Yesterday METALOCUS visited the CaixaForum exhibition of Alvar Aalto. This display aims to publicize his life and his work, presenting a human being that evolves over time and is always concerned about every detail. At the same time referring to the architect, the painter, the furniture designer and the entrepreneur who knew how to make a living out of design. We are talking about one of the most important architects of modernity.

The exhibition presented at the CaixaForum, chronologicaly, exhibits drawings, models, furniture, building materials, sculptures and multimedia material, exhibiting also interesting photographs by Armin Linke on the work of Aalto.

Alvar Aalto came from a cultivated family, his father was a topographer, his mother a teacher and his grandfather an inventor, and he studied at the University of Helsinki. His early influences have an Italian Renaissance line, although authors such as Kenneth Frampton define this period of his life with closer to romanticism and doricism. After going with a scholarship to study in Sweden he was highly influenced by German trends like the Bauhaus.

Throughout his life, Aalto projects over five hundred buildings, most of them in Finland. His work expands over more than one hundred buildings set in eighteen foreign countries. Many of his buildings are works of art projected as a whole (Gesamtkuntwerke), for Aalto designed every detail of the building ñ construction, furniture, lamps, fabrics, etc. and even experimented with building materials. Aaltoís most significat projects include Villa Mairea, Paimio Sanatorium for tuberculosis and the Library of Viipuri (Vyborg) where a magnificent combination of light, materials and organic volumes is made.

Furthermore, the exhibition shows the chairs made of plywood Aalto designed, which have made him one of the most famous furniture designers of the twentieth century. This aspect of his career was developed inside Artek company, which belonged to Alvar Aalto himself with his wife Aino Aalto, the promoter Maire Gullichsen and the art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl as partners.

Aalto understood people as the central element both in its architecture and its art and furniture designs. This is one of the main reasons for his influence in the whole twentieth-century history of architecture. Aalto is considered, along with Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius as one of the great masters of the Modern movement.

Complementary activities to the exhibition.-

Thursday, October 1st, 7:30 p.m.
How did Aalto became famous. Eva-Liisa Pelkonen, associate professor.
Yale University.

Monday, October 5rd, 7:30 p.m.
Landscape, geometry, deck, light.
Enrique Sobejano, architect, founding partner of Nieto Sobejano Architects, professor at the Universität der Künste, Berlin.

Wednesday, October 7th, 7:30 p.m.
New directions in architecture from the Scandinavian point of view.
Samuli Miettinen, Architect, partner and head of design at JKMM Architects, Finland.

Conference fee: 4 €
Limited seats.

 

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Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) qualified as an architect from Helsinki Institute of Technology (later Helsinki University of Technology and now part of the Aalto University) in 1921. He set up his first architectural practice in Jyväskylä. His early works followed the tenets of Nordic Classicism, the predominant style at that time. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he made a number of journeys to Europe on which he and his wife Aino Marsio, also an architect, became familiar with the latest trends in Modernism, the International Style.

The pure Functionalist phase in Aalto’s work lasted for several years. It enabled him to make an international breakthrough, largely because of Paimio Sanatorium (1929-1933), an important Functionalist milestone. Aalto had adopted the principals of user-friendly, functional design in his architecture. From the late 1930s onwards, the architectural expression of Aalto’s buildings became enriched by the use of organic forms, natural materials and increasing freedom in the handling of space.

From the 1950s onwards, Aalto’s architectural practice was employed principally on the design of public buildings, such as Säynätsalo Town Hall (1948-1952), the Jyväskylä Institute of Pedagogics, now the University of Jyväskylä (1951-1957), and the House of Culture in Helsinki (1952-1956). His urban design master plans represent larger projects than the buildings mentioned above, the most notable schemes that were built being Seinäjoki city centre (1956-1965/87), Rovaniemi city centre (1963-1976/88) and the partly built Jyväskylä administrative and cultural centre (1970-1982).

From the early 1950s onwards, Alvar Aalto’s work focused more and more on countries outside Finland, so that a number of buildings both private and public were built to his designs abroad. Some of his best-known works include Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland (1937–1939), the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Baker House, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (1947–1948), Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland (1949–1966), The Experimental House, Muuratsalo, Finland (1953) or Essen opera house, Essen, Germany (1959–1988).

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Published on: October 2, 2015
Cite: "Alvar Aalto in CaixaForum Madrid" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/alvar-aalto-caixaforum-madrid> ISSN 1139-6415
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