Alvar Aalto famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Art #Design #Splits
Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Art #Hate #Thinking
Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Form
Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Design #Tragedy #Shapes
Our time is so specialised that we have people who know more and more or less and less.
-- Alvar Aalto

#People
The ultimate goal of the architect...is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture... should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.
-- Alvar Aalto

#People #Goal #House
I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Cities #House #Opera
Nothing old is ever reborn but neither does it totally disappear. And that which has once been born, will always reappear in a new form
-- Alvar Aalto

#Doe #Disappear #Form
Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Civilization #Culture #Architecture
We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Cities #Architecture #Problem
God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is at least for me an abuse of paper.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Drawing #Abuse #Purpose
Objects are made to be completed by the human mind.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Mind #Made #Humans
Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Mean #Immature #Doe
True architecture exists only where man stands in the center.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Men #Architecture
The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life. This is the only true style in architecture
-- Alvar Aalto

#Essence #Style #Development
We should work for simple, good, undecorated things
-- Alvar Aalto

#Simple #Should
We have almost a city has probably two or three hundred committees. Every committee is dealing with just one problem and has nothing to do with the other problems.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Cities #Two #Three
We should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Simple #Men #Littles
The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view. It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Light #Views #Steel
The most difficult problems are naturally not involved in the search for forms for contemporary life. It is a question of working our way to forms behind which real human values lie.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Real #Lying #Way
Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Ideas #Creative #Needs
I do not write, I build.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Writing
Even the smallest daily chore can be humanized with the harmony of culture.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Culture #Harmony #Chores
Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Ties #Earth #Architecture
It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Giving #Tasks #Architecture
The best standardisation committee in the world is nature herself, but in nature standardisation occurs mainly in connection with the smallest possible units: cells. The result is millions of flexible combinations in which one never encounters the stereotyped.
-- Alvar Aalto

#Cells #Encounters #Connections

You may also like:

Alvaro Siza Vieira
Architect
Arne Jacobsen
Architect
Eero Saarinen
Architect
Finn Juhl
Architect
Frank Gehry
Architect
Frank Lloyd Wright
Architect
George Nelson
Designer
Hans Wegner
Isamu Noguchi
Artist
JÃ¸rn Utzon
Architect
Le Corbusier
Architect
Louis Kahn
Architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Architect
Marcel Breuer
Architect
Oscar Niemeyer
Architect
Renzo Piano
Architect
Tadao Ando
Architect
Verner Panton
Designer
Walter Gropius
Architect