An iconic piece of architecture is usually known not only by its aesthetics, but also by its contribution into the innovation of the field of architecture itself. Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Villa Mairea is located on a rural site in Noormarkku, Finland, where it portrays what it takes to successfully bring to life an experimental house. It is probably Aalto’s most personal work, a masterpiece that fused together numerous influences in a remarkable coherent whole. Designed for Maire and Harry Gullichsen, wealthy industrialists and cultured clients, who gave Aalto free hands and an opportunity for unrestricted experimentation. The earliest sketches appear to have been quite a modest interpretation of a traditional Finnish farmhouse, however, Maire Gullichsen did not agree with this approach, desiring “something Finnish, but with a spirit, a spirit of today” .
The Finnish architect not only took inspiration from colleague Frank Lloyd Wright, since several sketches show an intent of creating hovering floor slabs, characteristic spatial expression in Wright’s Fallingwater. However, the design took an unexpected turn into welcoming a fusion of Finnish and Japanese cultures and architecture styles as a major inspiration source for the final design of the building.
Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect, designer, sculptor and painter. Born in 1898 in the small Finnish town of Kuortane, Aalto is not only one of Finland’s most celebrated and well-known figures, but one of the most acclaimed architects of the 20th century. His high stature was a result of his humanistic approach to modernism: a mixture of organic resources, self-expression, and fresh progression. His work can be recognized by a number of elements. For example, his commitment to designs that create a sense of warmth and humanity as opposed to sheer function, or his dedication to the concept of gesamtkunstwerk, literally meaning “a work of art.”
A work of art to live in
Villa Mairea was built in 1939 as a modern residence, which has attained world-wide recognition as one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century architecture. In Alvar Aalto’s oeuvre, Villa Mairea represents the phase of his shift from the simplified forms of Functionalism towards a more organic modern architecture combining motifs from various origins. This house prefigured as one of the most daunting challenges of modern architecture and the twenty‐first century: How to be rooted in a specific place, its local economy, and its indigenous traditions, while at the same time being globally intertwined with the world at large and its fluid movement of ideas, forms, and technical innovations. While the villa is celebrated for Aalto’s pluralist incorporation of a multitude of traditional, modern and international influences, Aalto’s most decisive move is to create immediate local connection through the incorporation and representation of the Finnish forest: spatially, symbolically and decoratively. This results in a design collage that is not only ecologically sensitive to place, and thereby enhancing of “the emotional attachment to particular landscapes” . The Villa enjoys a park-like setting, with a gently rising approach from the south-east revealing a plain white-washed two-story brick façade with a significant wooden projection in the corner.
The plan of the Villa Mairea is a modified L-shape of the kind Aalto had used before. It is a layout which automatically created a semi-private enclosure to one side, and a more exclusive, formal edge to confront the public world on the other. The lawn and the swimming pool are situated in the angle of the L, with a variety of rooms overlooking them.
Horizontals and overhangs in the main composition echo the ground plane, and the curved pool weds the nearby forest topography. In contrast to these softening devices, the main facade has a more rigid, formal mood, and even possesses a canopy restated in a garden pergola vocabulary of bindings, poles and slats. The interiors of the Villa Mairea are richly articulated in wood, stone and brick. The spaces vary in size from the grand to the cabin-like. This same concept continues throughout the house, as materials shift form a stone to stone slab to glass and steel in the winter garden room. From the front door to the inside of the house, the materiality of the floor also changes as it becomes progressively more domestic and intimate, from stone to tiles to timber boarding and rugs.
As it is placed in such an such a mesmerizing natural environment, Aalto used this to his advantage and designed with the intentions of blurring the lines between being inside or outdoors. The verticality of the columns existing throughout the house and posts found by the staircase are intended to mimic the trees that surround the house. Aalto purposely makes each column different, “to avoid all artificial architectural rhythms.” The main living area appears to open and close, which reproduces a similar experience as when walking through a forest. Light shines through the undulating screen that forms the wall between the bookcase partitions of the library and the ceiling to further imitate the experience of being outdoors. Upon exiting out of the front door, one is submerged in a row of these columns, which are placed specifically by Aalto to emphasize the continuity found between the environment of both inside the villa and out.
From the beginning Aalto conceived not just as a free-standing detached house, but as a building that created its own enclosure, an element characteristic of Finnish Farmhouses. Aalto remarked that the “curving, living, unpredictable line which runs in dimensions unknown to mathematics is for me the incarnation of everything that forms a contrast to the modern world between brutal mechanicalness and religious beauty in life.” This free-form is found throughout the house, from the shape of the swimming pool and balcony spaces to other smaller finer details, like the fireplace.
“After all, nature is a symbol of freedom”
“Nature, rather than the machine, should serve as the model for architecture,” This belief most likely stems from the importance of nature in Finnish culture, pairing in with the organic idea of adapting to the local environment, forming a bond between people and nature. Both Finnish and Japanese cultures have quite a strong influence in Villa Mairea, its materiality, spatial organization and circulation; not only a connection, but a fusion with nature is constantly present in Finnish and Japanese cultures. The exposure to heavily forested areas shaped both cultures to cooperate with nature, and to build with nature as one of the main elements in the architecture. The Villa has deep historical, urban and cultural inspirations used for the design as Aalto incorporates both cultures simultaneously in total harmony. The location of a house becomes paramount at the moment of coming up with a particular design, as Finland is known to be a country heavily influenced by its relationship to nature. Given that about 70% of its land covered with dense forests all over the country, there is a constant exposure to both flora and fauna at all times.
A major component of Villa Mairea is the connection to its surroundings, through the generous use of wood and stone, as well as the garden surrounding the structure separating it from the forest. One of the characteristics of Japanese culture is often said to be a close and harmonious relationship between man and nature. In the 1930s, Aalto's admiration for Japanese art, craft and design grew. He loved its poise and skill and what he saw as its "enormous sensitivity and tact towards the individual" . In designing the sauna building, for example, Aalto took as his starting point the Karelian village bathing house and laundry, a homely communal building with turfed roof. He flattens and extends the roofline, paring down the structure to its purest abstract geometry. It is the sort of delicate, meditative building you find on a Kyoto temple site. The tradition and nature Aalto found in Japanese houses and gardens as well as religious structures would be the inspiration and confirmation for his extended concepts of rationalism and functionalism: humanizing the modern architecture with both the physical and psychological needs of human beings. A lot of the Japanese aesthetic, like a lot of Japanese culture, has its roots in religion. Shinto is a set of beliefs that puts a lot of emphasis on nature, and the spirit, or kami, within. Mostly, Japanese culture orbits around the idea of peace, tranquility and harmony with the environment around you. Japan's culture of resilience is built into its architectural practice, and its ideas about openness translate to even the most modern forms of urban living. In Japanese thinking there is no built or natural environment, just nature.
On the other side of the design, the forms and proportions of Finnish architecture are strongly influenced by two basic characteristics of the Finnish culture and people: intense individualism and determined utilitarianism. These somewhat contradictory qualities find their artistic unification means of stylistic expression. Aalto’s intention was to humanize space and form; his method consisting of blending modern technology and standardization with a craft-based approach to the design and the making of buildings. Finnish architecture has identifiable components in its traditions that take part in the materiality of Villa Mairea. Mainly, the tradition of using primarily stone, brick and wood, which is rooted in the construction of Finland’s churches. The intent of designing the fireplace space as the hearth, being environmentally and symbolically crucial in northern climate is also a tradition seen in Finnish vernacular houses. He sought to celebrate the many dimensions of human life; to provide design that operated on a functional as well as spiritual—and decidedly humane—level.
Aalto’s uniqueness in design derived from his ability to extend, modify and blend these different traditions with international and historical themes, such as Japanese architecture and culture. He achieves in this experimental house a design approach that combines recognizable elements in new and original forms, such as the use of the wood in the vertical columns, which at the same time reassemble the forest and create a moment of “nature within the architecture” that Japanese architecture is well-known for. Aalto’s use of Japanese motifs is not merely a borrowing of forms, but an attempt at allying himself with a more humane architectural tradition than that of what was becoming a “soulless” modernism.
Life after Villa Mairea
In an article in Arkkitehti in 1939 Aalto describes Villa Mairea as his own “laboratory experiment” . The principal importance in this particular project from Aalto was how he was given a unique opportunity of exploration, with he proudly embraced to develop his own architectural vocabulary. This house is representing a synthesis of Aalto’s architectural and design beliefs, mixing many different elements which were also a part of his future buildings and inspiration for future architecture. Villa Mairea offered the chance to incorporate and fuse together diverse techniques, styles and spatial qualities, influences from cultures such as Finnish and Japanese to forge his own style. The house is compared to many things in the realm of a “love poem”, a “chamber music” by his colleagues who visited the masterpiece. “A rare thing has been achieved: the feeling of an uninterrupted constant flow of space throughout the house which is never lost, and yet a feeling of intimacy is always preserved, wherever you are in the house” . The Villa is in fact a perfect example of cultural fusion at its best, where the juxtaposition of architectural traditions has been used in the creation of a whole new modern architecture vocabulary.
It is quite fitting that when translated to English, the Finnish word Aalto means “wave”, since not only does he subvert the prevailing rectilinear language of Modernism, but imposes a sort of spatial exuberance that challenges its reliance on regimen and regularity. He infuses the Villa Mairea with strategies that both disorient and enfold the observer. Richard Weston maintains that “anyone who experiences the interior of the villa can feel themselves at home, the moving center of a richly articulated space, which seems, like its model forest, to be structured around the human subject.” It is thus impossible to classify Aalto as a true Modernist or even to declare his kind of Modernism intrinsically Finnish; it is humanist. He is, as Goran Schildt labelled him, Modernism’s “secret opponent” , subtly re-humanizing a practice that had focused too heavily on function and abstraction and denied the essential human experience of memory, of place and of soul. Perhaps what Aalto’s Villa Mairea is most successful in demonstrating is this fissure in the Modernist conception of space: that every straight line has within it the potential to bend. In the rigid exists the fluid.