Author Description

To celebrate the centennial of the birth of the great Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words presents, for the first time, an illuminating collection of over 75 of his visionary lectures, speeches, articles, and other writings, and 100 archival illustrations. These fascinating texts illustrate important aspects of Aalto's outlook and career. They begin with a charming piece, dictated by Aalto near the end of his life, about growing up beneath his father's two-tiered white table where the surveyor's apprentices worked - and his gradual ascent to the top tier. From Aalto's early writings (which he signed with the pseudonym 'Ping') there is a satirical sketch about Christmas festivities at Benvenuto Cellini's place, attended by an unlikely mix of characters including Eliel Saarinen, Andre Le Notre, and Katshusika Hokusai. Aalto's often-idealistic reform projects - his Renaissance revival, his rationalistic utopia - his writings as a propagandist during the war years; his comments on his own crucial travels to Italy, the 1939 New York World's Fair, and the "decadence of public buildings"; critiques of building and furniture design - all reveal the progression of ideas and convictions that grew and changed throughout Aalto's life, both reflecting and influencing the course of architecture in the twentieth century. Other influences are also revealed in Aalto's contact with the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, Le Corbusier in France, and such important friends as Sven Markelius, Gunnar Asplund, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegried Giedion, Lewis Mumford, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright, some of whom Aalto eulogizes in the chapter 'In Memoriam'.