A current listing of the world's leading architects would certainly include such globally known powers as Japan's Kenzo Tange, Italy's Pier Luigi Nervi, England's James Stirling, and I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson, among some others, in the U.S. Another entry, however, would have to be Alvar Aalto of Finland, who, at 77, may well still be the most original designer building anywhere. Aalto? He is scarcely a household name in the U.S., because he has done little work in America.* But "the maestro," as he is often called in his native land, remains a seer with a special transnational influence—one that is characteristically not so much doctrinaire as moral.
Aalto is utterly unconcerned with architectural movements or polemics. He deflects theoretical discussions with the imperious reply: "I build." For him, every structure poses its own questions of balance between man, machines and nature. Every answer is therefore fresh, poetic, charged with the identity of its architect. Mies van der Rohe had this quality; so did Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Now Aalto, whom Wright called "a genius" 40 years ago, stands alone.
Aalto once described to some students his approach to a tuberculosis sanatorium he had designed in 1929 at Paimio, in southern Finland's pine forests. Aalto considered how each occupant, from the director on down, not only would use the building but also might feel about it. The janitor, he decided, should have his own closet, not just an impersonal clothes hook. When it came to the hospital rooms, Aalto put himself in the place of the patients. The result: designs for windows that would admit fresh air but not drafts, wash basins that would not splash, and chairs of resilient wood so that convalescents would not touch cold steel frames.
"The most difficult problems do not occur in the search for form," Aalto says, "but rather in the attempt to create forms that are based on real human values." The bold, simple form of the Paimio sanatorium thrust Aalto into the vanguard of European functionalism in the 1930s. But that straightforwardness gradually changed as he won other commissions for everything from furniture to factories to whole towns, mostly in Finland. Over the years, his buildings have grown ever more intricate and idiosyncratic, taking odd, seemingly arbitrary shapes. But their genesis—profound thoughtfulness leavened by the free play of emotion—has never changed.