Aalto, wooden standard housing, Varkaus, Savonmäki District, Finland, 1937. The house types have a traditional appearance although Aalto designed purely modernist dwellings at the time, such as the Kauttua Terrace House (Kauttua, 1937–38). Aalto, type house for the Asevelikylä village of ex-service men, Tampere, Finland, 1943
long run. . . . The individual architectural assignment can be treated as a laboratory experiment of sorts, in which things can be done that would be impossible with present-day mass production, and those experiments can spread further and eventually become available to one and all as production methods advance.19
At the time that the Villa Mairea was being furnished, at the end of 1939, the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union broke out. The war threw Aalto and other architects from their modern utopian aspirations back to basic issues of survival and dwelling, and the need to develop efficient, variable, and cheap housing systems to settle the numerous families who had lost their homes during the devastating war. Aalto had designed housing areas for Finnish industries as early as the 1930s. In addition to modernist housing types at the Sunila Pulp Mill (1936–38) and the Standard Terrace House at Kauttua (1937–38), he also developed several types of wooden worker’s houses. The modernist Sunila housing area includes a cluster of hip-roofed standardized wood houses of the same type as those tested earlier by the A. Ahlström Company in Varkaus. These so-called A-System houses were designed with the intention that the company would supply the wood material required to execute the standard drawings for self-build houses. During his research professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology immediately after the Winter War in 1940, Aalto and his students continued to work on the complex aspects of system housing. His vision was to make Finland a laboratory of modern housing, and he sought to raise American funds for this enterprise to design and build “An American Town in Finland,” a model town using advanced industrial methods. Due to the Continuation War of 1941–45, Aalto was, however, obliged to return abruptly to Finland, where he was put in charge of the Office for Reconstruction, an institution set up by the Finnish Association of Architects for the research and design of simple, efficient, and economic self-build housing. He was also responsible for directing the housing operation of the A. Ahlström Company. The resulting industrialized system was called the AA-System House and utilized the newly available insulation technology of the 1930s, to create a wood-frame structure that was thermally suited to the severe Finnish climate. It represented a significant shift from the traditional Finnish housing construction of horizontally laid logs covered by wooden boards. After the early 1950s, Aalto became engaged in an ever increasing number of public commissions in his own country and abroad. As a consequence he had less time to design houses, and the world-famous architect and academician was probably also considered too authoritarian and expensive by individual 17