‘Don’t worry about Marseille. It was the most horrible and perverted city I’ve ever seen. But I didn’t return to the port alone. I brought a “lifeboat”: a young lady from the congress, so Marseille wasn’t able to get to me.’ It’s August 1933, and the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is writing to his wife, business partner and, evidently, the love of his life, Aino. He goes on to say: ‘Of course, it turned into a love story, but with no danger to the body or soul. I sat alone with Le Corbusier every morning in Marseille. He has been extremely kind towards me.’
What an extraordinary letter. Aalto casually relays a port-side love affair in a note to his wife: the voice we hear is impish, full of life and honest – if selfish. We also get a tantalising glimpse into the architectural scene of the 1930s, a social network of ideas and idealism that is soon to be transformed (not least into a global diaspora) by World War II. The Fourth International Congress of Modern Architecture – a symposium of Europe’s prominent Modernist architects led by Le Corbusier and including Karl Moser, Josef Frank, Gerrit Rietveld, Walter Gropius and Pierre Jeanneret – was hosted on board a ship that sailed from Marseille to Athens and back again. The decision to shift the congress’s location from Moscow, as originally planned, and the resulting infamous ‘The Athens Charter’, a document published much later by Le Corbusier alone, is a story of its own.
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For now, two ‘great men’ – Aalto and Le Corbusier – sit every morning on the café chairs of Marseille, presumably talking of great creative visions, and of women picked up at ports. Both architects famously worked in close collaboration with female partners, who are now regarded as having been criminally unsung. On the one hand, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier’s great collaborator, was a guest and one of the very few female members of CIAM. On the other hand, Alvar Aalto’s beloved Aino was at home in Finland, looking after a gang of sick children. He ends his letter: ‘…because I am so in love, madly in love with Aino, who kisses me in tender places’.
Aino’s reply? ‘Why did you write that you would be home in a couple of days? I've been expecting your return every day since Friday, and then you tell me that you’ll be in Stockholm on Wednesday. Very peculiar, but so typical of you. It is my fault of course, for not knowing you better. I’m very upset. Besides, we’ve all been sick […] I’ll try to improve my mood before you come home. Aino.’
While not exactly mutinous, she doesn’t sound thrilled. And it feels like these two states – the gregarious and the reserved; the international and the grounded – are typical of their dynamic. The couple first met while they were both students in Helsinki and then, at the start of 1924, Aino got a job at Alvar’s architectural practice. She was four years older than Alvar, and she had already worked at two different practices as a trained draftsman and architect. By the end of the same year they were married.
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Almost as soon as their relationship started, it was evident that theirs was a creative partnership: a great many of their early drafts, drawings and architectural submissions were co-signed by Aino. Their peers considered them an extraordinary couple – the famous architect with his older wife and creative equal, joint signatory on the drawings and joint director of their companies. The unique dynamic of the couple (Alvar gregarious and charming, Aino more circumspect) certainly added to their personal fame.
Their style began to emerge as soon as they started to draw and plan together: a kind of humanistic modernism designed to care for the body and enliven its senses, with almost all of its formal language taken from the natural world. The pine forest, in particular, was a source of structural inspiration for their designs: from the load-bearing capacity of groups of slender vertical poles, to forms that nest within each other like acorns, seed heads and unfurling leaves.
The Aaltos designed the Vyborg Library in 1927 (the Viipurin Library to the Finns – the town was annexed and renamed by Russia during World War II), which is famous for its undulating wooden ceiling reminiscent of a pine forest’s floor, and its deep circular skylights which disperse daylight evenly with no harsh glare for comfortable reading. In 1933, they completed the Paimio Sanatorium near Turku, where every consideration was given to hygiene and wellness, from door handles that don’t catch on nurse’s cuffs to windows positioned for the supine body. The Aalto family home was also a collaboration, a modest-scaled and friendly piece of Modernism over multiple levels, in which the bedrooms face east and the exterior is clad in vertical rods for climbing plants.
In the 1930s, the Aaltos spent a lot of time working with master carpenter Otto Korhonen and his manufactory in Turku to realise their designs for furniture, many of which came about during the design of the Paimio Sanatorium. In the 1930s, his workshop came up with an innovative wood-bending method using thin birch veneers inserted into slits in a plank of solid birch (necessary because birch does not lend itself to being bent). This innovation was the final key in the puzzle of the Aalto design language: gentle, humanistic, flowing – allowing them to make furniture not of tubular steel, as their Bauhaus equivalents did, but of birch ply.
In 1935, Alvar and Aino, along with Maire Gullechsen and historian/critic Nils-Gustav Hahl, founded a company called Artek – a portmanteau of art and technology – to promote and produce their designs, including the ‘Paimio’ chair and the mass-production-friendly ‘No 60’ stool, entering into a more formal business partnership with Korhonen and his manufactory. Aino was appointed the creative director of this company, as well as being in charge of interior design for all Aalto projects.
The Artek ‘look’, which drills all the way down to how a chair leg is constructed, and all the way up to the huge, undulating forms of the Aalto buildings, can be well understood if we look at the design of their small domestic objects, many of which were Aino’s creation. They are neat exemplars of a design approach because they often rely on just one simple idea.
The ‘Bölgeblick’ glassware range designed by Aino (and still produced by Iittala) features concentric ribs that suggest the glass itself could be pressed flat like a silicone water bowl for travelling dogs. This collection – as well as the ‘Aalto Flower Vases’, designed in 1939 for Iiittala – display a ribbed modularity, and a passion for nesting, taken not only from nature, but from artists contemporary to them – notably Jean Arp.
Aino also designed a small amount of furnishing fabrics, and in 2019 Artek (now owned by larger design group Vitra) reissued one of them – a silk-screen-printed cotton fabric – discovered in the Aalto archives. According to the records, in around 1939, she received a gift of some cherry-blossom-patterned fabric from the wife of Hikotara Ichikawa, the Japanese ambassador to Finland. Inspired, Aino created the ‘Kirsikankukka’ fabric, based on cherry blossom, in homage to the relationship their two countries.
Sadly, in the mid-1940s, Aino was diagnosed with cancer, and died in January 1949, at the age of 54. According to his letters, this was a time of deep crisis for Alvar, who sought solace in his work and in travelling. But in 1952, he married a young architect at his offices, Elsa-Kaisa Makiniemi, who styled herself Elissa Aalto after they wed. While the dynamic between an older, well-established Alvar and the young Elissa was very different between him and Aino, it is notable that he had once again married a skilled architect who would grow increasingly influential, especially as he aged. After his death, Elissa became responsible for the completion and execution of all of Aalto Studio’s partially completed architectural projects.
There are of course many cases of ‘wives’ of great men whose role and legacy have been rightly reassessed; Aino is a prime example. She was an architect and a draftsman, designed all the Aalto interiors and a raft of products, co-designing many more; she ran the business for months on end while her husband did what he was best suited to: charming clients and socialising.
Aino wrote to Alvar in the 1930s : ‘I have been looking at things from all perspectives. My conclusion is: we have each other, our work and healthy children. It’s more than anyone could ask for… I’m dead tired. Aino.’
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The Aalto House, 20 Riihitie, 00330 Helsinki, Finland. Visit alvaraalto.fi
