Alvar Aalto

"The forest can do without man, but man cannot do without the forest."

Place of birth
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (Kuortane, 3 February 1898 – Helsinki, 11 May 1976)

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (Kuortane, 3 February 1898 – Helsinki, 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect, designer and academic., among the most important figures in 20th century architecture and remembered – together with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier – as a master of the Modern Movement.

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was born on February 3, 1898 in Kuortane, Finland, the firstborn of Johan Henrik, a Finnish engineer specializing in geodesy and cartography, and Selly Hackstedt, a postwoman born in Sweden. From an early age, Aalto benefited from an excellent family atmosphere, animated by the elegant clothing and cosmopolitanism of his father and the creative, talented, almost anarchic exuberance of his mother: this bipolarity, then, was reconciled in a respectful and fervent love towards creation and Nature (sealed by a motto of his grandfather, which read: "The forest can do without man, but man cannot do without the forest").

When little Alvar was only five years old, the family moved first to Alajärvi and then to Jyväskylä, in central Finland, with the aim of providing the children (five in total, of whom only four survived to adulthood) with an excellent education: it was in the latter town, in fact, that Aalto began his education, attending a classical educational institute with a strictly humanistic stamp.
The letters, however, did not enthuse Alvar, who since he was a child had a contagious passion for architecture and drawing, disciplines that he began to study in depth starting from his enrollment at the Helsinki Institute of Technology, which took place in 1916: despite dyslexia and the discouragement of an architect named Salervo ("You'll never be a good architect, but try lending yourself to journalism!"), Aalto gave brilliant proof of himself in these years, both academically and socially. Despite a brief interruption, due to the outbreak of the Finnish civil war (which saw Aalto fight bravely in the counter-revolutionary ranks of the White Army), Alvar managed to graduate cum laude in 1921 and, while still a student, even began his design activity, building a house for his parents, in Alajärvi.
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