Mairea Villa

Alvar Aalto – Mairea Villa, 1939

Villa Mairea is a single-family residential building located in Noormarkku, Finland, and built and in 1937 by architect Alvar Aalto commissioned by Maire and Harry Gullichsen.
Villa Mairea, today considered one of the most important single-family buildings in the entire history of world architecture (together with Le Corbusier's ville Savoye and the Fallingwater wrightiana), was built by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in the two-year period 1938-1939 commissioned by Harry and Maire Gullichsen.
Villa Mairea consists of two L-shaped two-story buildings that are intertwined orthogonally, defining two semi-private courts. The poetic force with which the building interacts with the lush surrounding nature is decisive, as always in Aalto. The house, in fact, does not present itself as a foreign body to Nature, or as a volume that is totally closed and defined in itself: the insertion of Villa Mairea in the dense forest of adjacent fir trees.