Alvar Aalto architect

The Aalto House is a seminal project in Alvar Aalto's development from the ideals of orthodox functionalism towards the complex, tactile, inclusive and emotive architecture of his mature age. The design development of the house reveals Aalto's rejection of simplistic rationality and the emergence of his personal thinking that penetrates into the experiential essence of architectural pleasure.

Renja Suominen-Kokkonen's essay, The Ideal Image of the Home, surveys the transformation of ideas about dwelling in the work of Aino and Alvar Aalto and the development of their own home both through its design phase and Aalto's life in the house with Aino as well as his second wife Elissa.

Juhani Pallasmaa analyses in his essay, Rationality and Domesticity, the themes and experiential qualities of the house, as well as the dialectics of rationality and domesticity, experimentation and traditionality in its design.

In addition to the two main essays, the book includes brief descriptions with definitive illustrations of realised and unrealised projects contemporaneuous with the Aalto House, carried out by Alvar Aalto's architectural office between 1933 and 1936.