One of the most interesting aspects of researching and writing a biography of Alvar Aalto was discovering what was happening in his personal life during the most creative periods of his career.
His ‘Experimental Villa’ was a case in point. It was located on what was then a small island, just a few miles from the site of Saynatsalo Town Hall. Aalto’s first wife Aino had died just a few months before he was awarded the commission for the town hall and he developed his design with 29-year-old Elsa Makiniemi who had recently joined his office. Elsa (or Elissa as Aalto christened her) became firstly project architect and by the end of the construction of the town hall, Aalto’s second wife. At that stage, Aalto had yet to build his elegant studio in Helsinki and still worked from his old office in Munkineimi, which had also been his and Aino’s home. He and Elissa planned a new home of their own – a summer house – and found the remote site while on a visit to Saynatsalo. Fortunately, Harry Gullichsen (Aalto’s client for the Villa Mairea) owned the land and sold it to Aalto at a knock-down price.
That left Aalto having to raise the cash for the construction of the house itself and he hit upon the brilliant idea of treating their summer home as a research project which he could then write off against tax. Thus the ‘Experimental Villa’ was born with the courtyard walls carried out in a collage of brick and tile patterns and bonds, to justify its innovative status. It’s a fascinating design in which the principal space is a partially-enclosed courtyard, focussed on a fire pit around which friends and family naturally gather on warm summer evenings to watch the sun setting on the lake below. It’s almost an inverted version of a house by Aalto’s great friend, Frank Lloyd Wright, in which the hearth is central to the entire composition but here outdoors under the stars, it takes on an almost primeval quality.
Sadly for the newly-weds, not only did the Finnish tax authorities reject their new home’s research status but it provoked them to investigate Aalto’s previous five year’s equally creative tax returns, resulting in a whopping multi-million Marka tax bill several years later, that nearly sunk the office. It was round about then that Elissa took over the running of the business.
You can read more about Aalto’s extraordinary life in my book “Alvar Aalto Architect” from Merrell Publications.
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John Stewart 