ALVAR AALTO

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (February 3, 1898, Kuortane – May 11, 1976, Helsinki) was a Finnish architect and designer.

His work includes architecture,furniture, textiles and glassware.

The span of his career, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is reflected in the styles of his work, ranging from Nordic Classicism of the early work, to a rational International Style Modernism during the 1930s to a more organic modernist style from the 1940s onwards.

He would design not just the building, but give special treatments to the interior surfaces and design furniture, lamps, and furnishings and glassware.

The Alvar Aalto Museum, designed by Aalto himself, is located in what is regarded as his home city Jyväskylä.[2]

Alvar Aalto was born in Kuortane, Finland.

 His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, was a Finnish-speaking land-surveyor and his mother, Selly Matilda was a postmistress.

When Aalto was 5 years old, the family moved to Alajärvi, and from there to Jyväskylä in Central Finland.

Aalto studied at the Jyväskylä Lyceum school, completing his basic education in 1916.

In 1916 he then enrolled to study architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology, graduating in 1921.

LIFE

Early career: classicism

The 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.

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) and "From doorstep to living room" (1926).[6]

•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.

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 they carried the seeds of his questioning of such an orthodox modernist approach and a move to a more daring, synthetic attitude.

Turun Sanomat Building Paimio Sanatorium

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.

Villa Mairea

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.

Buildings of aalto

•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

Finlandia Hall•Finlandia Hall is a concert hall with a •congress wing in Helsinki, Finland, by• Töölönlahti bay

•. The work began in 1967 and was •completed in 1971.

•Alvar Aalto was commissioned by the city of Helsinki to design a concert and congress building, the first constructed part of a great central city plan, which Aalto first presented in 1961, and which included a series of cultural buildings aligned along the Töölönlahti bay which penetrates the city centre. 

The main features of the building's exterior are the great horizontal mass of the building proper andthe towering auditorium that rises above it.

The main external wall material is Carrara marble and with copper roofs, which have acquired a green patina, and teak window frames.

The marble continues in the interior, and is supplemented by details in hardwoods, and ceramic.

Apart from the auditorium, the main feature of the interior is the shallow and broad 'Venetian' staircase leading from the ground-floor foyer to both the main auditorium and chamber music hall.

Säynätsalo Town Hall

The Säynätsalo Town Hall is a multifunction building complex – town hall, shops, library and flats 

The design of the Town Hall was influenced by both Finnish vernacular architecture and the humanist Italian renaissance. It was the Italian Renaissance from which Aalto drew inspiration for the courtyard arrangement which informed the name of his original competition entry entitled "Curia." While the main program of the building is housed within a heavy brick envelope, the courtyard is bordered by a glass-enclosed circulation space which can be linked to the model of an arcade-bordered Piazza.

The town hall is crowned by the council chamber, a double-height space which is capped by the Aalto-designed "Butterfly" trusses. It is approached from the main entrance hall a floor below via a ramp which wraps around the main tower structure under a row of clerestory ribbon windows.

Aalto constrained his material palate to one dominated by brick and accented by timber and copper. Though Aalto practiced at the same time as Modernist Architects Le Corbusier and others, he rejected the Machine Aesthetic for the majority of his architecture.

Instead, he saw his buildings as organisms made of up of individual cells. This principle informed Aalto's use of traditional building materials such as brick which is, by nature, cellular. The bricks were even laid slightly off-line to create a dynamic and enlivened surface condition.

Furniture and glassware

Chairs

•1932: Paimio Chair

•933: Three-legged stacking Stool 60

•1933: Four-legged Stool E60

•1935-6: Armchair 404

•1939: Armchair 406

•Lamps

•1954: Floor lamp A805•1959: Floor lamp A810

•Vases

•1936: Aalto Vase