[ k o t o n o g o ]: ALVAR AALTO

his BIOGRAPHY 

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) is considered a
modern architect, yet his work  exhibits a carefully crafted balance of intricate and complex forms,  spaces, and elements, and reveals a traditionalism rooted in the  cultural heritage and physical environment of Finland. Over the course  of his 50-year career, Alvar Aalto, unlike a number of his  contemporaries, did not rely on modernism's fondness for industrialized  processes as a compositional technique, but forged an architecture  influenced by a broad spectrum of concerns.

Alvar Aalto 's is an architecture that manifests an understanding of the  psychological needs of modern society, the particular qualities of the  Finnish environment, and the historical, technical, and cultural  traditions of Scandinavian architecture. Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was  born in the Ostro-Bothnian village of Kourtane in 1898. The family soon  moved to Alajarvi, where his mother, Selma Hackstedt Aalto, died in  1903. 

By 1907 Alvar Aalto 's father, J. H. Aalto, a government surveyor,  had remarried and moved the family to the central Finnish city of  Jyvaskyla. In Jyvaskyla the young Alvar Aalto attended the Normal School  and the Classical Lyceum, and in the summer months during his teens  often accompanied his father on surveying trips. Alvar Aalto entered the  Helsinki Polytechnic in 1916, and became a protege of Armas Lindgren  (who was partner of E. Saarinen and H. Gesellius during the formative  period of Finnish National Romanticism). While a student, Alvar Aalto  worked for Carolus Lindberg on the "Tivoli" area for the 1920 Finnish  National Fair, and served in the militia during the civil strife  following the Russian Revolution. After graduating from the Polytechnic  in 1921, Alvar Aalto sought employment in Sweden; unable to secure a  position with Gunnar Asplund, Alvar Aalto worked for A. Bjerke on the  Congress Hall for the 1923 Goteborg World's Fair.

After having executed several buildings for the 1922 Industrial  Exhibition in Tampere, Alvar Aalto established his practice in Jyvaskyla  in 1923. While securing local commissions, Alvar Aalto also followed  the normal practice in Finland of participating in architectural  competitions. In 1924 Alvar Aalto married the architect Aino Marsio.  Exemplary of the classicism found throughout Scandinavia during the  1920s, Alvar Aalto 's early work was influenced by contemporary Nordic  practitioners such as Asplund and Ragnar Ostberg, as well as by the  simple massing and ornamentation of the architettura mirwre of northern  Italy. His work evolved from the austere quality of the Railway Workers  Housing (1923), to the more Palladian inspired Workers Club (1924-1925)  (both in Jyvaskyla), and from there to the deftly refined and detailed  Seinajoki Civil Guards Complex (1925), Jyvaskyla Civil Guards Building  (1927), and the Muurame Church (1927-1929). Composed of simple,  wellproportioned volumes rendered in stucco or wood, these works are  characterized by their sparse decoration and selective use of classical  elements.

 In 1927 Alvar Aalto won the competition for the Southwestern  Agricultural Cooperative Building   (1927-1929), and moved his office to  Turku. Located on the southwest coast of Finland, Turku, the former  Swedish capital, was a major cultural center where Alvar Aalto made  numerous contacts that proved important to his development. His  friendship with architect Erik Bryggman was coupled with Turku's  proximity to Sweden, where associations with Asplund and Sven Markelius  provided connections with the continental architectural avantgarde.  Alvar Aalto not only attended the 1929 meeting of Les Congres  Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), but traveled regularly  throughout Europe, making him one of the most knowledgeable architects  in Finland of the "new architecture."

During the six years spent in Turku (1927-1933), Alvar Aalto designed  the series of buildings that would establish his international  reputation. His architecture evolved from the stripped classicism of the  Agricultural Cooperative Building toward a full acceptance of the  formal and theoretical canons of International Style modernism or  "functionalism" as it was termed in Finland. The Turun Sanamat Newspaper  Building (1928-1930) was the first work in Finland to incorporate Le  Corbusier's les cinq pointes d'une architecture nouvelle. The Standard  Apartment Block in Turku (1929), the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium  (1929-1933), and the Turku 7th Centenary Exhibition complex (designed in  collaboration with Bryggman in 1929) indicate Alvar Aalto 's level of  understanding of both International Style modernism and the other  avantgarde movements in art and architecture that occurred in the late  1920s and early 1930s. In addition to functionalist principles, Alvar  Aalto 's work demonstrated an awareness of Russian Constructivism and  the Dutch de Stijl movement, not to mention the work of Johannes Duiker,  Andre Lurcat, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. During this period, Alvar Aalto  was an active polemicist who advanced the cause of modernism in Finnish  architecture.

 Alvar Aalto moved his office to Helsinki in 1933, hoping the capital  would provide greater opportunities for commissions, as well as bringing  him closer to the city of Viipuri where the Municipal Library  (1927-1935) was under construction. Although Alvar Aalto would not  receive a major public commission in Helsinki for another two decades.  Alvar Aalto 's practice expanded. This was an important period of  transition in his work which, with the Viipuri Library, included his  house and office in the suburb of Munkkiniemi (1934-1936), the Finnish  Pavilions for the 1937 Paris and 1939 New York World's Fairs, the Villa  Mairea (1937-1938), and the factory and workers' housing at Sunila  (1935-1954). At this time Alvar Aalto received the patronage of Harry  and Maire Gullichsen, prominent industrialists, for whom Alvar Aalto had  designed the summer house Mairea on the Ahlstrom estate in Noormarkku.  The Gullichsens provided Alvar Aalto with entry into Finland's  industrial establishment, which resulted in a number of factory and  housing commissions throughout Finland, including the complexes at  Sunila, Inkeroinen, Kauttua, Vaasa, Karhula, and Varkaus for the  Ahlstrom and Stromberg companies. In 1935, with the assistance of Maire  Gullichsen and with Nils Gustav Hahl as director, the firm of Artek was  formed, which produced and marketed Alvar Aalto 's furniture, fabric,  and glassware designs.

During the mid-1930s Alvar Aalto 's work began to embody a more tactile,  romantic, and picturesque posture, becoming less machinelike in  imagery. The presence of these characterisl ics in his work, coupled  with a seemingly rekindled interest in Finnish vernacular building  traditions and a concern for the alienated individual within modern mass  society, signals a movement away from the functionalist tenets that  formed his architecture in the early 1930s. In renouncing industrialized  production as a compositional and formal ordering sensibility, Alvar  Aalto moved toward a more personal style which solidified over the next  decade, a direction achieving maturity in his work executed after World  War II. 

his Career

Early career: classicismAlthough he is sometimes regarded as among the first and most influential architects of Nordic modernism,  a closer examination of the historical facts reveals that Aalto (while a  pioneer in Finland) closely followed and had personal contacts with  other pioneers in Sweden, in particular Gunnar Asplund and Sven Markelius.  What they and many others of that generation in the Nordic countries  had in common was that they started off from a classical education and  were first designing in the so-called Nordic Classicism style – a style that had been a reaction to the previous dominant style of National Romanticism–  before moving, in the late 1920s, towards Modernism. On returning to  Jyväskylä in 1923 to establish his own architect's office, Aalto busied  himself with a number of single-family homes, all designed in the  classical style, such as the manor-like house for his mother's cousin  Terho Manner in Töysa in 1923, a summer villa for the Jyväskylä chief  constable in 1923 and the Alatalo farmhouse in Tarvaala in 1924. During  this period he also completed his first public buildings, the Jyväskylä  Workers' Club in 1925, the Jyväskylä Defence Corps building in 1926 and  the Seinajoki Defence Corp building in 1924-29.

Aalto also entered  several architectural competitions for prestigious state public  buildings, both in Finland and abroad, including the two competitions  for the Finnish Parliamentary building in 1923 and 1924, the extension  to the University of Helsinki in 1931, and the building to house the League of Nations in Geneva,  Switzerland, in 1926-27. Furthermore, this was the period when Aalto  was most prolific in his writings, with articles for professional  journals and newspapers. Among his most well-known essays from this  period are "Urban culture" 1924), "Temple baths on Jyväskylä ridge"  (1925), "Abbé Coignard's sermon" (1925), and "From doorstep to living  room" (1926). 

Early career: functionalism

The shift in Aalto's design approach from classicism to modernism is epitomised by the Viipuri Library  (1927–35), which went through a transformation from an originally  classical competition entry proposal to the completed high-modernist  building. Yet his humanistic approach is in full evidence in the  library: the interior displays natural materials, warm colours, and  undulating lines. Due to problems over financing and a change of site,  the Viipuri Library project lasted eight years, and during that same  time he also designed the Turun Sanomat Building (1929–30) and Paimio  Sanatorium (1929–33). Thus, the Turun Sanomat Building first heralded  Aalto's move towards modernism, and this was then carried forward both  in the Paimio Sanatorium and in the on-going design for the library.  Although the Turun Sanomat Building and Paimio Sanatorium are  comparatively pure modernist works, they too carried the seeds of his  questioning of such an orthodox modernist approach and a move to a more  daring, synthetic attitude.

Through Sven Markelius, Aalto became a member of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne  (CIAM), attending the second congress in Frankfurt in 1929 and the  fourth congress in Athens in 1933, where he established a close  friendship with László Moholy-Nagy, Sigfried Giedion and Philip Morton Shand. It was during this time that he followed closely the work of the main driving force behind the new modernism, Le Corbusier, and visited him in his Paris office several times in the following years.

It was not until the completion of the Paimio Sanatorium (1929) and  Viipuri Library (1935) that Aalto first achieved world attention in  architecture. His reputation grew in the USA following the critical  reception of his design for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, described by Frank Lloyd Wright  as a "work of genius". It could be said that Aalto's international  reputation was sealed with his inclusion in the second edition of  Sigfried Giedion's influential book on Modernist architecture, Space, Time and Architecture: The growth of a new tradition (1949), in which Aalto received more attention than any other Modernist architect, including Le Corbusier.  In his analysis of Aalto, Giedion gave primacy to qualities that depart  from direct functionality, such as mood, atmosphere, intensity of life  and even national characteristics, declaring that "Finland is with Aalto  wherever he goes".

Mid career: experimentation

Aalto's early experiments with wood and his move away from a purist  modernism would be tested in built form with the commission to design  Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku,  the luxury home of the young industrialist couple Harry and Maire  Gullichsen. It was Maire Gullichsen who acted as the main client, and  she worked closely not only with Alvar but also Aino Aalto on the  design, inspiring them to be more daring in their work. The original  design was to include a private art gallery, but this was never built.  The building forms a U-shape around a central inner "garden" the central  feature of which is a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Adjacent to the pool  is a sauna executed in a rustic style, alluding to both Finnish and  Japanese precedents. The design of the house is a synthesis of numerous  stylistic influences, from traditional Finnish vernacular to purist  modernism, as well as influences from English and Japanese architecture.  While the house is clearly intended for a wealthy family, Aalto  nevertheless argued that it was also an experiment that would prove  useful in the design of mass housing.

His increased fame led to offers and commissions outside Finland. In 1941 he accepted an invitation as a visiting professor to MIT, in the USA. This was during the Second World War,  and he involved his students in designing low-cost, small-scale housing  for the reconstruction of war-torn Finland. While teaching at MIT,  Aalto also designed the student dormitory, Baker House,  completed in 1948. This building was the first building of Aalto's  redbrick period. Originally used in Baker House to signify the Ivy  League university tradition, on his return to Finland Aalto used it in a  number of key buildings, in particular, in several of the buildings in  the new Helsinki University of Technology  campus (starting in 1950), Säynatsalo Town Hall (1952), Helsinki  Pensions Institute (1954), Helsinki House of Culture (1958), as well as  in his own summer house, the so-called Experimental House in Muuratsalo  (1957).

Mature career: monumentalism 

The early 1960s and 1970s (up until his death in 1976) were marked by  key works in Helsinki, in particular the huge town plan for the void in  centre of Helsinki adjacent to Töölö Bay and the vast railway yards, and marked on the edges by significant buildings such as the National Museum and the main railway station, both by Eliel Saarinen.  In his town plan Aalto proposed a line of separate marble-clad  buildings fronting the bay which would house various cultural  institutions, including a concert hall, opera, museum of architecture  and headquarters for the Finnish Academy. The scheme also extended into the Kamppi  district with a series of tall office blocks. Aalto first presented his  scheme in 1961, but it went through various modifications during the  early 1960s. Only two fragements of the overall plan were ever realized:  the Finlandia Hall  concert hall (1976) fronting Töölö Bay, and an office building in the  Kamppi district for the Helsinki Electricity Company (1975). The Miesian formal language of geometric grids employed in the buildings was also used by Aalto for other sites in Helsinki, including the Enso-Gutzeit building (1962), the Academic Bookstore (1962) and the SYP Bank building (1969).

Following Aalto's death in 1976 his office continued to operate under  the direction of his widow, Elissa, completing works already to some  extent designed. These works include the Jyväskylä City Theatre and  Essen Opera House. Since the death of Elissa Aalto the office has  continued to operate as the Alvar Aalto Academy, giving advice on the  restoration of Aalto buildings and organising the vast archive material.

his AWARD Aalto's awards included the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture from the Royal Institute of British Architects (1957) and the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects (1963). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957

his WORK

Aalto's career spans the changes in style from (Nordic Classicism) to purist International Style  Modernism to a more personal, synthetic and idiosyncratic Modernism.  Aalto's wide field of design activity ranges from the large scale of city planning and architecture to interior design, furniture and glassware design and painting.  It has been estimated that during his entire career Aalto designed over  500 individual buildings, approximately 300 of which were built, the  vast majority of which are in Finland. He also has a few buildings in  the USA, Germany, Italy, and France.

Aalto claimed that his paintings were not made as individual artworks  but as part of his process of architectural design, and many of his  small-scale "sculptural" experiments with wood led to later larger  architectural details and forms. These experiments also led to a number  of patents: for example, he invented a new form of laminated  bent-plywood furniture in 1932. His experimental method had been  influenced by his meetings with various members of the Bauhaus design school, especially László Moholy-Nagy,  whom he first met in 1930. Aalto's furniture was exhibited in London in  1935, to great critical acclaim, and to cope with the consumer demand  Aalto, together with his wife Aino, Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl founded the company Artek that same year. Aalto glassware (Aino as well as Alvar) is manufactured by Iittala. 

his Significant buildings 

1921–1923: Bell tower of Kauhajärvi Church, Lapua, Finland
1924–1928: Municipal hospital, Alajärvi, Finland
1926–1929: Defence Corps Building, Jyväskylä, Finland
1927–1935: Municipal library, Viipuri, Finland (now Vyborg, Russia)
1928–1929, 1930: Turun Sanomat newspaper offices, Turku, Finland
1928–1929: Paimio Sanatorium, Tuberculosis sanatorium and staff housing, Paimio, Finland
1931: Central University Hospital, Zagreb, Croatia (former Yugoslavia)
1932: – Villa Tammekann, Tartu, Estonia
1934: Corso theatre, restaurant interior, Zürich, Switzerland
1936–1938: Ahlstrom Sunila Pulp Mill, Housing, and Town Plan, Kotka
1937–1939: Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland
1939: Finnish Pavilion, at the 1939 World's Fair
1947–1948: Baker House, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
1949–1966: Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
1949–1952: Säynätsalo Town Hall, 1949 competition, built 1952, Säynätsalo (now part of Jyväskylä), Finland
1950–1957: Kansaneläkelaitos (National Pension Institution) office building, Helsinki, Finland
1952–1958: House of Culture, Helsinki, Finland
1953: The Experimental House, Muuratsalo, Finland
1958–1987: Town centre, Seinäjoki, Finland
1958–1972: North Jutland Art Museum, Aalborg, Denmark
1959–1962: Enso-Gutzeit Headquarters, Helsinki, Finland
1962: Aalto-Hochhaus, Bremen, Germany
1965: Regional Library of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
1962–1971: Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, Finland
1963–1965: Building for Västmanland-Dala nation, Uppsala, Sweden
1965–1968: Nordic House, Reykjavík, Iceland
1970: Mount Angel Abbey Library, St. Benedict, Oregon, USA
1959–1988: Essen opera house, Essen, Germany