wolfsburg, West Germany. The building combines virtually every feature that had become identified as Aalto hallmarks; the fanlike arrangement of the main auditorium and meeting rooms; sunken forms or double-height spaces open to the sky or skylighted, irregular shaped volumes, undulating ceilings, and richly textured wood surfaces.

Aalto was awarded in 1957 the Royal Gold Medal of Architecture in Great Britain and in 1963 the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. As he grew older, however, he became increasingly reclusive until he was inaccessible to all except a handful of longtime friends. The physical and mental impairments of age aggravated by a lifetime of heavy drinking sapped his creative energies during the last decade of his life. Aalto died May 11, 1976, in Helsinki. His death at the age of seventy-eight marked the departure of the last of the twentieth century’s architectural giants.

Significance

Over the course of Aalto’s fifty-four years of practice, he produced, exclusive of single-family dwellings, more than two hundred finished buildings plus the plans for scores more projects that were never built. He thus ranks second only to Frank Lloyd Wright as the most productive major architect of the twentieth century. In addition, he was highly successful aesthetically and financially in the design of furniture, home furnishings, and textiles. Until the post-World War II period, Aalto was probably more appreciated abroad than in his homeland. By the time of his death, however, his name was regarded as synonymous with Finnish architecture.

Aalto’s stature as a giant of modern architecture rests on three major achievements. The first is his technical virtuosity. Perhaps the outstanding example one reflecting the influence of the Finnish environment with its months of limited sunlight was his handling of site, building layout, and window and skylight arrangements to maximize the amount of natural light available. The second was his interest in, and concern for, the total environment of each building. Every detail was planned and coordinated to promote the comfort, convenience, and well-being of his buildings’ users or residents. The third was his success in transcending the limitations of the International Style in which he had first made his reputation. He did so by alternating rectangular volumes with more irregular forms; by brilliantly exploiting the textural possibilities of wood, natural stone, and, in the last phase of his career, thanks to the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, red brick; and by his talent for harmonizing his structures with the natural environment of the site.

Bibliography

Dunster, David, ed. Alvar Aalto. New York: Rizzoli, 1979. Includes an informative essay by Raji-Liisa Heinonen, “Some Aspects of 1920’s Classicism and the Emergence of Functionalism in Finland.” The other two main essays Demetri Porphyrios’s “Heterotopia: A Study in the Ordering Sensibility of the Work of Alvar Aalto,” and Steven Groak’s “Notes on Responding to Aalto’s Buildings” are murky exercises in architectural criticism. The rest of the volume consists of brief written descriptions with accompanying lavish illustrations many in full color of twenty Aalto buildings dating over the full span of his career.

Gutheim, Frederick. Alvar Aalto. New York: George Braziller, 1960. Gutheim’s brief biographical sketch in this volume for the Braziller Masters of World Architecture Series, written at the height of Aalto’s reputation, is adulatory, is not wholly reliable, and devotes disproportionately too much space to Aalto’s experiments in large-scale town planning (none of which fully materialized) and his post-World War II Finnish commissions. The work is still a useful introduction. There are approximately eighty pages of black-and-white photographs and floor or site plans.

Loftin, Laurence Keith, III. An Analysis of the Work of Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellon Press, 2005. Loftin, a professor of architecture, examines the nuances of Aalto’s work, including the architect’s designs for his own house, offices, and summer home. Includes sketches, plans, and photographs.

Pearson, Paul David. “Alvar Aalto.” In Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, edited by Adolf K. Placzek. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1982. A brief but comprehensive, balanced, and judicious survey of Aalto’s career and work that should be the starting point for all interested students. The major weakness apart from the inevitable scanting on details is that the format allows only a handful of small-sized black-and-white photographs for illustrations.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Alvar Aalto and the International Style. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978. This thoroughly researched and documented account of the first half of Aalto’s career, up to the death of his first wife in January, 1949, is regarded as the authoritative treatment of that phase of Aalto’s life. Pearson not only analyzes in his text all of Aalto’s projects, built and unbuilt, from the period, but illustrates most with reproductions of sketches/plans and photographs.

Quantrill, Malcolm. Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. A full one-volume account of Aalto’s long, productive career. The first chapter examines Aalto’s pronouncements on the nature of architecture; the second looks at “Modern Finnish Architecture Background and Evolution.” The remainder of the text traces the evolution of Aalto’s work, with extended analyses of the more important projects and extensive photographs and copies of plans to illustrate the points made. There is, in addition, an invaluable sixteen-page bibliography of books, exhibition catalogs, and articles.

Ray, Nicholas. Alvar Aalto. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. A brief but comprehensive look at Aalto’s life, work, theories, and relevance for the twenty-first century. Ray, an architect and professor, argues that Aalto’s theories were in opposition to those of other architects of his day.

Schildt, Göran. Alvar Aalto. 2 vols. Translated by Timothy Binham. New York: Rizzoli, 1984-1987. The first volume, covering up to 1927, should be regarded as the official biography. Schildt who was Aalto’s favorite architectural critic tends to worship Aalto, but he utilizes previously untapped archival materials to shed light on the development of Aalto’s art, work style, and personality. Contains 278 color and black-and-white illustrations. The second volume of this biography covers the years from the late 1920’s until 1939. This volume has the virtues and weaknesses of its predecessor but is must reading not only for serious students of Aalto but also for those interested in the development of modern architecture, at least as viewed through the eyes of one of its major shapers. Like the first volume, this one is generously illustrated.