Alvar Quotes

#1. We are all affected by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini, and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve.

Richard Meier

#2. Objects are made to be completed by the human mind.

Alvar Aalto

#3. Beauty is the harmony of purpose and form.

Alvar Aalto

#4. Two days after moving we recommended ourselves to God, Our Lord, and fled, hoping that, although it was late in the season and the fruits of the tunas were giving out, by remaining in the field we might still get over a good portion of the land.

Alvar N. C. De Vaca

#5. 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

#6. True architecture exists only where man stands in the center.

Alvar Aalto

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

Alvar Aalto

#10. 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

#11. Once I tried to make a standardization of staircases. Probably that is one of the oldest of the standardizations. Of course, we design new staircase steps every day in connection with all our houses, but a standardized step depends on the height of the buildings and on all kinds of things.

Alvar Aalto

#12. 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

#13. One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

Alvar N. C. De Vaca

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Even the smallest daily chore can be humanized with the harmony of culture.

Alvar Aalto

#17. 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

#18. Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

Alvar Aalto

#19. God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is, at least for me, an abuse of paper.

Alvar Aalto

#20. All over the land are vast and handsome pastures, with good grass for cattle, and it strikes me the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people.

Alvar N. C. De Vaca

#21. It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.

Alvar Aalto

#22. I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.

Alvar Aalto

#23. Seeing that our thirst was increasing and the water was killing us, while the storm did not abate, we agreed to trust to God, Our Lord, and rather risk the perils of the sea than wait there for certain death from thirst.

Alvar N. C. De Vaca

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. I do not write, I build.

Alvar Aalto

#28. Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.

Alvar Aalto

#29. 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

#30. Every one of my buildings begins with an Italian journey.

Alvar Aalto

#31. In almost every task involving form, there are dozens, often hundreds of contradictory elements, which need to be forced to work in harmony by man's will. This harmony can be acheived only through art.

Alvar Aalto

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Our time is so specialised that we have people who know more and more or less and less.

Alvar Aalto