Alvar Aalto
Finnish architect and designer (1898-1976) · Finland · Architects · Died at 78
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Something wrong?He turned plywood into curves no one thought wood could hold, then built entire worlds - buildings, chairs, lamps, glass - around the idea that modernism didn't have to feel cold.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 2
In their own words 1
, Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.
Awards
In their orbit 2
About this person
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was born in Finland on 3 February 1898, and his career rose alongside the country's rapid industrialization in the first half of the 20th century. Backed by industrialist patrons like the Ahlström-Gullichsen family, he moved from Nordic Classicism in the 1920s through rational International Style Modernism in the 1930s to a warmer, organic modernism from the 1940s on. Working with his first wife Aino, he treated every commission as Gesamtkunstwerk - total art - designing not just the structure but every surface, chair, and glass inside it. His technical breakthroughs in bent plywood earned him patents and shaped the midcentury work of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. He died 11 May 1976, leaving a museum of his own design in Jyväskylä, the city he called home.
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