The Complicated Love Story of Modernist Design Duo Aino and Alvar Aalto

The late, great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is known for a lot of things, including (but not limited to) his undulating glass Savoy vase, timeless wooden Paimio chairs, and a slew of modernist buildings he crafted in the International style. What’s lesser known, though, is that much of that work was crafted alongside or with the help of his wife, Aino Aalto, who was a talented architect and designer in her own right.

A new Phaidon monograph is attempting to change that, though. In Aino + Alvar Aalto: A Life Together, the pair’s grandson, Heikki Aalto-Alanen, uses private correspondence discovered in an old suitcase in the attic of the couple’s Riihitie House in Helsinki to piece their history together. The visual biography, Aalto-Alanen writes in the intro, is a look at the couple’s love story through the lens of their work.

Mostly told in their own words, Aino + Alvar Aalto is also an intimate look inside a partnership that was both romantic and commercial. Though Aino died in 1949 after a bout with breast cancer and Alvar would go on to remarry and work independently until his death in 1976, the 25 years the couple were together were some of their most productive, both personally and professionally. It’s when they helped launch Finnish furniture brand Artek and when they became renowned figures in the international art and architecture community, befriending everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier to Paul Klee.

While Alvar was, Aalto-Alanen writes, "restless, exuberant, and unpredictable," Aino was "intense, diligent, and restrained," making the pair a perfectly matched set. Though they were great professional collaborators, they were also romantically compatible. After all, as Aalto-Alanen writes in the book: "A shared vision cannot stand in the way of love, let alone replace it—rather the two can complement each other in a noble, beautiful way."

Aino + Alvar Aalto uses works like the Viipuri Library and the Paimio Sanatorium to illustrate how the pair worked together, including light studies, illustrations of undulating ceilings, and Aino’s textile sketches. Though Alvar receives much of the credit for these buildings even now, the book stresses that they were a collective achievement, even if Aino ended up staying home with the pair’s children (who they charmingly refer to as "the urchins" in letters) while Alvar got to glad-hand his design peers at European architecture congresses.

It was at those conferences that Alvar became friends with architectural luminaries like Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, who the book says Aino was quite taken with. (The feeling seems to have been mutual.) Though the Aaltos would mix, mingle, and vacation with all of the above, Aino + Alvar Aalto suggests that Aino started to feel excluded when she was left at home during Alvar’s business trips. He was off making professional friends and getting acclaim, while she was left home to tend the business and keep the kids in check, even though her work was just as important.

It doesn’t help that Alvar also seems to have had his share of romantic dalliances early in the marriage, leading the pair to assume what seems to be a sort of open marriage, lest, as Aalto-Alanen writes, they "end up in a situation in which their shared life and work might become untenable." The pair came to view their marriage as an important partnership on all fronts—romantic, professional, and personal—with Alvar telling Aino in a 1933 letter, "I love the human in you, not a moral being, and the human in you is weak, wild, and sweet…"

The pair’s letters are charmingly open and romantic, with Alvar often referring to his wife as "Aino, who kisses me in soft places," while Aino once wrote to Alvar that, "every night, I fall asleep with your name on my lips." In the letters in the book, Alvar is often the more outwardly affectionate, dropping lines like "there’s no fun in the world without you" and "there is nothing in the world as miraculous as our little gang," referring to their family, as well as telling Aino that, "one feels a little safer traveling in the knowledge that the nicest person in the world is home looking after the nicest little urchins in the world." After World War II, while Alvar was away in the U.S. teaching at MIT, he’d pen long missives to Aino back in Finland, including a 14-page screed around Christmas of 1945 in which he talked about how he longed to come back home to his family once his commitments had wrapped (he’d been offered a gig at Harvard as well, which he turned down), telling Aino he’d like to build his own version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin campus in the Dalarna region of Sweden so the pair could really devote time and energy to building out their portfolio.

That dream never came to fruition, unfortunately, since Aino developed breast cancer, the severity of which she seemingly hid from Alvar until things got pretty dire. In the book, Aalto-Alanen talks about how, alongside the letters he and his mother discovered in the couple’s attic, there were deathbed sketches of Aino made by Alvar, who they surmised was too broken up to step away. He’d come back to Finland once their daughter filled him in on how bad things were starting to get and spent the last few months of Aino’s life by her side, frequently covering her sleeping body in the mink coat she’d asked him to buy for her in America.

When Aino died, Alvar lost not just a wife and a work partner, but also his other half. The architecture and design world also lost an important luminary, with the Aaltos’ good friends Lily and Eero Saarinen writing Alvar that, "Aino Aalto will continue to live as an inspiration. The home she created as a woman, the designs she created as an architect, her integrity, courage, partnership in these fields will spread their influence day after day—in a world searching for the kind of beauty Aino Aalto found." Together, the Aaltos were stronger than they were apart—even if Alvar got most of the limelight.

Top Image: Courtesy Heikki Aalto-Alanen, from Aino + Alvar Aalto: A Life Together by Heikki Aalto-Alanen, published by Phaidon

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