Works

Information about the work and context of creation

Villa Mairea is a summer house built in 1938 in Noormarkku, Finland by Alvar Aalto and Aino Aalto, where they express all their principles of commitment to the culture, respect, and love for the nature of their country. 

Historically, many books attributed the work only to Alvar Aalto, but the works produced in the office were signed "Aino and Alvar Aalto".

Villa Mairea was designed in the mid-1930s for the Finnish couple Gullichsen: painter Maire Ahlström and timber entrepreneur Harry Gullichsen.

Formally, it is an L-shaped building with an independent body - the sauna - somewhat secluded and linked to an outdoor swimming pool. It is in the middle of a forest, to which the project pays special attention. The main entrance is at the apex of the L, so that, roughly speaking, one wing has the larger spaces and the other the more compartmentalised ones. The spaces are related to each other, like areas within an object that is admirable in itself. The way it is conceived represents a break with the architecture of its time.

The layout of the first floor is similar but the structure, despite the change in size and the increase in the number of pillars, maintains the positions and reveals the logical rhythm of the layout. 

This concern for subtlety is present throughout the project. The house keeps relations of squares and proportions (Platonic and modern figure) that are not obvious at first sight.

Aino Marsio-Aalto, within the modern movement in architecture and together with her contemporaries Margarete Schutte Lihotzky and Lilly Reich, in Germany, or Charlotte Perriand, in France, are the ones who introduced a revolutionary advance in the concept of understanding kitchens and kitchen design. The compact and functional kitchen as we know it today (and its build-in evolution in the 21st century), is a reflection of these architects' concern for a freer life for women. At the same time, in this period, we find Truus Schröder, co-author, together with Gerrit Rietveld, of the famous Schröeder house, Eileen Gray's E-102 house, Lilly Reich, a teacher at the Bauhaus school and co-author together with Mies Van der Rohe, of architectural and furniture works, the Finnish Elissa Mäkiniemi, Ragna Grubb in Denmark, interested in social housing, and the Chinese-American Anne Tyng, co-author with Louis Kahn of the most significant buildings of the Kahn office in the 1950s in the USA, among others.

Indications

It can be studied in the following subjects:

-History of art

-Architecture

-Industrial design

-Technologies

Documents