Villa Mairea
In contrast to these softening devices, the main facade has a more rigid, formal mood, and even possesses a canopy restated in a garden pergola vocabulary of bindings, poles and slats.
Maire and Hahl had the idea of founding an avant-garde art gallery in Helsinki to act as a focus of progressive culture, and in due course this became ‘ARTEK’, now world-famous as manufacturers and distributors of Aalto's furniture and glassware.
The Gullichsens believed in the possibility of a social utopia based on technological progress, and found in Alvar Aalto a designer who shared their ideals and could give them convincing architectural expression.
Aalto and his first wife Aino had undertaken various projects for the Ahlström Company, including workers' housing, social facilities, and the celebrated Sunila Plant, completed in 1939, but it was in the Villa Mairea itself that the character of their utopian vision was demonstrated most fully.
As Aalto's biographer Göran Schildt has pointed out, each was representative of the values of their time: the first an expression of semi-feudal authority organized around a highly formalized style of living, the latter underlining ‘the domestic happiness afforded by solid riches, with comfortable rooms, cosy furniture and luxurious, well-tended garden grounds’.
The new villa – to be used as a summer house, a form of retreat to nature traditional in Finland – was intended to express the aspirations of the new generation and of the Gullichsens’ vision of ‘the good life’ which they believed industrialization would eventually make available to the majority in the newly independent state.
Early in 1938, however, inspiration came from a radically different source, the residence named ‘Fallingwater’ designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, which had just received international acclaim thanks to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and publication in Life and Time magazines, as well as in architectural journals.
The influence of Fallingwater is evident in several sheets of studies, which show boldly cantilevered balconies and an undulating basement story intended as a substitution for the natural forms of the stream and rocks.
In later sketches, the free-form basement appears as an upper-floor studio with a serpentine wall sunk into a one-and-half storey entrance hall, forming a drop-ceiling around the fireplace.
There, the ‘L’ shape distinguishes between the house proper and the integral studio; at Villa Mairea, it separates the family accommodation from that of a courtyard - garden variously enclosed by combinations of walls, fences, trellises and the wooden sauna.
Marie's studio was re-positioned to occupy the place above the former entrance canopy, whose shape it echoes, and the various reception rooms were accommodated in a large 14 metre-square space.
Harry Gullichsen's only objection to the revised design was the lack of a separate library where he could hold confidential business meetings, for which Aalto proposed a small room screened by movable shelving units which did not reach the ceiling.
Not surprisingly, this arrangement did not offer the necessary acoustic privacy and the shelving units were permanently sited (although not actually fixed), with one angled to suggest frozen movement; the gap under the ceiling was filled with an undulating glazed screen.
Although this geometry contributes to the formal discipline which underpins the episodic spatial composition, and is emblematic of an ‘ideal’ house, it is only in the dining room that one can directly sense the underlying order.
Mrs. Gullichsen would occupy the seat at the opposite end of the table, conveniently close to the servery and kitchen, from where, as Herdeg writes, she ‘can contemplate her husband silhouetted against the dining room’s asymmetrical fireplace, while through the window she can see the sauna, the pool, the garden court, and the pine forest - things natural or traditional.
The same angle is continued outside in the flue which connects at the first-floor level into the service wing – a typical example of a rigorous formal integration which underlies Aalto’s at times seemingly willful manipulation of form.
