Alvar Aalto (02/3/1898 – 05/11/1976) – a great Finnish architect and designer. The buildings he designed were included in architectural textbooks and encyclopedias, and the company he founded, Artek, still successfully sells his furniture.
Over the 78 years of his life, Alvar Aalto built many public and private buildings in Europe, the USA, and even Iraq. All over Finland, from Helsinki to the small town of Alayarvi, where his parents lived, there are his universities, libraries, museums, theaters, cultural centers, offices, schools, and churches. From 1963 to 1968 he was president of the Finnish Academy, in 1957 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received prestigious architectural awards: the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
City library in Vyborg. 1935.
We were lucky: one of his most significant buildings is located in Vyborg, near St. Petersburg. Three years ago, the library, created by Alvar Aalto in 1935, was inaugurated after many years of restoration carried out by Russian and Finnish specialists. Now this is a real place of pilgrimage for everyone who is partial to modernist architecture. In 2015, the project received the highest EU award for the preservation of cultural heritage, “Europa Nostra” – the so-called “European restoration Oscar”. This is one of Aalto’s first projects where his author’s style was fully demonstrated: a combination of functionalism, dictating the severity of forms, and soft, flowing organics in the interiors, plus ergonomics and human focus in everything down to the smallest detail.
The snow-white building, consisting of clear geometric volumes, with strip and panoramic glazing, with a metal rail on a multi-level roof, like many other modernist buildings, resembles a huge ocean liner. The interior architecture amazes with its harmony and thoughtfulness of details – right down to the placement of shelving, armchairs, and stools.
Reading room in the Vyborg Library after restoration.
Aalto created an excellent system of natural lighting in all rooms. The reading room is permeated with diffused light, entering here through 57 round skylights in the ceiling. In the center is a dramatic double staircase with a sculpturally curved railing. In the assembly hall, the famous wave-shaped acoustic ceiling, covered with thin wooden slats, was restored – a detail that became one of Aalto’s calling cards after the Vyborg library.
Sanatorium in Paimio, archival photo. 1933.
Aalto was born in the deep Finnish province – probably there he learned to feel and understand nature, the connection with which he later so skillfully knew how to convey in his buildings. He received his architect’s diploma in 1921 at the Helsinki Polytechnic University but began building while still a student. His first project was a house for his parents in Alayarvi, in 1918. In those years he adhered to the neoclassical style. It was difficult for a novice architect to get an order in the capital, so Aalto returned to the provincial town of Jyväskylä, where he studied at the lyceum, and opened an office there. Accepted orders for private houses. From Jyväskyli he began a gradual movement towards the capital: first he moved to Turku, and only in 1933 to Helsinki. In Jyväskylä, about one and a half dozen buildings have been preserved that he built back in the 1920s and later, when he returned here having already become world famous. These are, among other things, a city theater, a university and an art museum, which now houses a memorial museum for the architect himself.
Since the late 1920s, Aalto has been actively involved in the world architectural discourse – he travels a lot around Europe, and meets architects and artists: Le Corbusier, Poul Henningsen , Walter Gropius, Andre Lursa, Karl Moser, Gerrit Rietveld, etc. – discusses with them their principles and ideas, develops his own understanding and gradually becomes one of the leading figures of modern architecture – it was during this period that he built those two buildings that brought him to the forefront: a library in Vyborg and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Paimio, in a pine forest near Turku. Contemporaries were amazed by the elegant, refined contours of this complex and the equally precise internal architecture.
Objects in pictures:
1. Tea serving table 901, Artek, 1936.
2. Stool X601, Artek, 1954.
3. Pendant lamp A331, Artek, 1953.
4. Deckchair 43, Artek, 1936.
5. Pendant lamp A338, Artek, 1950.
6. Pendant lamp A330S, Artek, 1939.
7. The famous stackable Stool 60, Artek, 1933.
Everything in the sanatorium – from the architecture to the smallest details – was supposed to contribute to the recovery of patients. Aalto, together with his wife Aino, who was also an architect, designed literally everything for the sanatorium – even sinks and containers for taking tests. Furniture was particularly successful. The Paimio chair was designed to allow maximum lung expansion for the person sitting in it. Springy armchairs and chaise lounges made of bent birch plywood, stackable chairs, leather sofas, functional lamps, mobile trolley tables – all these items were designed so comfortable and ergonomic that their industrial production was later established.
Armchair Paimio. 1932. Released by Artek.
In the early 1930s, Aalto worked closely with the Finnish furniture maker Otto Korhonen, they experimented with bent birch plywood and finally patented the technology for producing furniture from it. The main element they patented was the L-leg support leg: it was smoothly curved at an angle of 90 degrees. Based on the L-leg, a whole series of armchairs, chairs and stools was created, and the first was the legendary Stool 60 stool with a round seat on three legs – Aalto originally used it in the interiors of the Vyborg library. Then its mass production began, which continues to this day. This is one of the most frequently counterfeited furniture models. More than a million of the original stools, made in Finland, have been produced since the 1930s. In total, up to eight million such stools were produced by different manufacturers around the world, according to various sources. Recently, Stool 60 has become a mandatory attribute of all official Apple stores.
Stool 60 stools in the conference room of the Vyborg Library after restoration.
In 1935, Aalto, his wife and a couple of like-minded people founded the company Artek, which meant art + technology – now furniture of his design was produced under this brand. Today it is one of the leading Finnish design brands, owning the rights to remake furniture pieces created by Aalto and his wife. In addition to furniture, Aalto designed lamps, also for specific architectural objects, and in 1936, on the eve of the World Exhibition in Paris, he made a series of glass vases for the Iittala manufactory. The vase, which later became known as the Savoy, received a gold medal in Paris. They said that in it Aalto conveyed the outlines of one of the Finnish lakes. The Savoy restaurant in Helsinki, whose interiors were designed by Aalto, purchased these vases in large quantities, hence the name attached to them. The restaurant, by the way, is still open, and Aalto vases are on every table.
Vase Savoy, Iittala. 1936.
The greatest success of Aalto’s furniture was in London – local merchants were involved in sales here, and the number of copies sold was in the thousands, while in Finland itself there were only dozens. In any case, thanks to the success of his furniture, Aalto was able to take a short break in his architectural activities, not to chase orders, but to calmly start building his own house in one of the districts of Helsinki, where he had moved.
It is estimated that Aalto built about 75 private houses during his career, most in the early years, but the most important private house for the history of architecture was Villa Mairea in the west of the country, in Normarkku, which was completed in 1939. Many architectural historians consider it the most comfortable private house in the history of the twentieth century. In any case, it ranks with the most famous modernist villas of the 20th century, such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy in Poissy, Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat in Brno, Joseph Frank’s Beer in Vienna, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Over the Falls in Pennsylvania, Philip Johnson’s “Glass House” in Connecticut, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder in Utrecht or Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027 on the Cote d’Azur.
Villa Mairea. 1939.
The clients of Villa Mairea were Aalto’s friends – construction magnate Harry Gullichsen and his wife Maire. They gave him complete carte blanche: no restrictions either in terms of ideas or in terms of finances. As a result, a villa was built that was outwardly quite radical for those times: it had nothing in common with the traditional estate and the dominant manor house that the Finns were accustomed to – a building with shifted horizontal “levels”, carelessly spread out among the pine trees in the letter L, with an outdoor swimming pool, with a wooden “tower” housing the owner’s art studio, with open terraces, a winter garden below and a Japanese rock garden on the roof.
Villa Mairea. Fragment of the interior of the first floor.
On the ground floor, all rooms are combined into open space and at the same time isolated – thin Japanese-style columns, different floor coverings, different floor levels. Natural wood, white plaster, ceramic tiles, untreated stone slabs from which the fireplaces are made create a unique combination of modernist and something primordial, archaic, making you feel like you are in a cozy, protected shelter. Villa Mairea today functions as a museum and is open to visitors, but unfortunately there are very few of them, since getting to these remote places is not so easy.
Alvar Aalto (3.02.1898 — 11.05.1976)
Since 1938, Aalto has visited the USA several times: he is the author of the Finnish pavilion at the World Exhibition in New York, he travels around the country, meets famous American architects, visits the Kaufmann family in their “House over the Falls” and is almost settling in the Massachusetts Polytechnic University, having received a position as a professor, but due to the Second World War he leaves for his homeland. In 1946, he returned to the USA, taught, and built a dormitory on the Massachusetts Polytechnic campus – the famous Baker House. The red brick period in his work begins. However, he has still not received a single significant contract in Helsinki. And suddenly, in 1948, Aalto’s project wins the competition for the construction of a pension fund building in the capital. Aalto is back in Finland.
Finlandia Concert Hall in Helsinki. 1967-1971.
In addition to the Pension Fund building, he built several other objects in Helsinki: the monumental and white marble Finlandia Concert Hall, nicknamed the “iceberg of modernism” (1967-1971), the powerful House of Culture, similar to giant brick tanks (1952-1958), the Polytechnic University in the satellite city of Helsinki Espoo with the main building auditorium that became a landmark (1949-1966).
Opera House in Essen, Germany. 1959-1988. 3D model.
Expressive, image-generating buildings coexist in his post-war work with another type of building: these are rectangular functionalist boxes with a large number of regularly spaced windows, similar to each other like twins. This is exactly how the building of the Finnish Electric Company (1970), the headquarters of the Stora-Enso concern 1959, and the academic bookstore in the city center (1969) appear. The internal architecture of his buildings is often even more complex and expressive than the external: intersecting planes and lines, clashing colors, textures and streams of light are reminiscent of Suprematist compositions pulsating with internal energy.
Congress Hall in Helsinki. Finish: white Carrara marble. Project 1967–71 Completed after the death of the architect.
Aalto treated architectural creativity like a true artist: he did not adhere to any one style, order, concept, each time relying on an image born of the imagination; the source of inspiration for him was nature, and the ultimate goal was humanism, service to man.
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