Word: paimio
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Aalto's first great work of architecture, a tuberculosis hospital built near Paimio, Finland, during the late '20s and early '30s, accounted for his most original and visually powerful piece of furniture. The main wing of the sanitorium resembles an airy ocean liner, and the Paimio Loungechair could pass for a rarefied deck chair...
...also reasonably accommodating to human beings: the scrolls are functional flourishes, each a great wooden spring. In this, more than in any other piece, Aalto's devotion to wood is its saving grace, for even lacquered red, the birch makes the chair seem domestic and familiar. A Paimio Loungechair executed in metal would have been gorgeous but mean, dangerous looking...
Hard-drinking and imperious (he once stoned an offending electric sign because it ruined his view), Aalto blazed into prominence in the 1930s. His first celebrated works were a library in Viipuri and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Paimio. Their design was lean, clean, direct and even witty; in Aalto's hands, the meeting of an undulating ceiling and a wall could result in a line as playful and zesty as a Miro sketch...
Aalto once described to some students his approach to a tuberculosis sanatorium he had designed in 1929 at Paimio, in southern Finland's pine forests. Aalto considered how each occupant, from the director on down, not only would use the building but also might feel about it. The janitor, he decided, should have his own closet, not just an impersonal clothes hook. When it came to the hospital rooms, Aalto put himself in the place of the patients. The result: designs for windows that would admit fresh air but not drafts, wash basins that would not splash, and chairs...
...most difficult problems do not occur in the search for form," Aalto says, "but rather in the attempt to create forms that are based on real human values." The bold, simple form of the Paimio sanatorium thrust Aalto into the vanguard of European functionalism in the 1930s. But that straightforwardness gradually changed as he won other commissions for everything from furniture to factories to whole towns, mostly in Finland. Over the years, his buildings have grown ever more intricate and idiosyncratic, taking odd, seemingly arbitrary shapes. But their genesis-profound thoughtfulness leavened by the free play of emotion-has never...