Reviews (1)

Continuation of a Fine Biography
First, let me warn you: my perspective is "Alvar Aalto is THE great 20th century architect." Yes, Wright, Corb, Mies, Gropius and Kahn had more immediately recognizable & defiable styles, but Aalto was just as groundbreaking as any of them and more practical (and practicable) than any of them. That said, this is NOT really about his buildings. Rather, the man Aalto is examined, and thereby the mind that gave us the buildings. The whole thing is interesting (you don't need to have read the earlier two volumes to gain insight; this isn't Calculus). I found the chapters on the illness & death of his partner & wife Aino, a gifted designer in her own right and a huge part of Aalto's life, particularly affecting. I was tempted to give this book five stars, but it is, while very interesting and well written, incomplete. Not in the lack of knowledge of Aalto's earlier life/career, but in that his history as a designer is left to Schildt's later catalog of Aalto's work. The two are best read together. ... Read more

Reviews (6)

Funtastic book!
If you are one those who don't like boring books, and you like books to show good photografs, this is the book you have to buy about this great architect that ALVAR AALTO was. This book is one of my favourites and believe, i have plenty of book is my room. Amazing book and amazing photografs!

Coffee-table book +
Undoubtedly this is a book of fine photographs and drawings. And for many architects and students that is more than enough. They want to be inspired, and to get a feeling for the material qualities of architecture. They indeed need few words. But Weston's book makes a claim to be more than that. It claims to be a historical monograph. But we get little sense of the strangeness, the Otherness, of Finnish culture. Aalto could more or less be designing anywhere. Reference to Finland is merely stereo-typical "nature". Aalto remains as elusive as ever.

So beautiful as Alvar Aalto's architecture
I love Alvar Aalto's architecture and i think this is book contains so beautiful photografs as his architecture is. Richard Weston on the best.

great book
I would just like to say that this is one of the best architecture books i've seen up to date

Beautiful photographs
Beautiful photographs of Aalto's architecture. I don't think a monograph needs too many words. Weston provides the necessary dates and basic information, but luckilly keeps away from intellectualisations. ... Read more

Book Description

Of the indisputably great figures in 20th-century architecture, Alvar Aalto is in many ways the most humane, the least rigid, the most relevant to our contemporary sensibility and the emerging future. This sumptuous book offers a thorough study of an innovative and prolific master, whom Frank Lloyd Wright termed a genius. This fresh, penetrating examination of Aalto's work and influence includes essays by five notable critics and historians. Some 50 of Aalto's projects--houses, town halls, cultural institutions, factories, furniture and glass designs, and regional plans--from all periods of his extraordinarily productive career are illustrated and described, using much previously unpublished and newly photographic material. This book was published to accompany a 1998 retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Edited by Peter Reed.
Essays by Kenneth Frampton, Pekka Korvenmaa, Juhani Pallasmaa and Marc Treib. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

More than just the standards
This is a fabulous book for real students of modernism.This monograph goes beyond the handful of buildings we're used to seeing by this great architect.Aalto appears to be getting his just rewards these days as moreand more of us return to his work.

Alvar Aalto : Between Humanism and Materialism
a nice review, with a lotof pictures. Good quqlity af color and paper. ... Read more

Book Description

"The form is a mystery that eludes every definition."—Alvar Aalto

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) was not only influenced by the landscape of his native country, but by the political struggle over Finland’s place within European culture. After early neoclassical buildings, Alvar Aalto turned to ideas based on Functionalism, subsequently moving toward more organic structures, with brick and wood replacing plaster and steel. In addition to designing buildings, furniture, lamps, and glass objects with his wife Aino, he painted and was an avid traveler. A firm believer that buildings have a crucial role in shaping society, Aalto once said, "The duty of the architect is to give life a more sensitive structure." ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (1)

Superb pictures
This book is a superb collection of photographs of some of aalto's key works. But one is therefore surprised to see that this is a book by Aalto's incredible biographer Goran Schildt. One would expect more from such a distinguished scholar of Aalto's life. There is certainly nothing new in this volume. Of course the book can be a good primer for architecture students and the general public. This would be the book's value. Terribly disappointing for historians, however. ... Read more

Book Description

Alvar Aalto

Jyväskylä, 1898 - Helsinki, 1976.

If his first works as an architect (Library of Viipuri 1927-1935; Sanatorium of Piamio, 1928) were marked in the Modernist movement, then in the late thirties, with Villa Mairea (1938), for Mairea Gullichson, he began creating organic works with combined materials that fragmented or curved. In Helsinki (1935), as a furniture designer and part of the Artek foundation, he and his wife Aino Aalto and Mairea Gullichson began producing pieces like the stool with three legs, extraordinarily modest yet carefully treated. ... Read more

Book Description

This three-volume set chronicles the complete works of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto.

Aalto's designs encompassed the fields of painting, architecture, sculpture, and furniture, and are some of the most beautiful and original of modern times. His combination of an interest in natural, organic shapes with the modernist mandates of form and light in its purest aspects makes him one of the acknowledged masters of modern architecture, along with Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Ada Louise Huxtable writes of Aalto, "his deceptively simple style is a sophisticated synthesis, a reconciliation of the monumental and the popular, of the general and the particular, of the real and the mythic, of nature and art."

This book is one of cornerstones of any serious architectural library. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Aalto's Bible
This books contains almost all the architectural work of the finnish, in a highly detailed and careful way; full of plans and photographs and with texts of one of his closest collaborators and biographer. This 3 volume set displays chronologically the Aalto's evolution, first a as house designer, later as a public buildings master and finally as a city planner, always setting the primary interest in the people rather than in the modernist and rationalist eficient, accurate and fast way to do the architecture. A lection of style and responsability for any architect. ... Read more

Book Description

From neo-classicist and rationalist origins, Alvar Aalto developed a distinctive personal style, simultaneously expressive and functional, and clearly focussed on human needs and requirements. This portrait of Finland's most famous architect provides a compact survey and ideal introduction to Aalto's fascinating life and work, complete with plans, drawings and photographs. ... Read more

Book Description

This book is a unique comparative study of two of the greatest figures in modern architecture - Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto. By assessing the historical, personal and intellectual influneces of their attitudes to nature and the creative direction of their work, this study offers a new understanding about the diversity at the heart of their modernism.
Through an analysis of the architects' own writing about their ideas and philosophies, a better understanding is gained of their ideas for urban living and by looking at their most widely known work, the authors analyse the architects' intentions to build nature into the heart of their architecture. The authors argue that there are many similarities between the attitudes towards nature held by Le Corbusier and Aalto, and that these similarities had an important place in the generation of their architecture. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

nature and obscuratism
This is a strange book. Two architects from the height of modernism, one a half generation older than the other other. First there's Le Corbusier, THE man responsibe more than any other for changing the direction of architecture in the 20th century. A visionary. An idealist. Uncompromising. Brutal. An individualist. And then we have his half-mentor, the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto - who has just a handful of buildings outside his own country and came to prominance for a hospital and a library design in his own country at the height of Modernism (the CIAM conferences), and was championed by its highly influential 'official historian' Sigfried Giedion. And what do these 2 have in common apart from the latter being influenced by the former? That is, Aalto follwed Le Corbusier but corrected his more zealous ideas, appropriating them for a more organic line of design. The 2 authors put it down to God and nature! What an audacious reductionism! Neither architect was religious. Le Corbusier may have originally been from the mountains of Switzerland, but reduced nature to numbers. Aalto was from a rural country -period. And what basis do the authors use to make their claims? Psychoanalysis! They had problems with their mothers and wives. Well what male creative mind didn't?

Sadly most books on Aalto are coffee-table jobs - and this one is certainly not one of those. And there is yet to be a book on Le Corbusier not written by one of his apologists - and this one is no different. Thankfully, at least, this book is a serious, brave effort to say something deep and meaningful about these 2 architects. But it gets bogged down in its highly questionable methodology. ... Read more

Amazon.com

"The Lord created paper for drawing architecture.Everything else is--for me, at least--misuse of paper," Alvar Aalto, the Finnish modernist architect, once remarked.The quote begs the question of what Aalto--who, according to his close friend and biographer Goran Schildt, was also quite modest--would have thought of this book: a collection of 11 essays, almost entirely laudatory in tone, focusing on various aspects of his work, which spanned from the 1920s to the 1970s.Of the fare offered here, volume editor Winfried Nerdinger's kickoff, "Alvar Aalto's Human Modernism," provides the best general overview of Aalto's life work, "greatest hits" and guiding principles, while Schildt's character study, "The Many Faces of Alvar Aalto," positions the man as an egoless "secret opponent within the Modern Movement" in contrast to the rigid, self-important formalism of Corbusier and Company.These are followed by meditations on Aalto's relationship with cities and city planning, on private houses, and on his philosophical and professional ties to the U.S. (where he was particularly influenced by the teachings of Lewis Mumford, and where he taught, at MIT, after World War II), Sweden, Vienna, Switzerland, North Germany, and Wolfsburg, Germany (site of three major Aalto projects from the early '60s, including the Holy Spirit Community Center with its super-mod hood-shaped roof and autonomous slim white bell tower).

The only Aalto project to get its own essay here is the dazzling Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland (1938-39), in which Aalto fused modernist, Finnish vernacular, and Japanese and French influences to create one of those homes, like Fallingwater or the Villa Savoye, that transcends the stylistic strictures of the era and inhabits its own timeless realm of beauty and intrigue.Unfortunately, the accompanying photos of the house are-like those of Aalto's many other stylish and unique projects discussed herein--small and black-and-white.If you're really, deeply into Aalto--i.e., if you want to read theory about his work more than simply look at it--you'll like this rather academic volume.But if you first want to get to know his work better visually, then short of visiting the sites themselves, you're better off starting with a full-color monograph for a real photo, uh, Finnish. --Timothy Murphy ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

This digital document, covering the life and work of (Hugo) Alvar (Henrik) Aalto, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thomson Gale. The length of the entry is 3503 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author