Alvar Aalto (1898–1976)
Alvar Aalto is an internationally famous architect and an important exponent
of modernism. He created a distinct architectural style, whose aesthetic impact
is based on careful consideration for a building's relationship to its natural
surroundings, a human scale, the feeling evoked by the materials used,
meticulous detailing and the skilful placement of light sources. Aalto is valued
for having provided an alternative to the technology-dominated impersonality of
the international style, to its structural repetitiveness and visual monotony.
People rarely consider the fact that Aalto's work began as a collaborative
venture. From 1924 onwards he was married to the architect Aino Marsio. His wife
went on to specialise in interior design, but she also served as his closest
professional adviser on the design of the buildings themselves, although looking
after the home, the children and not least her husband restricted her
participation in the work of the office. The different personalities of wife and
husband seem to have complemented each other. It is generally thought that as
the more balanced and realistic partner Aino had a moderating effect on Alvar's
characteristic tendency to get carried away by an idea. Her outlook had a
beneficial influence on many projects; Alvar was totally attached - emotionally
and professionally - to his wife. And he recognised this, always, for instance,
making public her contributions to their projects and exhibitions. In social
situations Aino was retiring, while Alvar, who enjoyed mixing with people,
relished publicity and knew how to use it to advantage, maintained the image of
their joint enterprise and made important contacts. Aino Marsio-Aalto died at a
stage where the first large building projects of the 1950s were in preparation
and Alvar Aalto's position as Finland's leading architect was undisputed. The
end of the relationship was a difficult experience for Aalto. Three years later
he began a new marriage with his assistant, the architect Elissa Mäkiniemi.
Aalto's teachers at the Helsinki University of Technology were Armas
Lindgren, Usko Nyström and Carolus Lindberg. The national romantic ideals
dating from the turn of the century were passed on by Lindgren, for whom an
important aspect of architecture was the designer's artistic expression. For
Aalto's teachers, architectural history and tradition constituted an integral
part of the methodology of design. For Aalto, too, history was an important
source of ideas and inspiration but no longer a methodological guideline. He was
also always prepared to replace buildings erected by previous generations with
structures of his own. Aalto strongly represented the Western ideal of the
architect - that of the enlightened autocrat whose task as a designer and the
client's trusted partner is to direct the production of a built environment in
its broadest sense and in all its aspects, from general plans to the details of
interior design. In his case, too, this task involved a firm belief that his own
creations were functionally and aesthetically superior to those of his
predecessors.
The lively and personable Aalto was a popular student. He was drawn into
Carolus Lindberg's circle, which included the artists Henry Ericsson and Toivo
Vikstedt and the journalist Arthur Sjöblom. Aalto took his first steps as a
writer with columns in Kerberos, a journal which appeared from 1918 to
1921 and was edited by Vikstedt and Sjöblom. His later writing dealt more
exclusively with professional matters. But writing was a casual pursuit for
Aalto, who never attempted to construct a systematic theory. His activities in
the visual arts were in one way or another connected with his architecture, but
his architectural sketches and drawings are also interesting works of art in
themselves.
Jyväskylä, Aalto's home town during his school days, became his first base
of operations. The Alvar Aalto Office of Architecture and Monumental Art made
itself known locally through an effective advertising campaign. The office was
in a strategic location as far as business was concerned; and it also served as
bachelor quarters for Aalto and Toivo Takala, who was to be his associate as
draftsman and scale-model builder for thirty years. The first commissions came
from or through relatives and acquaintances. The district in which Aalto's
father worked as a surveyor - Southern Ostrobothnia and Central Finland - was
the most important area for the business. Soon after its establishment, the
office had so much work that Aalto took on the architecture student Ragnar Ypyä
as a trainee. He married his most important assistant, Aino Marsio, in 1924, and
in the same year the office produced drawings for breakthrough work - the
Workers' Association building in Jyväskylä and that of the Civil Guards in
Seinäjoki. The clients represented opposing political groupings - the socialist
labour movement and its victorious White adversaries in the Civil War of 1918.
Inspired by the enthusiasm prevailing in student circles, Aalto had participated
in the Civil War on the side of the Whites, and there is no reason to doubt that
he did so in earnest. As an architect, however, he had his own objectives and
principles, which stood outside - or perhaps above - worldly politics.
The first success in a competition came with a win in the second contest for
the Jyväskylä Civil Guards building, erected in 1926-29. In 1927 Aalto won
competitions both for the building of the Agricultural Cooperative of
Southwestern Finland erected in Turku in 1928 and for the City Library in
Viipuri (Vyborg), which was completed in 1935 after several planning phases.
During the first phase, the design was still classical in nature, but Aalto
developed it in a functionalist mode. The Agricultural Cooperative building was
the largest yet of Aalto's projects and him to move his office to Turku.
As a student Aalto had assisted Carolus Lindberg in designing the buildings
for the first Finnish Trade Fair. As such, Aalto's contribution was a minor one.
However, his biographer Göran Schildt regards the experience as important,
because it gave Aalto a taste of the fantasy world of exhibition architecture -
a world to which his lively imagination was well suited. Aalto was indeed
interested in exhibitions, using them as testing grounds. In 1929 he designed
Turku's 700th anniversary exhibition in collaboration with Erik Bryggman; this
provided an opportunity to apply the principles of functionalism to an overall
environment. The architects did not encourage exhibitors to indulge in the
fanciful and attention-getting ploys characteristic of the traditional approach
to exhibitions. On the contrary, they had designed a strict, uniform framework
for the participants. The Turku exhibition gave the general public in Finland
its first taste of a functionalist environment.
The undulating picture wall in the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York
World's Fair is one of Aalto's best-known motifs, as is the wavelike wooden
ceiling of the reading room in the Viipuri Library. (The Finnish word aalto
means 'wave'.) The Finnish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition is one of the
buildings in which - from the mid 1930s onwards - Aalto combined the irregular
volumes of modernism with a freely undulating line derived from shapes found in
Nature (Schildt refers in particular to the shorelines in a lake landscape) with
the qualities of an organic building material - wood. Translating shorelines and
contour lines into architectural motifs would scarcely have been possible
without the aeroplane. And indeed Aalto was interested in flying - and in new
technology in general. It was by private plane that the Aaltos went on their
honeymoon trip to continental Europe.
Aalto and Bryggman, the leading architects of the new architectural movement,
worked in Turku, where the atmosphere was favourable to modernism. As well as
temporary trainees, the Aaltos employed as assistants two Norwegian architects,
Harald Wildhagen and Erland Bjertnaes. In Turku there were clients who
specifically wanted functionalist architecture. Aalto was able to employ a
skeleton construction, flexible plans and the module principle for a residential
building at Läntinen Pitkäkatu 20 which was commissioned by the manufacturer
Juho Tapani and built in 1927-29, using standardised prefabricated concrete
elements developed by Tapani. The owner of the Turun Sanomat modernised
this newspaper and commissioned a design for a functionalist printing-press and
office building, which was erected in 1928-30. In collaboration with Emil
Henriksson, who acted as the structural engineer, Aalto designed a novel
concrete-frame structure for the Turun Sanomat building; in addition to
this, it contained - or was meant to contain - the sorts of modernist
refinements that Le Corbusier in particular had advocated. Schildt states that
Aalto had absorbed the principles of the new architecture and was applying them
in practice before he had even had the chance to see a single built example.
The Aaltos' Swedish friend and colleague Sven Markelius had proposed Alvar
Aalto as a member of the international organisation of modern architects, Les
Congrés Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), and Aalto
participated in its activities from 1929 onwards. Through the CIAM, Aalto became
familiar with modernism's social platform in the fields of housing and urban
planning. Acquaintances made at CIAM meetings led to close and long-term
relationships with, amongst others, Walter Gropius and the Swiss architecture
critic Siegfried Giedion. Aalto never visited the Bauhaus - Gropius had been
forced to leave it before the architects got to know each other, and Aalto did
not feel drawn to his successors Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
though Schildt believes that many of its principles were passed on to Aalto by
his CIAM friend Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, who had taught at the Bauhaus. Aalto's
friends also included the sculptor Alexander Calder and the painter Fernand Léger.
A number of the most influential figures in the modern movement became family
friends of the Aaltos, and there were visits to and fro. Their international
acquaintances were leftists - many were communist party members - and had
contacts with the Soviet Russian avant-garde. Aalto undoubtedly knew of the
Russian constructivists, though he does not appear to have known any of them
personally.
Aalto seems to have known all the most important modernists in Sweden - the
planners and background figures of the 1930 Stockholm exhibition. His circle of
acquaintances included the art historian Gregor Paulsson, who gave
'welfare-state functionalism' its slogan with his lecture title 'More
beautiful everyday articles'. Aalto's acquaintanceship with Gunnar Asplund
deepened into friendship slightly later. As a student, Aalto had tried to get
into Asplund's office as a trainee, but he had been turned away. The reason for
the slow warming of relations seems not, however, to have been this episode -
frustrating though it was at the time - but rather the Asplunds' reservations
concerning the Aaltos' and the Markelius' social life, which was marked by an
ample consumption of alcohol and by the carefree erotic relations between
Markelius' then wife Viola and Alvar, as described to Schildt by Viola herself.
Aalto's relationship with the most famous of architecture's modernists, Le
Corbusier, was perhaps at most that of an acquaintance. He had more of a liking
for the Frenchman André Lurçat - whom he met during his first trip to France
in 1928 and on whose work he lectured at the Finnish Association of Architects (Suomen
Arkkitehtiliitto) - than he did for Le Corbusier.
In the fight against tuberculosis, a widespread disease in Finland, a project
to build provincial sanatoriums was under way in the 1920s, and Aalto was one of
the participants in the competitions held. As a result of his success in one of
these, he was commissioned to design a sanatorium for Paimio in the Province of
Finland Proper. Built in 1929 - 33, the sanatorium adhered to the Le Corbusier-influenced
architecture also to be found in the Turun Sanomat building. At the same
time the Paimio sanatorium is a 'social Gesamtkunstwerk', which already
received international recognition at the time of its construction. There has
scarcely been another building in Finland whose siting and carefully designed
interior details are so attuned to the needs of the 'ordinary patient' as in the
case of this sanatorium.
Aalto already had experience in furnishings when the Paimio sanatorium was
being planned, as he had designed both individual pieces and standardised
furniture. During the interior work on the Agricultural Cooperative Building, he
had begun collaboration with Otto Korhonen, the technical manager of a Turku
furniture and construction factory (Huonekalu- ja Rakennustyötehdas),
who had a thorough knowledge of plywood and bent wood techniques. Working with
Korhonen, Aalto created chair models for series production. The fittings and
furnishings of the Paimio sanatorium and later of the Viipuri library
constituted an important advance in the designing of standard models. Some of
the furnishings designed then are still being produced. This has been possible
thanks to Artek, a firm founded in 1935 on the initiative of the architect Nils-Gustav
Hahl to conduct the manufacture, export and domestic sales of furniture. As
Artek's first general manager, Hahl aimed to follow the example of the Swedes
and develop sensible and reasonably-priced furnishings for a broad spectrum of
the public. Schildt reports, however, that as a result of pressure from the
Aaltos the firm's range became exclusive in relation to the average Finnish
standard and that it concentrated on products designed by the couple; this
resulted in quarrels with the idealistic Hahl. Hahl's departure for the war as a
volunteer medical orderly and his death in action brought the dispute to a
dramatic end. Hahl's conduct underlined the relative indifference of the Aaltos
towards social ideals, especially when his quiet heroism was set alongside
Aalto's almost hysterical concern for his own safety and his shirking of wartime
military assignments.
The building industry - and thus the Aalto office as well - had run into
financial difficulties when the depression hit in 1929. After the completion of
the Paimio sanatorium the Aaltos moved to Helsinki, where the opportunities for
work were better than in Turku. The office remained permanently in the capital,
where it operated until the 1950s at their own house in Munkkiniemi, built in
1935. In the early 1930s a dispute was still going on in the architectural
community over the issue of traditionalism versus functionalism. In the eyes of
many, Aalto and the school of thought that he represented were exponents of a
questionable 'Bolshevik architecture'; but in the course of the decade,
functionalism did in fact become the dominant trend in Finnish architecture. A
clear sign of the change was Aalto's election to the board of the Finnish
Association of Architects in 1935.
Aalto succeeded in implementing CIAM social policy in his planning and
designing work for the Ahlström forestry products concern. In the late 1930s he
became acquainted with Ahlström's general manager Harry Gullichsen and his wife
Maire, who came from the Ahlström family. The two were building up a
progressive, socially responsible ethos in the concern. Maire Gullichsen in
particular was familiar with the modern movement in art; she promoted it by
participating in the funding of Artek. The Gullichsens felt that modern design
was needed at Ahlström, and the Aaltos' office was capable of meeting the
concern's needs in many different ways.
Aalto drew up general and site plans for communities - such as Varkaus and
Kauttua - which were built around Ahlström plants, and he also designed
workers' housing and various other buildings for the company. Harry Gullichsen
played a role in Aalto's being commissioned to draw up plans and designs for an
enterprise, the Sunila cellulose factory near Kotka, undertaken jointly by a
number of forestry companies. Starting with the site plan, Aalto designed all
the Sunila buildings, including the production facilities. In planning the
residential buildings, he aimed at a 'classless' architecture which differed
from the ways in which Finnish factory communities had hitherto been designed in
that it was not particularly expressive of the community's social hierarchy.
Built between 1936 and 1954, Sunila, whose buildings are sited in a forest-like
landscape and adapted to the shapes of the terrain, became a model for
subsequent Finnish suburban neighbourhood planning.
For the Gullichsens the Aaltos designed the Villa Mairea at Noormarkku; it
consciously presents an alternative to the 'ceremonial' grand residence. Built
in 1938 - 40, it had a revolutionary effect on the residential ideals of the
Finnish upper middle class. Among the Ahlström residential buildings, the Villa
Mairea stands, even in its modern simplicity, at the extreme luxury end of a
scale at whose opposite end are the series-produced wooden houses of the
company's Varkaus factory. For the latter Aalto had designed his AA system of
prefabricated elements and had thus succeeded in adapting the functionalist idea
of standardisation to materials and products unknown in modernistic central and
western Europe but of a type already employed in the United States. Aalto had
approached the task of designing a minimal dwelling from the viewpoint of the
user - i.e. from a functional perspective. His architectural thinking was
dominated by the ideal of a 'multifunctional space', an ideal that also
manifested itself in the designing of the Villa Mairea. The Swiss architect
Lisbeth Sachs, who had participated in producing designs for the villa, told
Schildt how Aalto removed separating walls from a miniature model, claiming that
"those people don't need so many rooms".
Ahlström's interests also included the River Kokemäenjoki economic region,
which in Harry Gullichsen's opinion required coordinated planning. On his
initiative, cooperative planning began; it involved a number of riverside
municipalities and the City of Pori. On Gullichsen's recommendation, the
commission for this first Finnish regional plan was awarded to Alvar Aalto in
1940. The model was the famous Tennessee Valley Authority of the New Deal era in
the USA. From the 1920s onwards Aalto had produced a considerable number of
general and site plans; according to Schildt, he always held fast to his ideas
of what constituted a good living environment. These ideas, embodied in his
plans, were seldom put into practice, given the lack of political will. A
similar fate befell the regional plan for Lapland drawn up in the 1950s.
Collaboration with the Ahlström concern came to an end in 1946, but the
plans and designs produced for the company had aroused interest in industrial
circles. Work on site layouts and building plans for the Tampella concern's
factory community at Inkeroinen started in the 1930s and continued during the
war. Plans for Strömberg plants in Vaasa and for Yhteis-Sisu Ltd at Vanaja were
drawn up in the 1940s. One of Aalto's most important clients was the state-owned
forest-industry company Enso-Gutzeit; he did design work for projects at Säynätsalo
in 1942 - 52, at Imatra in 1947 - 61 and at Summa in 1954 - 60, as well as for
the head office in Helsinki in 1959 - 62. For a second state-owned enterprise,
Typpi Ltd, he designed a chemical production facility at Oulu in the 1950s. The
industrial projects gave the office a solid financial basis, enabling it to
invest effort in artistic experiments and competitions, where success was more
uncertain.
Aalto established professional contacts with the Anglo-American world in the
1930s. The New York Museum of Modern Art had held an exhibition of the Aaltos'
work in 1938, and in the same year they made their first trip to America. There
they became involved with wealthy circles associated with the museum and
established contact with the Rockefeller Foundation. During the same trip Aalto,
who had been one of Eliel Saarinen's critics in his youth, visited Cranbrook to
establish more harmonious relations with the other internationally famous figure
in Finnish architecture.
The couple's second visit to America in 1940 was an outright escape during
the final stages of Finland’s Winter War against the Soviet Union. Aalto gave
guest lectures at various educational institutions and evidently attempted to
justify his presence in the United States with ideas that he himself had
concocted concerning aid for Finland from the Rockefeller Foundation. The idea
of an experimental town for evacuees - which would involve a research institute
responsible for developing the production of housing - aroused interest and
seemed advantageous both for Finland and for Aalto himself. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) invited Aalto to take a research post there, since
the proposed institute and possible funding from the Foundation were linked to
Aalto in person. By this stage Finland had again become involved in the war, and
only one sea link - to Petsamo - remained, so that it was a question of either
staying in the United States or returning, and the Aaltos went back to face the
dangers of the new war situation alongside other Finns. Finland's alliance with
Germany put an end to plans for an experimental Finnish 'American Town'. After
the war, however, Aalto was appointed a professor at MIT, fulfilling his duties
there very irregularly until 1948. He was also kept busy by projects at the
Helsinki office, and he never really attempted to develop a practice in the
United States. While there, he got to know Frank Lloyd Wright, who had had an
influence on his work. By this time, however, Aalto was an independent master,
who relied on his own critical thinking when absorbing and applying new ideas.
Lewis Mumford, the critic of urbanism and author of The Culture of Cities,
was another of Aalto's American friends.
Aalto was now assigned to architectural tasks on the home front.
Reconstruction was the new national undertaking, and Aalto continued in his own
country the discussion on this topic that he had begun in the United States. On
the recommendation of the Association of Architects, an office for
reconstruction was established in 1942, and Aalto participated mainly by
supervising the development of building standards, which were produced by two of
his former assistants, Aarne Ervi and Viljo Rewell.
During and after the war, the production of type drawings and the designing
of standardised building-element series and town plans was important as far as
employment and social influence for architects was concerned. To the experienced
modernist Aalto, such work was a self-evident professional task. In this
situation it was only natural to elect him chairman of the Association of
Architects - as was done in 1943. A further reason for the choice was
undoubtedly an inkling as to the final outcome of the war: Aalto had
professional connections with the United States, which would become the leader
of the Western Bloc after the war. The Association also pushed for Aalto's
appointment as director-in-chief of the national board of public construction;
the post went, however, to the architect Jussi Lappi-Seppälä. Aalto then
became the leader of opposition to the State's architectural and building
policy. In protest against the rejection of Aalto, the Association proclaimed a
boycott of government commissions by its members, a ban which lasted until 1957.
The following year Aalto relinquished the chairmanship. This meant that he was
now freed from commitments which might have caused embarrassment when he took on
State commissions.
Aalto's professional career reached its zenith in the 1950s. At the end of
the previous decade, there had been several important competitions for public
building projects, and Aalto had won a number of them. These buildings represent
a peak achievement of the Finnish building industry; they are matched only by
the finest products of the national romantic period in their uniqueness and the
quality of the workmanship. A celebration of the end of postwar material
scarcity, they are carefully thought out down to the last detail and made of the
best possible materials. The furnishings of these buildings are from Artek, and
of the renowned textile artists of the time Aalto seems to have favoured Kirsti
Ilvessalo (b. 1920).
Aalto was appointed architect of the municipal hall built in 1949 - 52 for
the small industrial community of Säynätsalo on the recommendation of Enso
Gutzeit's local manager Hilmer Brommels. As the architect of the Jyväskylä
College of Education, Aalto was enthusiastically greeted back to his former home
town, even though contracts for the project (1951 - 56) were ultimately the
subject of court action. He nevertheless joined the local summer population,
building himself a villa, the 'experimental house', at Muuratsalo in 1952 - 53.
The Helsinki University of Technology (1949 - 66) and the Social Insurance
Institution building (1953 - 57) confirmed Aalto's position as the country's
leading architect, but this did not prevent him from accepting such jobs as
designing the House of Culture (1952 - 58) for the Finnish Communist Party, now
freed from its underground existence.
Not counting Finnish exhibition buildings, Aalto's first project built (and
also designed) abroad was a dormitory (1946 - 49) for MIT in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Despite the initial enthusiasm of foreigner's wanting to become
Aalto's clients, many projects commissioned from abroad remained unbuilt;
perhaps his designs were not easy to apply within all traditions of building.
Outside Finland, most of Aalto's works are in Germany, a country from which he
was already receiving commissions in the 1950s. There are also buildings
designed by his office in Estonia, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Bangladesh,
Italy and Sweden. In the 1940s it looked as if Aalto, with his Swedish fellow
architect Albin Stark as a partner, was going to gain a foothold in Sweden
through construction projects initiated by the industrialist and shipowner Axel
Johnson, but not one of the designs produced by Aalto at the time was translated
into reality. As monuments of civil society, municipal administrative and
cultural centres provided welcome planning work; Aalto received both domestic
and foreign commissions, but such centres were actually built only in Seinäjoki
(1951 - 87), Alajärvi (1965 - 70) and Rovaniemi (1961 - 87).
Aalto's early work is 'Nordic classical' in the style of the 1920s; he was
particularly attracted to the picturesque adaptation of historical or classical
motifs characteristic of that era's architecture. The work of Swedish and Danish
architects - especially Gunnar Asplund, but also Ragnar Östberg and Martin
Nyrop - showed Aalto the opportunities for romantic expression hidden within
classicism.
Aalto's shift to functionalism in the late 1920s took place in conjunction
with fairly large design projects; and his adoption of the new concept of
architecture happened within a short space of time and constituted a radical
turning point. What was involved was also a more profound view of architecture:
it seems to have been important for Aalto to understand the principles of
functionalism, as opposed to seeing it only as a formal style. But his work
nevertheless retained a romantic tone which acted as a counterweight to the
rationalism of the modern movement. Nature provided him with new features to
exploit in his architecture, and achieving a unity between landscape, terrain,
vegetation and a building seems to have become his central objective. The
spatial and visual complexity of Aalto's buildings is aimed primarily at the
senses, but they can also contain references to sites of great historical value,
such as the ruins of the Graeco-Roman world, or allusions to exotic
'primitivism'. For Aalto, architecture was essentially a social phenomenon. A
building embodies the designer's empathetic relationship with the user; or the
starting point of the design can be a utopian ideal of human cooperation, with
the building as the representation of good democratic administration or the
welfare state's concern for its citizens. A building also had to offer aesthetic
stimuli for free and spontaneous cultural activity. The Italian architect
Leonardo Mosso, who worked as an assistant of Aalto's, was probably thinking of
the sensuousness of his architecture and its mythic aspects when he called Aalto
"a poet amongst architects". On the other hand, the antirationalistic
features of Aalto's architecture have raised doubts amongst such defenders of
modernist rationalism and the antihistorical ethic as Nikolaus Pevsner. In a
1961 lecture held at the Royal Institute of British Architects in which he spoke
with concern about the awakening of the spirit of historicism and the dangers
inherent in the legacy of expressionism, the German-born British art historian
presented Aalto's House of Culture as a warning example of this trend.
The phase of Aalto's architecture that has attracted the most international
attention begins in the 1930s and continues after the Second World War.
Especially after the war, he designed for foreign clients, but his career was
predominantly based on his home country. He worked almost entirely in Finland,
where most of his works are also to be found.
Alvar Aalto's position in Finland differs somewhat from that which he holds
abroad. From a Finnish perspective, there is especial significance in the fact
that he was the first among Finnish architects to adopt modernism's view of
architecture so thoroughly that within a short space of time he became the
leading architect of the new movement in the Nordic countries. Important from
the viewpoint of Finnish architecture and society was Aalto's contribution to
the standardised construction and socially oriented architectural planning of
the modernist movement.
From the 1950s onwards, Alvar Aalto was renowned both at home and abroad.
According to Schildt, he was offered numerous professorships at universities and
colleges all over the world, but he consistently refused them because of his
work commitments. His Finnish admirers elevated him to the status of a national
hero to complete the series of figures who had achieved international fame -
Jean Sibelius and Paavo Nurmi. And Aalto, who had always understood the
importance of theatre and myth in human life, himself participated in developing
this personality cult.
As we approach
the end of the twentieth century, it is easy to forget that modern architecture
was born in the aftermath of the First World War. Grounded in reason, it was
intended to transcend national divisions by capturing the spirit of the 'Machine
Age'. A related, but different, impulse was apparent in the Nordic countries in
the early 1920s, where architects also turned to supposedly timeless values:
clarity of form, elegant proportions, minimal ornament. On the Continent the
urge was towards innovation, to exploit new building materials and match the
industrial achievements of the day - cars, aeroplanes, ocean liners. In
Scandinavia it was to reconnect with the mainstream of Western culture - to
'bring grapes to the rowan peoples' as a favourite saying of the time had it -
and the style, inevitably, was Classical.
instant
proof, and on its completion in 1933 the Paimio Sanatorium (picture on
the left) was acclaimed internationally as a major achievement: Sigfried Giedion,
self-appointed promoter and critic-in-chief of modern architecture, soon ranked
it with Walter Gropius's Bauhaus and Le Corbusier's League of Nations project.
Aalto's attention to what Giedion called 'the human side' was evident throughout
the buildings. The patients' rooms, with their specially designed heating,
lighting and furniture, remain models of what would now be called 'integrated
environmental design', and the classic 
The
Paimio chair (picture on the right) and other furniture were rapturously
received in London in 1933, when they were exhibited at the Fortnum and Mason
store, the Architectural Review acclaiming them 'cheap and seemly
furniture, light and easy to move . . . For England it may at last spell death
to fake Queen Anne'. Following the formation of Artek two years later, Aalto's
furniture began to be distributed worldwide, finding its way into numerous
design-conscious homes. It did not spell death to fake Queen Anne, however, and
it is ironic that over sixty years later the Swedish company Ikea - whose
products reflect Aalto's pioneering example - began an advertising campaign to 'modernise'
English taste!