Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain

Master of warm modernism.

Alvar Aalto, often working with Aino Aalto, designed buildings, furniture and glass using bent wood and organic forms.

Alvar Aalto was born in 1898 in Kuortane, Finland, and grew up in Jyväskylä. He trained as an architect at the Helsinki University of Technology, graduating in 1921. In 1924 he married the architect Aino Marsio, who became his close collaborator until her death in 1949. He later married the architect Elissa Mäkiniemi, who also took part in the work.

His first major works were the city library in Viipuri, now Vyborg in Russia, with an undulating timber ceiling in the lecture hall, and the Paimio Sanatorium of 1929–33. The sanatorium for tuberculosis patients was designed down to the smallest detail with the patients' well-being in mind, and the Paimio chair in bent birch plywood helped them breathe more easily. Together with a furniture factory he developed techniques for bending solid birch, and the Stool 60 of 1933 became a bestseller.

In 1935 Alvar and Aino Aalto founded the company Artek with Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl to sell the furniture. The Savoy vase of 1936, with its undulating form, is still made by Iittala. Villa Mairea of 1937–39, designed for the Gullichsens, combines modernism with Finnish tradition. Throughout his career Aalto sought to soften the severity of functionalism with wood, brick, light and organic forms.

After the Second World War his works included the Baker House student residence at MIT in the United States, the Säynätsalo Town Hall, cultural centres and churches in several countries, and Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, inaugurated in 1971. He also designed the Nordic House in Reykjavik. He ran a large office and designed everything from town plans to door handles.

Aalto died in 1976. He is Finland's best-known architect and has featured on both banknotes and stamps. A museum devoted to him is in Jyväskylä. His humanist modernism influenced architects all over the world and became a model for the warmth and feeling for nature of Scandinavian design.