History

Alvar Aalto was born in Kuortane, Finland, on 3 February 1898 and studied architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology. His early work followed Neoclassical conventions; the turn to Functionalism came after a visit to the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, where he encountered Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion. The Paimio Sanatorium (1929–1933, southwest of Turku) is his first masterpiece in the new mode: a building conceived as a therapeutic instrument, with sun terraces, colour-coded corridors and furniture — the Paimio Chair — designed to ease breathing for tuberculosis patients.

Aalto and his first wife Aino Marsio designed their house in Munkkiniemi in 1936: a white-rendered concrete building that integrates a studio, garden and domestic spaces with characteristic Finnish informality. In the same year he designed the Aalto vase for the Milan Triennale — a free-form blown glass vessel whose undulating silhouette was inspired by the shoreline of Finnish lakes. The vase entered mass production through the Iittala glassworks and has not left it since.

The Finlandia Hall (1971–1975) was Aalto’s final major work in Helsinki; he died on 11 May 1976, eighteen months after its completion. The building was intended as the anchor of a grand civic park extending around the Töölönlahti bay — a project Aalto had proposed as early as 1961 — but only the concert and congress hall was built. The Carrara marble cladding, subjected to Helsinki’s freeze-thaw cycles, has required repeated restoration and remains a technically controversial choice, which Aalto’s admirers consider evidence of his willingness to subordinate engineering prudence to aesthetic vision.