Alvar Aalto : Finnish architect and designer, as well as a sculptor and painter. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware.
His Awards:
1.Prince Eugene Medal (1954).
2.RIBA Gold Medal (1957).
3.AIA Gold Medal (1963).
Major works: Paimio Sanatorium-1933 Villa Mairea -1939. the Expressionist House of Culture-1958. Finlandia Hall-1971. Riola Parish Church-1978
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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. He used different styles through his career : classicism, functionalism, International and Finnish vernacular. 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.
Alvar Aalto 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.
Alvar Aalto from 1920s to 1970s:
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.
From 1930s to mid 1940s: 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. 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.
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.
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.
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