Alvar Aalto’s Concept of Dwelling Juhani Pallasmaa
The setting of Alvar Aalto’s birth and earliest childhood. His father, surveyor J. H. Aalto, rented the upper story of this farmhouse in Kuortane, Finland, where Alvar was born on February 3, 1898. His family moved to Jyväskylä, a small town in central Finland, in 1903, when Alvar was five years old.
opposite Aalto in front of the living room fireplace at the Muuratsalo Experimental House in the 1950s
The most basic and, at the same time, arguably the most demanding architectural task is the design of the individual dwelling. The deepest architectural emotions, images, and associations are concretized in this most intimate of design tasks. Only structures built for the purposes of faith pose similarly subtle existential, emotive, and personal issues. During his exceptionally productive career that lasted more than half a century and extended from planning and architecture to product design and artistic work, Alvar Aalto designed numerous dwellings, from one-family houses and weekend residences to apartment buildings and entire housing areas for municipalities and industrial companies. His clients ranged from privileged and wealthy patrons; to his friends, such as his biographer Göran Schildt, his favorite architectural photographer Eino Mäkinen, and taxi driver Alvi Hirvonen; to the anonymous dwellers of apartment blocks. The catalog of Aalto’s oeuvre compiled by Schildt lists seventy-six projects for houses and vacation dwellings; forty-five terraced houses, apartment buildings, and housing areas; and thirty-eight projects for standardized housing.1 He also designed and built a house and two summer residences for his own family, in addition to working on the family’s apartments, which he altered and furnished earlier in his career. Aalto’s standardized housing systems include designs for reconstruction projects after World War Two. Even his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 dealt with prefabricated housing adapted to differing site conditions and family structures. The architect also frequently wrote and spoke about technical, psychological, and social problems related to dwelling and housing. One of his earliest essays, entitled “From Doorstep to Living Room,” written at the age of twenty-eight in 1926, is his most important literary study of dwelling.2 It reveals that he approached the issue of dwelling and home from a mental and experiential point of view rather than from the aspect of utility or an aestheticized architectural formalism. In this essay, we find the foundations for many of the design elements that characterized Aalto’s early classicist houses as well as his later modernist designs. The essence of the article is to point out ways in which the long traditions of dwelling in the south, which have developed through millennia of life and architectural history, could be transferred to the Nordic climatic and cultural conditions. The architect admired Mediterranean culture to the degree that at the 11