ALVAR AALTO, DE L’OEUVRE AUX ECRITS
François Burkhardt [introduction]
François Burkhardt [introduction], Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto et al.: ALVAR AALTO, DE L’OEUVRE AUX ECRITS. Paris: Centre National D'art Et De Culture Georges Pompidou, September 1988. First edition. Text in French. Quarto. Black cloth decorated and titled in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Black endpapers. 190 pp. Illustrated essays with 24 pages of color photography. Glossy black jacket lightly rubbed with trivial edgewear and a sunned spine, so a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.625 x 12 hardcover book with 190 pages fully illustrated in color and black and white with photographs, drawings, diagrams, etc. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name from October 19, 1988 to January 23, 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The work of Alvar Aalto was deeply rooted in the culture and the landscape of his native Finland. A Grand Duchy of Russia until the revolution of 1917, the newly independent state promoted architecture as a means of establishing its identity as a social democracy, and in Aalto found an architect with the ambition and talents to meet the challenge. Throughout a long and fertile career his work embraced almost all the key public institutions - town halls, libraries, theatres, churches, universities and government departments - as well as social housing and private dwellings. He brought to buildings of every type and scale a profound concern for the physical and psychological needs of their individual users, as well as sensitivity to natural sites and materials and to the experimental qualities of architecture.
Aalto once said "We should work for simple, good, undecorated things but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street." His visionary glassware, furniture, and architecture whether residential, corporate, or cultural remain humane. Not something to be said about all great modernist architects.
Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898 – 1976) was not only influenced by the landscape of his native country, but by the political struggle over Finland's place within European culture. After early neoclassical buildings, Alvar Aalto turned to ideas based on Functionalism, subsequently moving toward more organic structures, with brick and wood replacing plaster and steel. In addition to designing buildings, furniture, lamps, and glass objects with his wife Aino, he painted and was an avid traveler. A firm believer that buildings have a crucial role in shaping society, Aalto once said, “The duty of the architect is to give life a more sensitive structure.”