Alvar Aalto
Born: 1898
Died: 1976
Gender: Male
Nationality: Finnish
“The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life. This is the only true style in architecture.” Alvar Aalto
Aalto’s insistence on the importance of design and formal expression in our lives and his adept handling of materials, light, and space; explain why he is one of the great architects of the twentieth century. He was also a town planner, painter, and designer. The principles of classical architecture are evident in Aalto’s early work. This influence remained and was later synthesized with modern architectural expression during his mature period. He was able to assimilate both Nordic and Continental influences emanating from Berlin, Weimar, and Paris. Aalto quickly proved himself a master of the burgeoning International Style.
Aalto’s attention to the ‘the human side’ was evident throughout his buildings and furniture design such as the Paimio chair. He developed innovative techniques to bend wood, enabling him to design furniture, which was simultaneously modern, yet human to the touch. In 1933, his furniture designs were rapturously received in London. Aalto’s furniture began to be distributed worldwide, finding its way into numerous design-conscious homes.
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We can see the influence of the Paimio design in many of the key features of Aalto’s mature manner. Compositions assembled from deliberately varied forms and materials. The juxtaposition of rectilinear and free, ‘organic’ geometries epitomized by his love of counterpointing a straight and undulating line. ‘Aalto’ means ‘wave’ in Finnish. It was only natural that the wave would become his signature. Aalto was noted for his fastidious attention to detail and a conspicuous concern with the building as a complete environment to be experienced by its occupants through all their senses, not just their eyes.
The Aalto wave assumed magisterial form in the three-storey suspended wall billowing through the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Throughout his career, Aalto was presented internationally as the ‘humaniser’ and ‘naturaliser’ of a cold, overly rational modern architecture, and the radical implications of his painterly approach to architectural form went largely unremarked. Aalto painted throughout his life, thinking of it as a useful ‘aesthetic exercise’, and learnt more than any architect from the technique of collage invented by Braque and Picasso in 1912. Lurking in all his work from Paimio onwards, collage techniques became dominant in the design of one of his great masterpieces, the Villa Mairea (1937-40). Collage also enabled Aalto to adopt a richly varied palette of materials, combining ‘traditional’, and ‘modern’.
Commissioned by the wealthy industrialists Harry and Maire Gullichsen. The collage technique enabled him to respond brilliantly to his clients’ request for a house, which was both modern and unmistakably Finnish. Aalto’s brilliant synthesis of color, material, form, and scale convey something of the power of his architectural work The most radical development of all came in the interior, which Aalto visualized as an abstraction of a Finnish forest. Aalto said he wanted ‘to avoid artificial architectural rhythms in the architecture. The idea of treating the interior as a metaphoric landscape had its roots in Nordic Classicism. Almost all his later work is characterized by a contrast between broad horizontal masses and vertically striated surfaces, which can readily be read as an abstraction of the Finnish landscape. Today the Villa Mairea, has become one of the most admired private residences of modern architecture.
Believing that ‘great ideas arise from the small details of life’, Aalto created poetic places out of an intense concern for the needs of what he called ‘the little man’, and from a deep love of his native landscape. He did not dwell on abstract theory, but immersed himself in the particularities of a site, the texture of materials and the quality of the light.
Functionalism was a phase in his career, a step on the way to his expression of the organic relationship between man, nature, and buildings. Paimio Sanatorium, a building that quickly elevated him to the status of a master of heroic functionalism. A genre that he was soon to walk away from in his pursuit of artistic harmony through a synergy encompassing people, their environment and the buildings in which they live. It was Aalto’s ability to coordinate those three components that discloses the beauty of his work. Aalto spoke of his art (building art he called it) as a synthesis of life in materialized form.
Biography by Pierre