Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (pronounced [ˈhuːɡo ˈɑlʋɑr ˈhenrik ˈɑːlto]; 3 February 1898 – 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer.

"[2] Aalto's early career ran in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the 20th century.

[7] The entry for him on the Museum of Modern Art website notes his "remarkable synthesis of romantic and pragmatic ideas," adding His work reflects a deep desire to humanize architecture through an unorthodox handling of form and materials that was both rational and intuitive.

Influenced by the so-called International Style modernism (or functionalism, as it was called in Finland) and his acquaintance with leading modernists in Europe, including Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund and many of the artists and architects associated with the Bauhaus, Aalto created designs that had a profound impact on the trajectory of modernism before and after World War II.

[10] His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, was a Finnish-speaking land-surveyor and his mother, Selma Matilda "Selly" (née Hackstedt) was a Swedish-speaking postmistress.

[12] He studied at the Jyväskylä Lyceum school, where he completed his basic education in 1916, and took drawing lessons from local artist Jonas Heiska.

[15] In 1920, while a student, Aalto made his first trip abroad, travelling via Stockholm to Gothenburg, where he briefly found work with architect Arvid Bjerke.

[17] The latter trip together sealed an intellectual bond with the culture of the Mediterranean region that remained important to Aalto for life.

After winning the architecture competition for the Southwest Finland Agricultural Cooperative building in 1927, the Aaltos moved their office to Turku.

In 1952, he designed and built a summer cottage, the so-called Experimental House, for himself and his second wife, now Elissa Aalto, in Muuratsalo in Central Finland.

For example, the manor-like house for his mother's cousin Terho Manner in Töysa (1923), a summer villa for the Jyväskylä chief constable (also from 1923) and the Alatalo farmhouse in Tarvaala (1924).

Among his most well-known essays from this period are "Urban culture" (1924),[27] "Temple baths on Jyväskylä ridge" (1925),[28] "Abbé Coignard's sermon" (1925),[29] and "From doorstep to living room" (1926).

His humanistic approach is in full evidence in the library: the interior displays natural materials, warm colours, and undulating lines.

A number of factors contributed to Aalto's shift towards modernism: his increased familiarity with international trends, facilitated by his travels throughout Europe; the opportunity to experiment with concrete prefabrication in the Standard Apartment Building; the cutting-edge Le Corbusier-inspired formal language of the Turun Sanomat Building; and Aalto's application of both in the Paimio Sanatorium and in the ongoing design for the library.

[32] While these early Functionalist bear hallmarks of influences from Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other key modernist figures of central Europe, Aalto nevertheless started to show his individuality in a departure from such norms with the introduction of organic references.

His reputation grew in the US following the critical reception of his design for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, described by Frank Lloyd Wright as a "work of genius".

During the 1930s Alvar spent some time experimenting with laminated wood, sculpture and abstract relief, characterized by irregular curved forms.

Utilizing this knowledge, he was able to solve technical problems concerning the flexibility of wood while at the same time working out spatial issues in his designs.

[13] Foremost among Aalto's work from the early 1960s until his death in 1976 were his projects in Helsinki, in particular the huge town plan for the void in the centre of Helsinki adjacent to Töölö Bay and the vast railway yards, an area marked on the edges by significant buildings such as the National Museum and the main railway station, both by Eliel Saarinen.

In his town plan, Aalto proposed a line of separate marble-clad buildings fronting the bay, which would house various cultural institutions, including a concert hall, opera, museum of architecture, and headquarters for the Finnish Academy.

Following Aalto's death in 1976, his office continued to operate under the direction of his widow Elissa, who oversaw the completion of works already designed (to some extent), among them the Jyväskylä City Theatre and Essen opera house.

His techniques in the way he cut beech wood, for example, and his ability to use plywood as a structural element while at the same time exploiting its aesthetic properties, were at once technically innovative and artistically inspired.

Other examples of his boundary-pushing sensibility include the vertical placement of rough-hewn logs at his pavilion at the Lapua expo, a design element that evoked a medieval barricade.

[1] His experimental method had been influenced by his meetings with various members of the Bauhaus design school, especially László Moholy-Nagy, whom he first met in 1930.

Aalto was also influential in bringing modern art to the attention of the Finnish people, in particular the work of his friends Alexander Milne Calder and Fernand Léger.

At the other end of the political spectrum (though similarly concerned with the appropriateness of Aalto's formal language), the American cultural theorist and architectural historian Charles Jencks singled out his Pensions Institute as an example of what he termed the architect's "soft paternalism": "Conceived as a fragmented mass to break up the feeling of bureaucracy, it succeeds all too well in being humane and killing the pensioner with kindness.

The forms are familiar – red brick and ribbon-strip windows broken by copper and bronze elements – all carried through with a literal-mindedness that borders on the soporific.

"[63] During his lifetime, Aalto faced criticisms from his fellow architects in Finland, most notably Kirmo Mikkola and Juhani Pallasmaa.

By the last decade of Aalto's life, his work was seen as unfashionably individualistic at a time when the opposing tendencies of rationalism and constructivism – often championed under left-wing politics – argued for anonymous, aggressively non-aesthetic architecture.