Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (1898-1976) was a Finnish architect, furniture designer, and town planner. More broadly, he was a comprehensive designer with a humanistic concern for man and his total environment.

On Feb. 3, 1898, Alvar Aalto was born in Kuortane. After service during the war of national liberation, he studied architecture at the Helsinki Polytechnic Institute and graduated in 1921.

His first major design was for the Municipal Library, Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia), which won the competition of 1927, although local conservatism prevented construction until 1934. The building includes an auditorium at ground level with a glazed wall overlooking the parkland. The library accommodation, in contrast, has blank walls and indirect lighting to prevent direct sunlight from annoying the readers. Aalto's building for the newspaper Turun-Sanomat in Turku (1928) demonstrates his feeling for structure, especially in the use of tapered columns.

The qualities of the Viipuri library and the Turku newspaper office emerge...