Alvar Aalto:Finnish architect and designer, as well as a sculptor and painter. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware. Download from this Link :http://festyy.com/wgrIx7 Visit our website for more presentations: https://architecture2018z.wixsite.com/architecturez

1. "God
created
paper for
the
purpose of
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architectur
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Everything
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2. AALTO ALVAR
• Finnish architect and designer, as well as a sculptor and painter. His work includes
architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware.
• Awards:
1. Prince Eugene Medal (1954).
2. RIBA Gold Medal (1957).
3. AIA Gold Medal (1963).

3. DESIGN
• In his designs, Alvar Aalto often used local materials, particularly wood. He is known for
the chairs he created out of bent pieces of wood, eliminating the need to connect the
horizontal and vertical pieces .
• Although Aalto borrowed from the International Style, he utilized texture, color, and
structure in creative new ways. He refined the generic examples of modern architecture
that existed in most of Europe and recreated them into a new Finnish architecture.
• Aalto's designs were particularly significant because of their response to site, material
and form.
• Used styles: classicism, functionalism, International and Finnish vernacular.

4. DESIGN
• Aalto did not undermine the cultural field of modernism but exercised his critique
internally. Many of his 1950s buildings, for example, addressed the placeless of modern
architecture, which critics had complained about. His Rautatalo office building (Helsinki,
1955) in particular was singled out by critics as a successful example of contextualize
because the brick corner pilasters could be read as minimal markers that indicated
respect for the built context, the adjacent brick facade of the bank by Eliel Saarinen,
without giving up the modern agenda.

5. ASPECTS IN AALTO’S ARCHITECTURE
• The majority of historians and critics emphasize three aspects in Aalto’s architecture that
set it apart from any other architect’s work and explain his importance:
1. His concern for the human qualities of the environment.
2. His love of nature.
3. Finnish heritage.

6. AALTO ALVAR DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS
1. Individuality in mass housing.
2. Social equality in theaters.
3. Foible for details.
4. Carefully planned light systems in public buildings.
5. Aalto turns out to be a pure dissident of the avant-garde. emphasizing the complexity of
architecture by leaving aesthetic values behind him.

7. EARLY WORKS 1920S
• His early work shows the influence of anonymous irregular Italian architecture and
neoclassical formality as developed by 19th-century architects such as Carl Ludwig
Engel, and these strategies were to remain important throughout his career.

8. • Aalto organized the facade of the
Workers’ Club like the Palazzo Ducale
in Venice by setting a heavy, closed
volume on airy Doric columns on the
ground floor. The almost symmetrical
facade is challenged by a Palladian-
style window that is shifted to one
side, marking the location of a theater
on the first floor
JYVÄSKYLÄ WORKERS' CLUB IN 1925

9. JYVÄSKYLÄ WORKERS' CLUB IN 1925
Side Elevation Main Elevation

10. • During this time, Aalto started designing bent-
plywood furniture, which he later developed
into standard types. From 1942 Aino Aalto
directed the Artek Company, which had been
set up in 1935 for the manufacture of this
furniture. These experiments also affected the
architectural designs: in the mid-1930s, Aalto
introduced the famous curved, suspended
wooden ceiling as an acoustical device for the
lecture room of the Viipuri Library. Although
the functioning of this element is very
questionable, curved walls and ceilings
became typical of his later work.
FROM 1930S TO MID 1940S
Suspended wooden ceiling as an acoustical device for
the lecture room of the Viipuri Library

11. FROM 1930S TO MID 1940S
• The integration of building and nature emerged as a central theme in Aalto’s work; this is
exemplified in his designs for the Sunila pulp mill (1937) and the Sunila housing for
employees (1939). In the engineering staff housing, the first fan-plan motif appears, which
became a crucial element in his designs. Characteristic of this period is his interest in
natural materials, such as wood, brick, and grass roofs, as he demonstrated in one of his
masterpieces, the Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku. The villa is often praised for its
harmonious relationship with nature and reference to old Finnish farmsteads.

12. • In the Villa Mairea (1939), a country
house for an industrialist and his
painter wife, all of Aalto’s ideas melted
together to become an organic and
artistic whole. It was his “Opus con
Amore”....not a house, but a love
poem..... It was also everything the
clients had asked for; Modern and
Finnish...
• When asked about his theories Aalto
usually replied, “The truth about
building is in building, not talk”.
VILLA MAIREA 1939

13. VILLA MAIREA 1939
• The Villa Mairea was designed in 1937-38 for Aalto’s friends Maire and Harry Gullichsen,
and it was built in Noormarkku, Finland. Aalto was told by the clients to treat the Villa
Mairea as “an ‘experimental house,’” so he used it to mix together different concepts he
had been using.
Exterior Interior Garden Recliner

14. VILLA MAIREA 1939
Villa Mairea International Style Finnish Vernacular
Exterior Small ribbon windows
Volumetric
Flat roof
Asymmetry
Use of wood (local materials)
Curvilinear forms
Open to nature
Ornamentation
Interior Open plan
Steel columns (grid
organization)
Use of wood
Ornamentation
References to nature

15. DETAILS

16. LATE 1940S AND 1950S
• Although Aalto’s brick buildings from the late 1940s and 1950s won international critical
acclaim, for his commissions in Germany—the Hansaviertel House (1957) in Berlin, the
Neue Vahr Apartment building (1962), and the parish centers in Detmerode

17. • The House of Culture consists of a
curvilinear theater and a rectangular
office block, a typical Aalto arrangement
of organic versus orthogonal shapes,
where the public space is articulated in a
free form and more private functions are
placed in rectangular shapes. As in most
of his designs, all elements including the
apparently free form follow a hidden
geometric grid, with the center being a
fountain in the courtyard, where a giant
hand presents a tiny model of the
building
THE EXPRESSIONIST HOUSE OF CULTURE 1958

18. • Inside the theater, he experimented
again with the acoustic ceiling but also
drew on references to the facade of Le
Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.
THE EXPRESSIONIST HOUSE OF CULTURE 1958

19. 1960S TO 1970S
• While his work was never compulsively innovative, neither was it static. His late designs
showed an increased complexity and dynamism that some regarded as incautious. In particular,
his work of the late 1960s and early 1970s was marked by splayed, diagonal shapes and
clustered, overlapping volumes. Energy and imagination were ever present.
• (1968) and Wolfsburg (1962)—he chose international white modernism while at the same time
continuing to use brick in the Otaniemi (1974) and Jyväskylä (1971) universities. This choice
may seem surprising, given that brick had a strong regional connotation in Hanseatic cities,
whereas in Finland the dominant building material was wood.
• Hence, Aalto’s use of brick in Finland cannot be understood as primitive or regional, and he
himself connected brick rather with Central Europe, whereas Finnish architects of around 1900
tended to view it as Russian. Aalto did not want to simply reproduce tradition, and so he worked
in both Finland and Germany explicitly against tradition and concentrated more on the symbolic
self-identity of the community than on local traditions or building techniques.

20. • The main feature of the Finlandia Hall
building is a tower like section with a
sloping roof. Alvar Aalto’s idea behind
the design was that a high empty
space would provide better acoustics.
• A lattice ceiling hides the space to the
audience but it allows the creation of
the same deep post-echo as tall
church towers.
FINLANDIA HALL 1971

21. • Aalto used marble in both indoor and
outdoor surfaces as a contrast to black
granite.
FINLANDIA HALL 1971

22. • The interior design of the building is a tribute
to detail. The design of each lamp, piece of
furniture, panel, flooring material and
decorative board reflects the mature approach
resulting from Aalto’s long career as an
architect.
• In the Finlandia Hall, the focus is not on
extraordinary forms or ostentatious interior. It
is on the audience and on the performers.
According to Aalto, the audience at the
Finlandia Hall need not dress up like people
used to in the opera foyers and gilded concert
halls of the old days. What people wear should
be as genuine and natural as the environment
in the building.
FINLANDIA HALL 1971

23. FURNITURE'S
• Whereas Aalto was famous for his architecture, his furniture designs were well thought of and
are still popular today. He studied Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte, and for a period
of time, worked under Eliel Saarinen.
• He also gained inspiration from Gebrüder Thonet. During the late 1920s and 1930s he, working
closely with Aino Aalto, also focused a lot of his energy on furniture design, partly due to the
decision to design much of the individual furniture pieces and lamps for the Paimio Sanatorium.
• Of particular significance was the experimentation in bent plywood chairs, most notably the so-
called Paimio chair, which had been designed for the sitting tuberculosis patient. The Aaltos,
together with visual arts promoter Maire Gullichsen and art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl founded
the Artek company in 1935, ostensibly to sell Aalto products but also other imported products.
• He became the first furniture designer to use the cantilever principle in chair design using wood.

24. FURNITURE'S

25. FURNITURE'S

26. HONORARY MENTIONS
Paimio Sanatorium- 1933 Viipuri Library-1935

27. HONORARY MENTIONS
Säynätsalo Town Hall - 1949 Heilig Geist Kirche-1962

28. HONORARY MENTIONS
Stephanuskirche - 1968 Riola Parish Church-1978

29. LIST OF REFERENCES
• Encyclopedia of 20th centaury architecture, page 1-7.
• Architecture magazine (Rice university) No.4- March.1962.
• ALVAR AALTO’S VILLA MAIREA: Modernism with a Finnish Approach. EMMA WALSH
,ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES AND CONCEPTS,FALL 2014.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvar_Aalto
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artek_(company)#Paimio_Chair
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Alvar_Aalto%27s_works
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandia_Hall