Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles, and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings. Over the course of his career from the 1920s to the 1970s, his style evolved from Nordic classicism to an international-style rational modernism in the 1930s to a more organic modernist style beginning in the 1940s. Typical is his striving for a total work of art, for which he designed not only the building, but also the interior surfaces, furniture, lamps, and even glassware. Aalto preferred to work with wood and is considered the inventor of curved plywood furniture. The Alvar Aalto Museum, which he designed himself, is in his hometown of Jyväskylä, where he lived from the age of five.

After drawing lessons with a local artist, he attended the Helsinki University of Technology from 1916. His studies were interrupted by the Civil War, in which he fought for the White Army. After graduation he opened an architectural office in Jyväskylä. He married the architect Aino Marsio (1894-1949) and worked alongside her. Due to his success, he moved his office first to Turku, then in 1933 to Helsinki. After the early death of his first wife, he again married an architect, Elissa Mäkiniemi (1922-94), who had worked in his office. From the 1920s, along with a change to functionalism, he attracted attention with numerous writings. In the 1930s he maintained contacts with the artists of the Bauhaus and with the Swiss Le Corbusier. As early as 1938 he received a solo exhibition at MOMA in New York, and in the 1940s he was invited as a visiting professor to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the last two decades of his life Aalto mainly designed monumental buildings for Helsinki. From 1963-68 he was president of the Academy of Finland. In total, he designed more than 500 buildings, of which 300 were actually built, mostly in Finland (including the Finlandia Concert and Congress Hall in Helsinki), but also in France, Germany (opera house in Essen), Italy, and the United States.

Which projects Aalto exhibited in 1952 is unknown, as they are listed generically as Stadium and Sportshalls. In 1933 he had participated in the competition for the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki for the 1940 Olympics. In 1949 he won the competition for the design of the Otaniemi compound. His proposal included the sports field, the sports hall, and some service buildings used for the training of Olympic athletes. Initially, the facilities were to be used for the 1952 Olympic Games and then they became part of the campus of the Technical University. The Otahalli sports hall in particular, built 1949-52, set standards with its wooden construction and is still in use.