Alvar Aalto
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Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (pronounced [ˈhuɡo ˈɑlʋɑr ˈhenrik ˈɑːlto]; 3 February 1898 – 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer.[1] His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings, though he never regarded himself as an artist, seeing painting and sculpture as "branches of the tree whose trunk is architecture.
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was born in Kuortane, Finland. His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, was a Finnish-speaking land-surveyor and his mother, Selma Matilda "Selly" (née Hackstedt) was a Swedish-speaking postmistress. When Aalto was 5 years old, the family moved to Alajärvi, and from there to Jyväskylä in Central Finland.[citation needed]
He studied at the Jyväskylä Lyceum school, where he completed his basic education in 1916, and took drawing lessons from a local artist named Jonas Heiska. In 1916, he then enrolled to study architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology. His studies were interrupted by the Finnish Civil War, which he fought in. He fought on the side of the White Army and fought at the Battle of Länkipohja and the Battle of Tampere.
He built his first piece of architecture while still a student, a house for his parents, at Alajärvi.[9] Afterwards, he continued his education, graduating in 1921. In the summer of 1922 he began his official military service, finishing at the Hamina reserve officer training school, and was promoted to reserve second lieutenant in June 1923.
In 1920, while still a student, Aalto made his first trip abroad, travelling via Stockholm to Gothenburg, where he even briefly found work with the architect Arvid Bjerke. In 1922, he accomplished his first independent piece at the Industrial Exposition in Tampere. In 1923, he returned to Jyväskylä, where he opened his first architectural office under the name 'Alvar Aalto, Architect and Monumental Artist'. At that same time he also wrote articles for the Jyväskylä newspaper Sisä-Suomi under the pseudonym Remus.During this time, he designed a number of small single-family houses in Jyväskylä, and the office's workload steadily increased.
On October 6, 1924, Aalto married architect Aino Marsio; their honeymoon journey to Italy was Aalto's first trip there, though Aino had previously made a study trip there. The latter trip together sealed an intellectual bond with the culture of the Mediterranean region that was to remain important to Aalto for the rest of his life.
On their return, they continued with a number of local projects, notably the Jyväskylä Worker's Club, which incorporated a number of motifs which they had studied during their trip, most notably the decorations of the Festival hall modelled on the Rucellai Sepulchre in Florence by Leon Battista Alberti. Following winning the architecture competition for the Southwest Finland Agricultural Cooperative building in 1927 the Aaltos moved their office to Turku. They had made contact with the city's most progressive architect, Erik Bryggman, already before moving, and they then began collaborating with him, most notably on the Turku Fair of 1928-29. Aalto's biographer, Göran Schildt, claimed that Bryggman was the only architect with whom Aalto cooperated as an equal.[13] With increasing works in the Finnish capital, the Aaltos' office moved again in 1933 to Helsinki.
The Aaltos designed and built a joint house-office (1935–36) for themselves in Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, but later (1954–56) had a purpose-built office erected in the same neighbourhood – nowadays the former is a "home museum" and the latter the premises of the Alvar Aalto Academy. In 1926, the young Aaltos designed and had built for themselves a summer cottage in Alajärvi, Villa Flora.
