This nearly complete collection of Aalto's literary sketches and lectures from 1922 to 1968 expresses the architect's views on modernism, traditionalism, and functionalism, the design of housing and furnishings, city and regional planning, and technology and the quality of life. These short pieces are enriched by drawings from Aalto's travels in the Mediterranean countries and North Africa.

Sketches

Arts & Photography

Alvar Aalto

Architecture

MIT Press]

Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study.

Quantrill, Malcolm

Schocken

The year 1998 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and this book of his writings is one of many publications and exhibitions designed to commemorate it. Editor Goran Schildt is Aalto's official biographer. He has compiled a lifetime of Aalto's thoughts, and provided all the connective tissue a reader needs to place those thoughts in context. The architect, he says, "shunned the role of prophet and was averse to the abstract hair-splitting practised by art critics today." Instead, he was "a social creature," whose "gift of doubt" sets him apart from pontificators of all eras. 
 Aalto's writings are filled with theories--many profoundly idealistic--that are part of a less cynical age, when humanists believed that social change through culture was an imminent likelihood. Priceless passages abound, not all of them about architecture. Aalto writes with high spirits about setting toilet-paper bonfires with his two brothers in childhood, for instance, or drunken parties with poets, artists, and other architects (notably his teacher, Eliel Saarinen). Aalto's famously lithe and accomplished pencil drawings, which prove the artist in the architect, illustrate the book, along with photographs of his buildings.

Alvar Aalto In His Own Words

Rizzoli

Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism

Of the indisputably great figures in 20th-century architecture, Alvar Aalto is in many ways the most humane, the least rigid, the most relevant to our contemporary sensibility and the emerging future. This sumptuous book offers a thorough study of an innovative and prolific master, whom Frank Lloyd Wright termed a genius. This fresh, penetrating examination of Aalto's work and influence includes essays by five notable critics and historians. Some 50 of Aalto's projects--houses, town halls, cultural institutions, factories, furniture and glass designs, and regional plans--from all periods of his extraordinarily productive career are illustrated and described, using much previously unpublished and newly photographic material. This book was published to accompany a 1998 retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Alvar Aalto: Arkkitehti, 1898-1976

Rakennustieto Oy

The latest addition to the authoritative monograph series documenting each of Alvar Aalto's architectural projects focuses on the house Aalto and his second wife Elissa designed for the Parisian art dealer Louis Carré in the mid-1950s. This profusely illustrated volume describes the architecture of the building, the exceptional interiors and life in the house. It also includes a biographical sketch of Carré, who met Aalto at the opening of the pavilion Aalto had designed for the 1956 Venice Biennale. The friendship between Aalto, the radical experimenter, and Carré, the perfectionist patron of the arts, lasted the rest of their lives, and Maison LC became one of the most exceptional collaborations between architect and client ever built.

Maison Louis Carre, 1956-63 (Alvar Aalto Architect)

Alvar Aalto Akatemia & Saatio

This extensive publication documents Alvar Aalto's work on the designof the Helsinki University of Technology campus, which began when hewon the first prize in an architectural competition in 1949, andcontinued with a number of other campus buildings through the 1950sand 1960s. The totality that Aalto created can still be experiencedtoday, despite various infills in the area designed by other architects.Besides numerous photographs and schematics, this excellent surveyincludes articles by Aalto experts on the historical background of theuniversity and its architecture, and on the mid-20th-century universitycampus. The Works section presents a selection of buildings andunrealized projects by the Aalto office between 1947 and 1974.

Alvar Aalto Architect - University of Technology, Otaniemi 1949-74 Vol.13

Ram Distribution

This latest addition to the Alvar Aalto Foundation's ambitious series of books is the most impressive yet. Aalto's design for the campus for Jyväskylä College of Education, in the small rural town where the architect grew up, is one of the first competitions the master Modernist won as an emerging power in the early 1950s. The campus, with its late-19th-century buildings, needed to be expanded and repaired; Aalto's scheme shows his mastery of creating an openness that allowed abundant light and landscape to become part of the buildings. With a wealth of photos and renderings, including previously unpublished material such as the competition drawings, and unrealized projects by the Aalto office from the same era. Texts by Aalto scholars Päivi Lukkarinen and Mari Forsberg.

Jyzvaskyla University 1951-71 (Alvar Aalto Architect Volume 16)

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Books by Alvar Aalto