Modernism

... Alvar Aalto was born in 1898 in the village of Kuortane, situated in central Finland. He was the eldest of three children of a middle-class. His father was a surveyor. Over his lifetime, after getting his degree in architecture from the Helsinki University of Technology, he designed 70 buildings in his country. Aalto made his international breakthrough as a furniture designer. Aalto wished to learn "the language of wood fibres" and believed that there is a positive effect when our skin comes into contact with natural materials. Aalto, similar to Mondrian and Rieveld, says Schultze, "produced profoundly modern buildings that are unique combinations of reductive abstraction and expressive elements." He is manifestly a modernist, whose work reflects the leanings toward reductivist abstraction associated with much of 20th-century design. However, his uniqueness consists in his ability to combine such abilities with what appear to be their opposites, or the organic, the sensual,

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