Artists’ Papers Register
A location register of the papers of artists, designers and craftspeople held in publicly accessible collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland
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Artists’ Papers RegisterA location register of the papers of artists, designers and craftspeople held in publicly accessible collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland |
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| GB/NNAF/P301225 Aalto, Alvar (1898-1976) Gender: Male Functions, occupations and activities Finnish architect, furniture designer, sculptor and painter; born at Kuortane, Finland (3 February 1898); studied at the Technical College in Helsinki (1916-12), with one of the foremost proponents of National Romantic architecture, Armas Lindgren, as his principal teacher; in 1923 established a modest architects' office in the town where he grew up, Jyvaskyla in central Finland; travelled to Italy in 1924 for the first time and ever since, places like Florence, Siena and Venice, remained a frequently visited source of inspiration for him throughout his life; in 1927 he moves his office to Turku; in 1929 he was invited to join CIAM; travelled to Germany and established friendly relationships with older coleagues such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, but also with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who was the same age and who gave him important artistic inspiration; in 1933 he moved to Helsinki, where two years later he erected his own residential and office building in the district of Munkkiniemi; in 1935 he met the factory-owning couple Maire and Harry Gullichsen and his friendship with them made possible the foundation of the Artek furniture design company, which began to sell Aalto's furniture in Finland and abroad; in 1940 he was appointed research professor in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, but he managed to teach for only a short time in the USA before he was summoned back to his homeland; he was employed on the reconstruction of Finland's towns and cities after the war damage; he had been occupied with urban and regional planning before World War II; in 1945 he was commissioned to draw up a general plan for the province of Lappland and a new city plan for the totally destroyed provincial capital, Rovaniemi; the 1950s became a great, vital creative period in his life after he met the young architect Elissa Makiniemi, his wife from 1952; it was during the 1950s that he really began to receive commissions outside Finland (USA, Germany, etc.); during his career he managed to execute c. 1000 projects, always working with a wealth of ideas; over the years he accepted more than 300 architects from both Finland and abroad (particularly Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavia, and the USA) as assistants for short or long periods of time; one of his important maxims was that architects have an absolutely clear mission: to humanize mechanical forms; died in Helsinki (11 May 1976). Thesaurus ARCHITECTS PAINTERS SCULPTORS Relationships Associate relationship with Nagy, Laszlo Moholy- (1895-1946) Friendship Archival Resources Number noted: 1 Letters (2), 1937-1939 Held at: University of East Anglia Library Document reference: PP/9/1 Comments: Papers listed Date of creation: 07 November 2002
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