"Everything that is superfluous becomes ugly over time", said Alvar Aalto. Probably one of the most influential Nordic designers of the 20th century, and one of those who form part of the modern movement along with Le Corbusier, of whom we spoke in the previous issue, and Van der Rohe.
His notion of architecture regarded building as a public service, and it is said that he was never driven by money, in a harsh era when poverty also plagued this Nordic and discreet Finland.
In 1921, at the age of twenty-three, Aalto trained as an architect at the Helsinki University of Technology, where romantic nationalism still prevailed. When the young Aalto opened his architectural practice, the most important Finnish architect of the time, Eliel Saarinen, went to live in the United States, and the reception of the Modern Movement in Finland was in the 1930s, shortly after the first CIAM of La Sarraz led by Le Corbusier and by Giedion, who would become Aalto's friend; this new view of space and life would prevail over a simple popular architecture that drew on Finnish history. Also in neighbouring Sweden (always as influential as Russia in Finland), the ideas of the Modern Movement arrived with the functionalists Sven Gottfrid Markelius, Uno Åhrén and Paul Gunnar Hedqvist.
Aalto was influenced by national Romanticism as an expression of the social movement in the face of the Swedish and Russian advance in Finnish life in the late 19th century.
In 1924, Aalto travelled to Italy with his wife, Aino Marsio, and the influence of Italian culture became one of the key elements of his work as an architect; the Renaissance is one of the matrices for the churches and chapels he built in the late 1920s, as can be seen in the churches of Jämsä and Muurame. In 1932, Aalto won a competition and created a series of bowls, plates and vases in wavy shapes, which were made of pressed glass that was cheap to produce, and he moved increasingly into furniture and object design. In 1935, the Aalto couple founded the company Artek for the international distribution of the furniture they planned, with the aim of combining art and technology (hence artek) in the industrial production of objects for everyday life that were also beautiful and of artistic value.
In Spain, which he visited in 1951 (Barcelona, Madrid, Palma, Granada), his arrival was the trigger for the creation of the R Group (which recognised itself in GATCPAC and CIAM and brought together architects such as Antoni de Moragas, Josep Antoni Coderch, Joaquim Gili, Josep Maria Sostres, Manuel Valls, Oriol Bohigas, Josep Martorell), and for the Alhambra Manifesto, which sought to recover the proposals of the Modern Movement. In his conversations, Aalto acknowledged some Spanish influences, such as that of Miró in the ceiling of the Vyborg library, which, according to him, had a sinuous shape like a Miró painting. This Russian library, consisting of two cubic structures, is illuminated by large skylights, and has recently been restored.
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