A Humanist Resistance

Introduction

‘Historiographies’ as opposed to ‘Histories’. History in recent years has undergone a definitive shift away from the stoic figures and static events of the past. The cultural and institutional bedrock upon which much of history has been transcribed and later disseminated, has shattered, splintering into smaller and smaller divergent fragments. Sliding away from the formal and concrete histories of the past, the landscape of history has broadened, as communities of scholars, academics, students and the public have come to reassess the familiar narratives which have been handed down and allow access to the events and figures of our shared and diverse human experience. Like a broken mirror whose fragments lie strewn across the floor, those who peer into the depths of these shattered fragments will find strange and new perspectives, as shifting visions and renewed perspectives replace the stoically staid and contrived portraitures of the past. Separated, but not dissimilar, these histories compose a new framework within which history becomes a relativized experience; through our interactions with each narrative, the space between each history becomes apparent, revealing the difference, or différance (1).

In the act of historic transcription, curating narratives to express the unfolding of historic events, we expose our innermost biases. Latent within our words, written and spoken, can be found a vast and intricately connected array of social and cultural perspectives. The differences between each narrative are many, and similar to the ancient navigators observing the brilliant stars of a dark night sky, contemporary voyagers, adrift in this expanse must similarly chart their own coasts; like cartographers tracing the uncharted seas, plotting the space between each isle, landmass, and connecting river, modern interpretations of history are a mix of geographic and historic conception: thusly called the ‘historiography’. 

The intent of this article, in its purposefully narrow view, will be to re-examine the work of Alvar Aalto from a marxist perspective (2); tracing the ways in which the situational framework surrounding his specific architectural practices were intensely influenced via capitalist modes of production, and modernization of Finland in the first half of the twentieth century. For his part, Aalto’s contributions to the realm of architecture were recognized internationally during his lifetime, thanks in large part to a series of fortuitous connections and affluent industrialist benefactors. It is often said that history is written by the victors, and in their record keeping, Aalto’s works has figured prominently within the histories of modern architecture. The typical historic narrative of Aalto’s works have used his architecture as the great humanist foil to much of the seemingly ‘harsh’, ‘rectilinear’, or ‘stark’ architecture of his modernist contemporaries, as opposed to his, oft described as, ‘warm’, ‘curvilinear’, or ‘natural’. In comparison with his contemporaries, such as Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Eileen Grey, etc, the structures of the discussion and debate of Aalto’s work and where it fits in modernism wax between formal and aesthetic discussion on the more ‘grounded’ or ‘earthly’ and poetic moves, to the metaphysical and structuralist arguments (3) seeing some form of spatial semiotics, upholding place-specificity, critical regionalism, and even the geopolitical movements of fascism, and nationalism. His poetic and sinuous curvilinear forms, composed of natural materials oft found within the landscapes of his building’s setting, many of them to be found in his native Finland, are seen with some sense of reverence, not for his material craft, or the beauty of their internal function or broader ability to impact its users for the better, but instead, he is given special reverence as the nation’s architect. This role though, when viewed within the fractious new framework given to history, apart from being problematic, is a contrived and prescriptive history; heavily influenced by Aalto’s close connections with individuals and practices closely associated with academic, and manufacturing apparatuses (4).

Aalto + Paimio

Because the act of writing histories is ultimately an occlusionary practice, for the purposes of this study, we will examine Aalto’s architectural work, the Sanitorium at Paimio, and a building widely recognized as the beginning of Aalto’s exposure to international publics, consumers, and later commissions, as the main focus of this work. The reasons behind this seemingly singular focus on this one instance of architectural expression in Aalto’s long and varied career will be to clearly carve out a specific and limited framework into which the body argument of this article will rest. This act, in it’s narrow specificity, is intended to free the reader of any misconception that the author intends to provide an absolute or total summation of the life and work of Alvar Aalto; instead revealing in this one instance, how outside influences latent within Aalto’s spheres of influence, have contrived and contributed to this narrative of Aalto as the ‘alternative modernist’. In this one instance of the architect’s career, there are a variety of unique discourses at play, from aesthetics, anthropometrics, geopolitics, or even 20th century shifts in the philosophy of medicine, etc; Revealing the numerous new visions yet fully unexplored, our intent will be to examine through a marxist lens, Aalto’s design and architectural practices surrounding his sanitorium at Paimio, the curious and revealing ways in which his furniture (some designed at hospital equipment) became popular worldwide, and the architectural production of theories which have come to enshrine Aalto and his works.

Gesamkunstwerk / Architecture

Alvar Aalto’s life works are not a unique, in the sense that his contemporaries share many similarities. Just as Aalto might be known for his undulating ceilings, Mies is known for his upright linearity. Similarly, just as you can spend thousands of dollars on a chair by Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, or Eileen Gray, one can find similar furniture works by Aalto. This is in large part due to the post-industrial enlightenment era’s expansion of the role of the architect from master builder to the more general umbrella term of “designer”. During the first half of the twentieth century, as european nations, such as Aalto’s Finland, increasingly became industrialized, modern architects and their practices of architecture typically involved a “total-design”, or “Gesamtkunstwerk” (5). Translated from German to mean, ‘a total work of art’, architects of this particular era of modernism were inundated both by the cultural mindset of the artist-as-genius, as well as by the economic opportunities latent within a burgeoning second industrialization and the robustness of consumer markets supported by waves of newly affluent social classes, architects not only had the opportunity, but were even expected to be producing furniture, pavilions, textiles, ceramics, etc. While architectural expression might oft be thought of as the singular interior voice of an architect or a designer, this conception of architecture and its praxis is inextricably linked with this era. The architect becomes similar to that of a demi-god, inspired divinely by the fickle muses, producing whole buildings as the divine expressions (6) revealed to them in their architectural soothsaying, applying hard graphite-lines to vellum. The irony of course is the oft white-washed fickle attitudes and receptions many of these ‘divine’ expressions would meet just decades later, when a new expression of architectonic religion had been discovered. Architecture and the architect’s role in this era was expressed and analyzed for their divine and artistic merits, yet the reality that much of their work had as lasting a cultural impact about as long as it took for the next issue of whichever magazine their work had been published in, was about as harsh as the whitewashed walls and stark facades many of these ‘modernist masterpieces’ frigidly exuded.

Aalto’s sanatorium at Paimio is not unique in this respect, and even for Aalto, Paimio, though an early work (1929-1932), was indicative of his particular and meticulous practices; seeing himself as the architect and designer of a total environment. Evidence of this can be found from the floor plan and design of the building’s facades, to the specification of paint colors and the furniture found throughout the sanitorium. In Aalto’s words himself he describes Paimio as, 

“A project during which I came in contact for the first time with human misfortune. ...When I received the assignment I was myself ill and therefore had the opportunity to make a few experiments and find out what it really felt like to be sick. I became irritated at having to lie horizontal all the time,and my first observation was that the rooms were designed for people who are upright and not for those who lie in bed day in and day out. Like moths to a lamp my eyes were constantly drawn to the electric light in the room, which was absolutely not designed for bedridden patients. The room conveyed neither balance nor calm.” (7)

- Alvar Aalto (1955 Vienna Lecture).

These ‘few experiments’ as Aalto calls them, would eventually later become realized designs for washbasins which silenced the pressurized flow of water, as well as the ‘Paimio Chair’, whose curvaceous design rendered in plywood was intended to aid patient’s breathing, and whose springiness was intended to help a patient cough in comfort. This humanist, or human-centric desire to design for his users, in a 1957 lecture in london Aalto expressed in his own terms, “We should work for simple, good, undecorated things" and he continues, "but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.” (8) As Aalto described it, is often the narrative used in discussion of Aalto’s work. At Paimio, as with many works of modern architecture, the formal aspects of Aalto’s designs are discussed at length, usually in support of the myth of Aalto as the heroic saint; the alternative modernist. This argument, while problematic is a rigorous research and study of the differences between Aalto’s work and the work of his fellow contemporary modernists. Paimio, while rendered in white stucco and generally can be perceived as a work of modernism, the looseness with with this term can be applied hints also at the inability for much of Aalto’s works to be defined. In formal terms, Paimio is irregular. Standing over eight stories tall, and equipped with a variety of terraces, and long banded windows of glass, Paimio’s exterior facades convey no hierarchical arrangement, and their exterior brightness of whitewashed stucco belie the restful and dark interior spaces. Though modern hospitals of the era were typically brightly lit clinical-sorts of places, the interior rooms of the patients at Paimio were designed by the Aalto’s to be restful and patient-centric spaces (9). Heaters, which normally run along the exteriors of the walls were moved towards the patient’s feet. Ceilings featured darker colors to provide a restful upward view, while the lighting of each of the rooms was toned down from the typical fluorescent fixtures so as not to dazzle or produce a dizzyingly bright space. Dayroom corners on each floor cantilevered out into the landscape unsupported, providing an expansive visual access to the native pine forests of the site specially selected by Aalto.

The situation of Paimio in the landscape was an integral part of the design for the sanatorium, and Aalto received relatively few demanding guidelines for the site of his final design. constructed between 1929 and finished in 1932, Aalto’s Paimio sanatorium is impacted more than just by the ways in which the sun and Finnish breezes penetrated the tall and thin wings of building. Taking a biographical perspective, one possible reason other than the medical conventions of the time which favored expansive natural climbs over the cramped and smog-filled industrial cities of his time, could have been affected by Aalto’s participation in the three and a half month long Finnish Civil war of 1918 in which Aalto’s own architectural education was put on hold and the young aspiring architect was called to free what would become the nation of Finland from its servitude as a Duchy of Russia. Similarly, the period of Aalto’s career coincided with efforts globally, not unique to Finland, towards reunification and the construction of great nationalistic identities; culminating in the fervor and torment such movements fomented, leaving behind the disastrous wake of world war II (10). Aalto’s earliest works are closely aligned with Nordic classicism, a pre-30’s attempt to produce a architectural identity for a newly freed nation, and the geopolitical bedrock upon which Aalto’s early career undoubtedly gained Aalto access to his later commission at Paimio.

As with much of Aalto’s works, the layout of evidence is layered in such ways that Aalto become almost indefinite. While working on the library in Viipuri, a project which lasted from 1927 to 1935, and whose competition he won as a result of a classically inspired design, later became influenced by the national attention he received for his Turun Sanomat building of 1929-30, the first of his career to be rendered in white stucco and banded windows typical of the international style. This departure from the neoclassical inspired may have been a stylistic shift, however throughout Aalto’s career there is a self-professed, and historian packaged construction of Aalto as the modern architect of a nation. When given the choice, much of Aalto’s works appear in densely pine-forested landscapes, and the material choices of his works are often geographically specific only to Finland; electing to use Finnish pine wood in the construction of his buildings to his plywood furniture. Paimio thus, is no great surprise to be found on a mount overlooking the Finnish landscape, removed from urban environments, and featuring expanses of surrounding pine forests for the Sanitorium’s patients to take in, and perhaps even be taken in a little themselves by his participation in the construction of a new nationalistic Finnish identity.

Gesamkunstwerk / Furniture

Aalto’s work at Paimio garnered the architect and his offices fame after the finished project was published, by this time Aalto had become a close friend with architect Le Corbusier, artist Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, and the architectural historian Siegfried Giedion. During these years, from 1929 - 1033, Aalto retained membership with the Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne, or CIAM for short, whose stylistic and aesthetic norms provided the guidelines for what modern architecture could be. The Aalto office won further fame in 1935 when the Vipurii library was finally finished, after Aalto had laboriously revised the building multiple times, moving from his neoclassical competition entry to the CIAM conforming design we have today. Having experimented extensively with the properties of plywood, even developing his own unique form which allowed him to produce the kinds of furniture and chairs first seen in his Sanatorium at Paimio, Alvar and Aino, under the patronage of Marie Gullichsen, quickly formed the company Artek (11). in order to cheaply and efficiently produce high-quality bent plywood furniture following an exhibition of their works in London. It was only natural, given Gullichsen’s family history as leaders of the 19th century industrialization of Finland, and one of the wealthiest patrons of the arts and public life in Finland. Gullichsen’s family ties to industrial processes, as well as the physical space, material capital (12,13) , combined with Aalto and Aino’s knowledge of materials and design which has to this day carried much of their popular bentwood furniture works and eventually glassware forward through the decades and can still be found in any museum store, or high-end furniture retailer.

The narrative which follows Aalto though, as the benign and benevolent Finnish-Father-Architect, while perhaps true in some sense of his professed desires to produce works of lasting impact for Finns, is a contrived history very purposefully and deliberately disseminated; obscuring the irony and absurdities inherent within this idealistic narrative and the realities of producing architecture in capitalist and industrialized nations. At Paimio, Aalto designed many things, again under the practices of Gesamtkunstwerk, from sinks to handrails to what is most famously known, the Paimio Chair. It was this chair, having been revealed first publicly with the opening of the Sanatorium in 1932, and later again making its appearance at the London Design Exhibition in 1935, which itself underscores the moral or ethical flexibility with which all architects must engage in capitalist societies. Though the chair as designed specifically to help breathing and aid the sitter when violent fits of coughing break out, providing a moulded spring-like sitting surface which dampened the recoil of the body, the chair can be found in a variety of settings. As is the case with a great variety of furniture, it is not the appearance of the chair in living rooms, or hotels, or libraries which is telling, but rather the disunity with with the pure humanist argument for Aalto’s work as being deified as a designer purely attuned to the human experience as the driver of his motivations. The absurdity and appearance of a pine wood chair designed specifically for a tuberculosis hospital set amid a Finnish pine-forest, gracing its rippling bentwood form upon the rooftop terraces of cloistered urban apartments in Chicago, or featured prominently in corporate lobbies of Los Angeles, or any public building where a great many people pass, is inherently a contradiction to this sensation of the work of the Aaltos as architectural saints, without any regard for material wealth or success (14).

S. Gideon /

After the successes of the Library at Vipurii (‘29-’35), the Turun Sanomat building (‘29-’30), The Paimio Sanatorium (‘29-’32), and their exhibition and success of their newly formed Artek company in ‘35, the Aalto’s Finnish pavilion of 1939, produced for the New York City World’s Fair was met in America with waves of critical acclaim, both among architectural circles, and the wider american and international public. It was this success which solidified Aalto’s career as one not of pure architectural expression, but also afforded him the opportunities to create sculpture, and provided the material capital upon which his success had been ensured. Having met years earlier while the first secretary of CIAM, Siegfried Giedion, a swiss and bohemian born intellectual and architecture critic further concretized Aalto’s fame after his 1949 book, ‘Space, Time, and Architecture’ featured Aalto so prominently that mentions of his name total twice as much as any other modern architect listed in the book. Though, like Aalto, initially a member of CIAM, Gideon would later become closely associated with the Independent Group, a group of artists, architects, and intellectuals who sought to confront the limits of modernist architecture and the prescriptive norms CIAM disseminated. Aalto’s prominent presence within Gideon’s influential history book contributed greatly to the deified myth of the architect as the humanist saint. Gideon’s critique of Aalto’s work sets him apart from his fellow contemporary modernists, describing his work and practices as having the unique ability to produce architectural mood, atmospheres, and even nationalist sentiment, even stating in the book, “Finland is with Alvar Aalto wherever he goes” (15). This contrived narrative laid forth by Gideon still largely informs the perceptions and judgements with with much of Aalto’s work is said to exude. At the same time though, not twenty years later, architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri, and even the Finnish born architect and author Juhani Pallasmaa have come to de-mystify this frosted image of the Aaltos (16).

Gesamkunstwerk / The Detail

Aaltos work, while interpreted as works of great humanist and architectonic expression, their realities and principled existences are called into curious inspection when considering the material and social capital garnered by Aalto’s office (17). Aalto’s works are not unique in their similar career paths which can be seen when compared to his contemporaries. Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, and Eileen Gray each in their own particular way was impacted by extraneous cultural conditions and societal structures, from patronage to manufacturing processes, and their interplay with consumer markets. Architecture curiously maintains its distance from the shopkeep; the history of the profession more solipsistically obsessed with maintaining a certain amount of architectural ethics, or at least in some sense claiming to do so. But architects of the post-enlightenment and post-industrial era are slaves to movements of capital, goods and services, locally and globally. The material effort required to build a modern building is so far removed and detached from traditional structures, whose only particular design requirement were to provide shelter and enough space for each occupant, has shifted dramatically, leaving architects caught some place in between the conception of their profession as a purely noble pursuit, and the market-demanded aesthete to produce beautiful buildings and objects for public consumption.

Conclusions / Closing Thoughts

What instead remains of the humanist overtures oft associated with the work of the Aalto’s can still be salvaged in the explicit forms and purpose-built site-specific architectural objects of use, the architectural detail. The detail remains Aalto’s greatest figure of admiration, not purely for their sinuous beauty, their craft, or their material and technological brilliance, but due to their complete and unquestionable inability or refusal to be sold en-mass. The architectural detail, beyond the doorknob, or the lighting fixture is a spatio-material arrangement, purposefully designed to inform and imbue a space with a specific mood, or atmosphere as Giedion puts it, and mitigates a variety of factors, from material, to climate, to user circulation and interaction. At Paimio, the architectural details which resist commodification are what give the building its most pure expressions of the humanist intent. The bright yellow floors and circulating staircases of the sanatorium's public hallways, or the visually unimpeded and expansive views from which patients could take in the pine-forested landscapes, or even the combination of commodity details such as the sink, and the lighting of the patients rooms, in a combinatorial effect produce a spatial detail which fulfills it’s professed intent.

Submission to / Boston Architectural College - Student Magazine / Praxis

Published / Fall 2014

#AlvarAalto #Architecture #Ethics #Labor #Architectural Ethics #ArchitecturalIdeals #ArchitecturalAgency #DesignCritique #ArchitecturalDetailing

Notes :

1.  Vincent B Leitch, ”Jacques Derrida.” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1815 - 1830.
Notes : Using a post-structuralist, or Derridean conception of time, perception and history, the work of the article applies these historiographic methods in demystifying the past by examining the connections between the events and works of Aalto, applying a marxist critique to the influences of capital.2. Itinerant Office. “New Generations: Three Approaches to Architecture in Times of Crisis.” Accessed May 1 2014.  

2.  Vincent B Leitch, ”Karl Marx” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 767 - 783.
Note: Predominantly focusing on the ways in which material capital and Aalto’s connections, or social capital, led in many ways to his success as an architect; iterating the ways in which Aalto’s practice of ‘Gesamkunst’ architecture (Architecture, furniture, and the detail), can be influenced to varying degrees by capitalist structures. Eventually finding the detail least susceptible to influence of capital due to its site-specific nature.

3.  Vincent B Leitch, ”Ferdinand De Saussure” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 956 - 977.
Note: Much of the research and architectural critiques of Aalto center around a ‘structuralist’ critique in which material form has limited and ordained meaning. Aalto’s works were produced both at a time when structural critique was common, influencing the manner in which he conceived his work, as well as the ways which he sought his architecture to perform; specifically to the creation of the Finnish national identity.

4.  Louis Althusser, Trans. Ben Brewster. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review P, 1972. 127-86.
Notes: Aalto’s works were made possibly by a variety of social and cultural apparatuses, which Louis Althusser describes at length. Most speficially, Althusser’s outlining of an ideological state aparatus’s reliance on the narrative aspect of history, and the replication of its own systems through forms of privilege are most influencing on Aalto’s works, and the supporting role which architects and works of architecture aid in the continuation of these structures.

5.  Michael A. Vidalis, "Gesamtkunstwerk - 'total work of art'", Architectural Review, June 30, 2010.

6. Boyce, Charles (1985). "Aalto, Hugo Alvar Henrik (1899–1976)". Dictionary of Furniture. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co.
Notes: Alvar Aalto was not only a successful architect, but also an accomplished and skilled sculptor, painter, craftsman, as well as an adept building materials scientist. Though having received no formal education in materials sciences, Aalto’s early career was marked by an experimentalism with regards to laminated wood, a period of experimentation which would eventually lead to his development of techniques which would later be employed in his furniture works, and even later architectural commissions.

7. Aalto, Alvar, Timo Tuomi, Kristiina Paatero, and Eija Rauske, Alvar Aalto In Seven Buildings: Interpretations of an Architect's Work = Alvar Aalto In Sieben Bauwerken : Interpretationen Des Lebenswerks Eines Architekten (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1998.), 13.

8. Aalto, Alvar, Timo Tuomi, Kristiina Paatero, and Eija Rauske, Alvar Aalto In Seven Buildings: Interpretations of an Architect's Work = Alvar Aalto In Sieben Bauwerken : Interpretationen Des Lebenswerks Eines Architekten (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1998.), 13.
Notes: It is unclear to what extent the role Aino, Aalto’s wife (married in 1925) who worked closely with Alvar, made to the interior, but more so the larger conception and achievement of the hospital. Traditional narratives portray Aino through a patriarchal role as ‘second-fiddle’, citing her furniture and glassworks, rather than her delft material understanding (most notably seen in the Aalto’s work at the Villa Mairea), or her own right as an architect.

9.  Aalto, Alvar, Timo Tuomi, Kristiina Paatero, and Eija Rauske. Alvar Aalto In Seven Buildings: Interpretations of an Architect's Work = Alvar Aalto In Sieben Bauwerken : Interpretationen Des Lebenswerks Eines Architekten. Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1998. 13.

10.  Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa (2009). Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 

11.  Brown, Theodore M. (1969). "Alto, Hugo Alvar Henrik". In Myers, Bernard S. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Art. I: AA-Ceylon. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company

12.  Vincent B Leitch, ”Karl Marx: The Fetish of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 776 - 783.

13.  Louis Althusser, Trans. Ben Brewster. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review P, 1972. 127-86.

14.   Vincent B Leitch, ”Karl Marx: The Fetish of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 776 - 783.

15. Giedion, S. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. 1st Harvard University Press paperback ed., 5th rev. and enl. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.

16.  Pallasmaa, Juhani (1998). Alvar Aalto: Villa Mairea 1938–39 (2nd ed.). Ram Pubns & Dist.

17.  Aalto, Alvar, Timo Tuomi, Kristiina Paatero, and Eija Rauske. Alvar Aalto In Seven Buildings: Interpretations of an Architect's Work = Alvar Aalto In Sieben Bauwerken : Interpretationen Des Lebenswerks Eines Architekten. Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1998.
Notes: Apart from Pallasmaa and Tafuri, even works published by the Aalto Foundation itself have come to question the typical hmanist inscriptions used to describe Aalto’s career, usually centering around the disjunction of Aalto’s insitence on his desire to serve and develop architecture for the every-man, and his works for affluent clients such as the Alstrom-Gullichsen’s and the Villa Mairea. 

References :

Aalto, Alvar, Timo Tuomi, Kristiina Paatero, and Eija Rauske. Alvar Aalto In Seven Buildings: Interpretations of an Architect's Work = Alvar Aalto In Sieben Bauwerken : Interpretationen Des Lebenswerks Eines Architekten. Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1998.

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1972. 127-86.

Boyce, Charles. "Aalto, Hugo Alvar Henrik (1899–1976)." Dictionary of Furniture, 1, 176, 276. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co, 1985. 

Giedion, S. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. 1st Harvard University Press paperback ed., 5th rev. and enl. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Jetsonen, Jari, Sirkkaliisa Jetsonen, and Alvar Aalto. Alvar Aalto Houses. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011.

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001).

Michael A. Vidalis, "Gesamtkunstwerk - 'total work of art'", Architectural Review, June 30, 2010.

Pallasmaa, Juhani (1998). Alvar Aalto: Villa Mairea 1938–39 (2nd ed.). Ram Pubns & Dist.

Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa. Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2009.

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