Collection by designer Alvar Aalto - Buro International

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (3 February 1898 - 11 May 1976) was a prominent Finnish architect and designer, known for his wide-ranging contributions to the fields of architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware. Although Aalto was a versatile creator, he never considered himself an artist and saw painting and sculpture as extensions of architecture. His career unfolded in parallel with Finland's remarkable economic growth and industrialisation during the first half of the 20th century, and he found many of his clients among the industrial elite, including the Ahlström-Gullichsen family, who acted as his patrons.

Aalto's architectural path, which stretched from the 1920s to the 1970s, is marked by evolving styles. He moved from Nordic Classicism in his early work to the rational modernist International Style in the 1930s, and eventually adopted a more organic modernist style from the 1940s onwards.

A striking feature of Aalto's architectural work was his emphasis on Gesamtkunstwerk, the concept of a total work of art, in which he and his first wife, Aino Aalto, carefully designed not only the building but also the interior elements, furniture, lighting and glassware. Aalto's furniture designs are regarded as examples of Scandinavian modernism, notable for their elegant simplicity and their consideration of materials, particularly wood. His inventive approaches to design even earned him patents for various production techniques, such as one for bent wood.

Aalto's pioneering design of bent plywood furniture had a profound influence on mid-20th-century modernism and noticeably influenced the design aesthetic of greats such as Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. The Alvar Aalto Museum, itself designed by Aalto, bears witness to his legacy in his home town of Jyväskylä.

His work, as recognised by the Museum of Modern Art, represents a remarkable synthesis of romantic and pragmatic ideals, in which form and materials were carefully manipulated with a balance between rationality and intuition. Inspired by the international modernism and functionalism prevalent in Finland, Aalto's designs had a considerable influence on the course of modernism, both before and after the Second World War, and left a lasting mark on the world of architecture and design.