Alvar Aalto

Aalto was born in a rural village in southern Ostrobothnia; his father was a surveyor and his grandfather a forester.² The Guardian describes him as retaining a strong attachment to Finland's forests and lakes.² Aalto rejected the historicism and folkloric emphasis of the “dream of the north” movement as stifling.² His early career coincided with Finland's rapid economic growth and industrialization in the first half of the twentieth century; among his industrialist clients was the Ahlström-Gullichsen family.⁴

The Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium, designed in 1929, stands in a pine forest near Turku and has a white, clean-lined exterior.² The Guardian identifies the sanatorium as the building that brought Aalto international recognition.² Critic J. M. Richards said that meetings of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne in 1929 and 1933 introduced doctrinaire modernists to Aalto's emerging voice from northern Europe.² Aalto's early presentation in the United Kingdom took place at Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, with writer P. Morton Shand as his chief supporter there.²

Getty Research dates the beginning of Aalto's furniture design to the early 1930s; he is particularly associated with bent-plywood furniture.¹ The Finnish design company Artek was founded in 1935, with Aalto and architect Aino Marsio-Aalto (1894–1949) as co-founders.^1,3 Bard Graduate Center describes its exhibition on Artek and the Aaltos as the first in the United States to focus specifically on both architect co-founders.³

Getty ULAN describes Aalto's library at Viipuri, designed around 1927, as being in the International Style.¹ Aalto designed Maison Louis Carré for French art dealer Louis Carré, who was interested in architecture; the house is in Bazoches-sur-Guyonnes, about 40 kilometers southwest of Paris.⁵ ArchDaily describes the house's sloping roof as visually continuing the hillside and notes its use of local sandstone and Finnish pinewood.⁵

ArchDaily also describes a small library adjoining the living room and wooden louvers, particularly at the main entrance.⁵ According to checkonsite.com, an Alvar Aalto museum is located in Jyväskylä, his longtime home city.⁴ According to a 2012 paper in Journal of Green Building, a scholarly study treats Aalto's summer house as a precedent for bioclimatic, sustainable design strategies.⁶ The Oxford Companion to Architecture describes its approach as combining social, technical, and practical aspects with an art-historical perspective.⁷