Alvar Aalto

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (Kuortane, Southern Ostrobothnia, February 3, 1898 – Helsinki, May 11, 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer. He was part of the Modern Movement and participated in the CIAM ( International Congresses of Modern Architecture ). He was the only architect of the Second generation of the Modern Movement recognized as a «master», thus comparing himself to the great masters of the Heroic Period of the Modern Movement Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright The Alvar Aalto Medal is awarded in their honor every five years.

Biography

Aalto was born in Kuortane, into a family of classical Western culture. His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, who was involved in environmental projects, put him in touch with Finnish nature protection, his mother, Selma Mathilda Hackstedt, was a teacher.

He studied high school in Jyväskylä and architecture at what is now the Helsinki Polytechnic University, where some professors, and especially Armas Eliel Lindgren, belonged to romantic nationalism, an artistic movement that searched for the historical roots and identity of Finland to extol her. In 1917 he enlisted in the Finnish civil war, which ended in 1918. After graduating in 1921 he went on a lengthy study tour of northern Europe. In 1923 he opened his own architecture studio in Jyväskylä. In 1925 he contracted marriage to Aino Marsio, an architect who collaborated on several of his projects. The two together traveled through Central Europe and Italy. During that decade he participated in the thought of various avant-gardes, especially the Bauhaus, and established contacts with artists and critics, among whom Laszlo Moholy-Nagy stood out. In 1928 he was appointed a member of the CIAM, the most important congresses of modern architecture, in which architects of the category of Le Corbusier and Sert participated. He also collaborated for a time with Erik Bryggman, who urged them to adopt a purer and more functionalist modernity, pitting him against the Nordic classicism of his early works.

Alvar Aalto Study in Helsinki (1954–56)

In 1927 he moved first to Turku and then to Helsinki in 1933, already being an architect of some reputation. The furniture exhibition in London that year, organized by P. Shand, was the first of many international exhibitions of his work, such as the one at MOMA in 1938. In 1935 he and his wife Aino Marsio, Maire Gullichsen founded the company Artek, dedicated to the mass production of the designs of the couple of architects. For her, he designed the first chair supported by a self-supporting wooden structure, which was patented. One of his classic pieces of business production is the Aalto vase, also called Savoy.

He worked abroad for a few years, returning to Finland in 1940, after the First Russo-Finnish War. One of the places where he lived was the United States, where he was appointed professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). for its acronym in English).

In 1942 he was elected president of the Association of Finnish Architects. After the Second Russo-Finnish War in 1944, he carried out several urban projects once he was appointed head of the state office established for the reconstruction of the country. During World War II he came into contact with Nazi classicism at the hands of its main representative, Albert speer. Between 1946 and 1948 he lived in the United States, subsisting as an architect and teacher. He then he met Frank Lloyd Wright.

Before the death of his first wife Aino Marsio, works published in the office were usually signed "Aino y Alvar Aalto." Marsio collaborated directly as a designer in domestic aspects of the projects. His patient and calm character was an important balance in Aalto's impulsive and unorthodox life. In 1949 his wife Aino Marsio died and in 1952 he married Elissa Mäkiniemi, like Aino an architect and collaborator, who directed the construction of the unfinished projects at his death, which occurred on May 11, 1976 in Helsinki.

Thought and design method

Aalto himself theorized about his design method in the article The Trout and the River (1947); In it, he wrote that he first analyzed all the requirements of the project and then, he put them aside to sketch ideas with simple lines, until he found that drawing that satisfactorily solved all the starting conditions. For Aalto, the experimentation of ideas did not end until the project was built, highlighting its successes and defects; the projects, not being considered finished on paper, suffered modifications during the commissioning.

Aalto immersed himself in modern and internationalizing architecture but, like other architects of the second generation, he looked for a way to add the variables of each territory and culture. the pieces for themselves and for the sake of a whole that attended to culture, society and location, extending the reasoning to the materials themselves. This started in Aalto, as can be seen from his writings, from his concern for the humanization of architecture , in which this is understood as a cultural proposal that responds to a specific society and not only as a something functional and technical; The way to achieve this was by designing spaces that were simultaneously functional and ergonomic, which ended up leading to the adoption of organic architecture.

On the other hand, for Aalto painting and architecture had influenced each other, just as he thought that the arts shared origins and processes. In this sense, he was influenced by the painters Paul Cézanne and Fernand Léger, with whom he was a friend. He believed in the inspiration produced by other arts; He drew, painted and sculpted throughout his life. "The three art forms of architecture, painting and scupulture are linked to one another in that they are all manifestations of the human spirit based on materia", that is, his theory that supported the fact that the arts were linked one with another as manifestations of the human spirit in materiality were fundamental in his life as an architect.

In fact, in a description of his masterpiece, the Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, 1938-1939, Aalto confessed. "In this building the designers sought to apply a special concept connected with modern painting". An important fact is that in his design process Aalto practiced painting and sculpture, he said: " Paintings and sculptures are a part of my working method, for which I am not willing to see them separately from my architecture, as if they could express something beyond this. For me they are branches of the same tree whose trunk is Architecture".

Alvar Aalto and the criticism of CIAM

The International Congresses of Modern Architecture, abbreviated CIAM, were meetings of architects of the Modern Movement that took place in various places in Europe. A first group of them, fundamentally dominated by the presence of German avant-garde architects, met before the Second World War and discussed the typical functionalist themes (travel analysis, analysis of living areas, minimal housing), going less to more complexity, that is, beginning to study the housing in the CIAM I, then the neighborhood and then the city. This first group wrote Letter from Athens, synthesis of modern ideology on the city, based on the criterion of zoning, profusely published time later and constantly misunderstood when taking as dogma and not making critical readings. After the war, the congresses resumed, becoming more crowded. The figure of Le Corbusier (in the image), which dominated many of them, lost importance in front of the architects of the so-called Team Xwhich provoked the last crisis and the dissolution of the CIAM, proposing a review of modern architecture.

In 1929 Aalto was invited to participate as a full member of CIAM II in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). At CIAM III (1930), dedicated to the study of housing, he exhibited prototypes of standardized housing. Later he lost interest in pure functionalism and gained it in expressionist modernity and organic architecture, showing admiration for architectures such as those of Frank Lloyd Wright. Influenced by the national style architecture of his country, Alvar Aalto actively participated in the CIAM, defending a humanizing position and criticizing functionalism turned into formalism. His own architecture is distorted in order to respond to the particular conditions of each project with elegance and genius. Likewise, he confronted aesthetics machinist, cold and away from people, both in architecture and in furniture and other objects. Following this interest, he studied with Aino the flexibility of laminated wood as a warm material, for the mass production of everyday objects built with it.

His position at the CIAM, represented by his own projects, ultimately criticized the modern conception of the International Style, highlighting the science-art duality of architecture and respecting the contribution of psychology.

Architecture is not a science. It remains the great synthetic process of combining thousands of defined human functions (...) Functionality is correct, only if it can be expanded to even cover the psychophysical field.

Alvar Aalto

Artistic stages

National Romanticism

Cathedral of Tampere, medieval work of Lars Sonck, to whom Aalto admired in his time of student.

Although Aalto's work cannot be included in this category, National Romanticism, born as a social movement in 1891 in reaction to Swedish and Russian rule, still marked Finnish architecture and academia in his student days. The Finnish architecture associated with the movement sought national references in medieval culture. Thanks to this, the traditional materials were recovered: wood, stone and brick. Other arts were affected, examples being music (Jean Sibelius) and painting (Akseli Gallen-Kallela). An example of a nationalist romantic architect was Lars Sonck, whom Aalto admired in his youth. His influence was evident in the church of Mikaelinkkirko (Turku, completed in 1905), which he won as a student, made in neo-Gothic style and built in stone.

As the early years of the 20th century progressed, however, Finnish architects diversified their influences and National Romanticism lost adherents as did associated currents of its time, such as Art Nouveau Belgian and Spanish Modernism.

Nordic classicism

Just when the second decade of the 20th century began, Classicism took hold among the countries of northern Europe. Eyes turned to Italy once again in the history of art. Aalto himself studied and wrote about the country after visiting it with his wife. This current was the dominant one in the last years as a student of the architect and in the first years as a professional, which surely endowed him with the classic references that can be found in his work. Several of his early works reveal the influence of this current, especially influenced by Gunnar Asplund, the main Swedish classical architect of the time.

Rationalism

Headquarters of the newspaper Turun Sanomat in Turku, considered as the first fully rationalist work of Aalto.

In the 1920s, the Scandinavians were interested in functionalist principles, industrial aesthetics, pure surfaces, the independence of the structure with respect to the enclosures and partitions, minimal housing, collective housing, zoning, etc. In those years, in which he traveled a lot around Europe, Alvar Aalto was more interested in the social and cultural elements offered by the new avant-garde, especially in terms of housing, which had become the center of architecture, than in its possibilities of serial production. At that time he was active publishing articles on architecture and participating in the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, committed to the Modern Movement, until the early 1930s.

In 1924, with the Workers' House, he lost his symmetry, a classic resource unwanted by most of the moderns. However, his rationalism was still somewhat timid in the works he produced between 1927 and 1929, when he had already detached himself from Nordic Classicism. The first building of his considered fully modern was the one designed for the newspaper Turum Sanomat in Turku.

Personal Accents

A series of works carried out after 1930, among which stands out Villa Mairea (1937), mark a new phase in the work of Alvar Aalto, in which his modern architecture loses its purity to enrich themselves with their own twists, perhaps influenced by the outdated romanticism. The Pavilion for the New York World's Fair (1939) also belongs to this stage.

Neoempiricism

Alvar Aalto was in the United States between 1946 and 1948, when he was able to personally meet the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, popular above all for his organic works (a term that, as Bruno Zevi warned, is confusing and should be refined). It is then when, with the commission of the Baker House (1946-49), Alvar Aalto's neo-empiricist stage begins, in which he takes that vision to interpret the Modern Movement. The vision that he then took of architecture prompted him to seek and find solutions that, from a modern perspective, connect new urban and architectural developments with the historic city.

Representative architectural works

Viipuri Library

View of the hall of acts with its sky-wrapped beam.

This building (1927-1934), damaged during the first Russo-Finnish war and almost completely destroyed in the second, gained its historical significance from the corrugated roof of its assembly hall, constructed of wood, a continuous, folded plane that it gives the sensation of lengthening the space. The curve is used continuously by the architect from this work on.

Formally, they were two rectangular bodies of different sizes, placed at an angle and joined by an entrance system that caused it to be transversal in both bodies. The largest volume was largely occupied by the reading room and the smallest by the conference room, while the library occupied the lower part. In the words of Alvar Aalto (The trout and the torrent, 1948), the library «consists of several reading and delivery areas, staggered on different levels, and at the top are the administrative and supervision center. The drawings (...) led to an intertwining of the section and the plan, and to a certain unity between the horizontal and the vertical construction". project, Aalto lavished himself on drawings that he defined as childish and naive in which, taking nature as a reference (landscapes, natural lights), he managed to imagine the "main idea" of the building.

The project is prodigal in details. Thus, for example, there are few windows in favor of uniform overhead lighting and artificial light that gently illuminates the whitewashed walls.

Paimio Sanatorium

Paimio sanatorium.

Located 3 km from Paimio, in Finland, and built between 1929 and 1933, it was one of many that were programmed in the country at that time. Aalto, who entered various competitions for local administrations, only won the one for the Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium, which failed in 1928. He designed the Paimio chair for him, whose angle, the result of interaction with doctors, makes breathing easier for troubled patients, as well as steel loungers.

Silla Paimio.

Formally, the sanatorium is made up of two volumes, one very elongated rectangular with the rooms and the other with singular shapes with the common spaces, so that at the intersection of both is the nucleus of vertical communications. The patient wing, very regular, includes terraces so that they can get fresh air. The common areas each have a different shape and orientation. The surrounding landscape, a territory of heather and pine forest in which some gardens were adapted, formed part of the project, despite the fact that over the years it has changed. International Style. The structure is not continuous and is almost never guessed from the outside. Although it is porticoed in most cases, the volume of rooms is supported by large reinforced concrete central pillars that allow the terraces to be left as cantilevered slabs, with a screen wall on the opposite side that acts as a tie rod.

Aalto also designed the houses for the doctors, separated from the sanatorium and arranged in a row. They are four white volumes with two floors with a flat roof. Each one has two entrances, the main one and the service one. The service areas are all located on the lower floor, so that on the upper one, above these areas, each house has a terrace that separates them from the rest. The garages are external.

Villa Mairea

Villa Mairea.

This house (1937) was built for a wood businesswoman, so this material played an important role in its construction. Formally it is an L-shaped building with an independent body, the sauna, somewhat apart and linked to an outdoor pool. It is located in the middle of a forest, to which the project pays special attention. The main entrance is at the vertex of the L, so that, grosso modo, the largest spaces remain in one of the wings and the most compartmentalized in the other. The relationship of the spaces is carried out with each other, like zones within an admirable object in itself. Its conception represents a break with the architecture of its time.

The layout of the second floor is similar, but the structure, which maintains the positions, revealing the logical rhythm with which it is arranged, changes dimensions and multiplies into pillars. This desire for subtlety is found throughout the project; Thus, the house maintains relationships of squares and proportions (Platonic and modern figure) that are not noticeable at first glance.

Finnish pavilion for the 1939 New York World's Fair

Aalto won the competition held in 1937 for the building that would represent Finland at the Universal Exposition in New York in 1939. This had four superimposed floors in a single space that occupied 16 meters in height. The lower level was occupied by products of all kinds, as a summary of what will be seen in the following ones. The second floor was dedicated to work, the fourth to the Finns and on the top floor was the exhibition about the country.

The building was characterized by three planes inclined inwards and parallel, built in wood and blind -the lighting is from above-, which allowed the view to cover distant objects and located several floors above, thereby establishing horizontal and vertical. The intention of the architect was to return to the traditional concept of the bazaar through juxtaposed arrangements (horizontal relationship on the same level) and superimposed (relation multi-level vertical) of the objects, generating the greatest possible concentration. The volume is exterior, but it is unitary, in such a way that it does not allow one to guess what the interior is like.

The success and appeal of the pavilion was such that it allowed the architect to maintain certain contacts in the United States, which he took advantage of during World War II to establish himself in the country. The pavilion even earned the praise of genius from Frank Lloyd Wright, known among other things for disdaining many great architects.

Baker House

Baker House, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1947 Alvar Aalto built this student residence for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Aalto used different resources to break the monotony of the required extension and program. He even came to curve the façade, so that the rooms enjoyed the view of the Charles River without seeing the entire building (that is, its great extension) from their windows. He also alternated the capacity and shape of the rooms and combined the shapes and arrangements of the common spaces, including the stairs, which protrude from the rear façade; Thus, all the rooms are different and while some look up the river, others do so down the river. Despite the curve, the façade of the rooms is an uninterrupted rhythm. Functionally, you enter through the back and from there you can choose to go to the dining room or other rooms that, on the ground floor, protrude from one of the sides of the sinusoidal figure of the rooms as independent bodies, or access the rooms up the stairs. On each floor there are common rooms smaller than the main ones, located on the ground floor.

Säynätsalo Town Hall

Plant staircase at Säynätsalo Town Hall.

Spatially, the Säynätsalo Town Hall (1952) is a kind of open cloister with four sides, one of which is the library and the others are offices. The patio that joins the bodies is artificially elevated, distinguishing itself from the plain that surrounds the building, and the body considered the main one -in which the most important meeting room is located- stands out in height above the others. The open central space communicates with the plain through two stairs, one of them made of wood containing grass terraces. The main material of the entire building is brick.

Helsinki University of Technology

Alvar and Elissa Aalto in the 1950s.

Alvar and Elissa Aalto had been in charge of the project for the main building of this technological university, located in Espoo, since 1949. In 1955 the Aaltos had the project ready, which was to be built in a wooded area ten kilometers from the capital The building was built between 1953 and 1966 in exposed brick, and the main building between 1961 and 1964.

The design of the campus was complemented by other buildings designed by the Aaltos such as the Sports Center. Other important Finnish architects also participated in the campus project: Raili and Reima Pietilä (who did the Student Center and Kaija and Heikki Siren (in charge of the Lutheran Chapel).

Auditorium of the Polytechnic University of Helsinki.

A large part of the project is occupied by auditoriums created in the manner of amphitheatres. The student areas are opposite the administration areas, whose area is located at one end. The classrooms are organized around patios, which also serve to separate the different study areas. On one side of two of them, one totally interior and the other open, are the areas dedicated to the study of geography and geodesy. On the other side, and separated from the architecture school by two other open patios, there is a general area. The school of architecture, located at one end, is arranged around another open courtyard. The arrangement in open courtyards allows each area to be expanded without the works affecting the others, so that a restructuring of the functions of the building as a whole is not necessary.

The work, which was projected at the same time as the road infrastructure that was to connect it with the city, perfectly separates vehicle traffic from pedestrian traffic, which descends on terraces, so that residents can move from classes to their homes without having to cross roads. The houses, forming part of the same complex, are located on the highest floors.

Apartment tower in Bremen

Apartment tower in Bremen.

Alvar Aalto designed this building (Bremen, Germany; 1958-62) with a fan shape, characteristic of it. With this form, he singles out each apartment, so that they are all different even without losing the same properties (a façade, exit to the same space, the same layout of the spaces). In addition, the fan-shaped arrangement may have a functional origin in terms of communications, since these, when found at their vertex, are shortened, avoiding long corridors.

Rovaniemi Library

Interior of the Rovaniemi Library.

In 1963 Aalto designed the Rovaniemi Library, one of several commissioned to him. The building was built between 1965 and 1968 as the first phase of a cultural and administrative center for the city.

It consists of a bass pickup plus a floor from which a fan-shaped body protrudes, which receives light from the north through a square. This body contains the children's and adult libraries, a museum and a study room. The surveillance and loans desk is located in the center of the room, so that all the wings can be controlled from there. The tablet hosts various functions; mainly, from libraries and thematic museums. The project is carried out so that these uses can be interchanged.

For the windows, Aalto designed sunshades.

Furniture

Alvar Aalto Chair.

Many of the objects he designed are still in production today, including:

• Chair "Paimio" or Model No. 41produced by Artek (1930-1931)
• Chair Model No. 31produced by Artek (1931-1932)
• Stool Model No. 60 and 69produced by Artek (1932-1933)
• Stool Y-leg Stoolproduced by Artek (1946-1947)
• Tumbona Model No. 43 and chair Model No. 406produced by Artek (1936)