Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect, designer, sculptor and artist. He is considered one of the great leaders in planning, as well as a key proponent of mid-century modernism. His fifty-year career included work in the fields of furniture, textiles, painting, sculpture, landscape, urban planning, glassware and jewelry.
Alvar Aalto was Finland's most famous architect. His high creative growth was the result of his humanistic approach to modernism - a mixture of organic resources, self-expression and progress. His main goal was to create a work of art for everyone. Aalto not only designed buildings, but also paid great attention to their interior elements, such as lamps, glassware and furniture. He redesigned the architecture and furniture of public structures, relying on the basis of productivity and human relations with organic forms and using the natural environment as a starting point for projects. He is known for bringing his alternative method to visual boredom and the structural monotony of international style in the middle of the century. Thus, in the Scandinavian countries he is rightly called the "father of modernism."
Childhood and youth
Hugo Alwar Henrik Aalto in the small town of Kuortana, Finland, February 3, 1898. He was one of the first three children born by surveyor Johan Henrik Aalto and Selma (Selly) Matilda Hackestedt.
His mother Selma died in 1903, when Alvar was only five years old. His father Johan remarried and moved his family to Jyväskylä, where Aalto attended school and continued to explore his father’s trips during the summer.
After graduating from the Jyväskylä Lyceum in 1916, he moved to Helsinki. There he continued to receive excellent marks in architecture at the only Finnish architectural school (now Helsinki University of Technology).
Alto also served in the Finnish National Police during the Civil War.
By 1921, he was a certified architect with a master's degree and two years later opened an office in Jyväskylä. He married his assistant architect Aino Marcio. Their honeymoon in Italy had a profound impact on his Nordic worldview and creativity, which lasted until the end of his career.
