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The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is especially important for his insistence on a humane modernism. During his long and prolific career, Aalto's work embraced almost all key public institutions - town halls, theatres, churches, libraries and universities - as well as standardized housing and private homes.

Aalto's architecture is distinctively Finnish. It is marked by a warm humanity and strong individuality. His buildings derive their special aesthetic character from their dynamic relationship with their natural surroundings, their human scale, superbly executed details, unique treatment of materials and ingenious use of lighting. Always, Aalto was concerned for the individual user's experience of the architecture he designed, and its liveability.

Following are some favorite Aalto quotes:

Building art is a synthesis of life in materialized form.We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.



We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.



God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is, at least for me, an abuse of paper.



v Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.



Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems, we split the possibilities to make good building art.



Once I tried to make a standardization of staircases. Probably that is one of the oldest of the standardizations. Of course, we design new staircase steps every day in connection with all our houses, but a standardized step depends on the height of the buildings and on all kinds of things.



I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.



The ultimate goal of the architect...is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture... should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.



We should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.



The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life. This is the only true style in architecture.



Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.



We have almost a city has probably two or three hundred committees. Every committee is dealing with just one problem and has nothing to do with the other problems.



The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view. It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.



The best standardization committee in the world is nature herself, but in nature standardization occurs mainly in connection with the smallest possible units: cells. The result is millions of flexible combinations in which one never encounters the stereotyped.



Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.



Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.



Our time is so specialized that we have people who know more and more or less and less.



The most difficult problems are naturally not involved in the search for forms for contemporary life. It is a question of working our way to forms behind which real human values lie.



Even the smallest daily chore can be humanized with the harmony of culture.



Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.



It is not what a building looks like on the day it opens but what it is like thirty years later that matters.



~ Alvar Aalto