Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) was a Finnish architect and designer, born in Kuortane. He graduated from Helsinki University of Technology in 1921. He worked closely with his first wife, the architect Aino Aalto, until her death in 1949, and in 1935 they founded the furniture company Artek with Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl.

His early buildings used the white walls and flat roofs of 1920s modernism; later ones added wood, brick, curved walls and daylight from roof openings. At Paimio Sanatorium (1928-1933), a tuberculosis hospital, he designed the building, its fittings and the Paimio chair, made of bent laminated plywood. The lecture hall of the Viipuri Library (1927-1935), in a city now part of Russia, has an undulating wooden ceiling designed to spread sound through the room. Villa Mairea in Noormarkku (1937-1939), built for Maire and Harry Gullichsen, combines white render, timber and stone.

In the United States he designed Baker House, a dormitory at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1947-1948), whose serpentine plan gives most rooms a diagonal view of the Charles River. Later works include Säynätsalo Town Hall (1949-1952), built of red brick around a raised courtyard, and Finlandia Hall in Helsinki (1962-1971), a concert and congress hall faced in white marble.