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The old master's health is frail now. Yet he remains active, employing 16 architects to work on new projects in Finland, Brasilia, Tel Aviv and Eau Claire, Wis., where Aalto is planning a center for the Midwest Institute of Scandinavian Culture. Always reclusive, he gets hundreds of letters daily but answers none of them himself. In a recent interview, however, he received his visitors graciously in his sun-filled Helsinki studio. Surrounded by wispy, mysterious sketches — the first stirrings of new designs — he was far more interested in asking questions than answering them. Questioned about a house he had created for the Finnish composer Joonas Kokkonen, Aalto merely shrugged: "It's very small, very simple."
Kokkonen sees it differently. He still treasures Aalto's tablecloth sketch of a piano. "Which way do you walk around it?" the architect asked. Then he designed the composer's studio around the piano, creating an asymmetrical space that culminates in a high window looking out on nearby treetops and the Finnish sky — inspiration without distraction. The layout of the rest of the house followed from there. As a fee, the architect laughingly asked for two bars of music. But Kokkonen sat down in his new studio, wrote a cello concerto and dedicated it to Alvar Aalto.
*A dormitory for M.I.T., a library for the Mount Angel Abbey in St. Benedict, Ore., and a conference room for the Institute of International Education in Manhattan.