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Sometimes known as the Savoy vase from its use in the Savoy restaurant in Helsinki, which Aalto built in 1937, this piece and others in the series took First Prize in a competition sponsored by the Finnish manufacturer Karhula-Iittala in 1936. |
GLASS
- ART - FUNCTION ALVAR AALTO (1898 - 1976) One
of the giants of twentieth-century architecture and design, Alvar
Aalto is ranked by art historians alongside Le Corbusier, Walter
Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, although his work shared
few of the formal usage and structural methods for which his peers
were known. Boldly independent, Aalto was a self-described humanist
who emphasized organic forms, the use of wood as a medium, and the
relationship of architecture to nature. He was trained as an architect
at what is now the Helsinki University of Technology and after his
graduation in 1922 set up his practice first in the small town of
Jvaskyla followed by Turku (1927-33) and Helsinki (1933-76). In
1924, Aalto married Aino Marsio, an architect practicing in his
office with whom he collaborated on furniture and interior design
commissions. By the end of 1920s Aalto has already begun the avant-garde
buildings that catapulted him into international prominence in the
1930s - the Turun-Sanomat newspaper office in Turku (1928-30), the
tuberculosis sanatorium at Paimio (1929-33), and the city Aalto's interest in glass design was aroused early: he joined Ornamo, the Finnish Association of Designers, in 1920. He did not, however, have the opportunity to concentrate on glass design until 1932, partly because he lived far from Finland's design centres and partly because of unfavourable economic trends reduced the Finnish glassworks to passivity at the time. The controversial Functionalist exhibition in Stockholm in 1930 sparked considerable interest in modern industrial art for the general public in Finland, too. This led to a series of design competitions for glass objects and paved the way for the heroic years of Finnish design in the 1930s. Both Alvar and Aino Aalto took part in these competitions, in which their international orientation and faithfulness to the idiom of avant-garde art brought them unexpected success despite their lack of specialized experience. SAVOY VASE (1936) Entirely plain but shaped with free organic curves to provide decorative interest, this vase was one of a series by Alvar Aalto that introduced a new abstract vocabulary into glass design, a development that art critics have attributed both to the designer's fondness for natural forms and to the influence of such surrealist artists as Jean Arp. Sometimes known as the Savoy vase from its use in the Savoy restaurant in Helsinki, which Aalto built in 1937, this piece and others in the series took First Prize in a competition sponsored by the Finnish manufacturer Karhula-Iittala in 1936. The competition aimed to find new tableware and art-glass designs for the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937, where these pieces were first exhibited. They ranged from a shallow dish 3 inches high to a tall vase about 39 inches high. This model was originally produced in clear, brown, azure blue, green, and smoke-coloured glass. Information for the art shown above:
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at Viipuri (1927-35). At the same time, for the Huonekaluja Rakennustyotendas
furniture company, he began to design experimental furniture in
laminated woods, which first appeared at the firm's exhibition display
in Turku in 1929 in the form of a chair with a seat and back formed
from a single curved piece of bent plywood. Considering interior
furnishings as architectural accessories, part of the biology of
building, Aalto went on to develop plywood furniture for the Paimio
sanatorium, pieces he considered more humane than the metal furniture
then regarded as hygienic for institutional use. When shown for
the first time at exhibitions in London (1933) and Zurich (1934),
and at the V Triennale in Milan in 1933, his furniture met with
such immediate popular and critical success that English and Swiss
firms made arrangements to import it on a regular basis. In 1935,
Aalto himself, his wife, the art critic Nils Gustav Hahl, and the
financier Harry Gullichsen and his wife, Marie Gullichsen, founded
a company called Artek to produce and distribute Aalto's designs.
The firm continues to this day, and more than half of Aalto's original
models is still in production.