In the end of 1937 Aalto
began to work on the project of the Villa Mairea, a summer house
for the Gullichsen's family. The house was built on a large
estate, owned by the family at Noormarkku on the west coast of
Finland, north of Turku. He took inspiration by the organization
of vernacular farmsteads and by Wright's "Fallingwater"
that had international good reviews.
The building has a L-shaped basement and the main entrance is
positioned at the side, in front of the dining room. The entrance
opens into a small lobby from which another door leads straight
ahead into an open hall. We can see the dining room and the
living room divided by an angled wall. The open living room is
planned around a structural grid.
We can see the sauna through the windows of the living room , the
pool, the garden court and the pine forest.
The library is downstairs, to hold confidential business
meetings. It was wanted by Harry Gullichsen. Beyond the library
and close to the living we can see the Winter garden from which a
staircase leads directly up into Maire's studio.
The middle of the dining is occupied by a table from which we can
look at the axis to the entrance, the entire living room and
beyond the pine forest. Next to dining room there are the
servery, the kitchen and two offices.
The flat roof of the dining room is extended to form a covered
terrace which is linked to the irregular roof of the timber
sauna. The shallow balconies, that lead on principal bedroom, are
made of wooden poles.
By comparison with the sophisticated spatial composition of the
ground floor, the first floor is an assemblage of private rooms.
The main wooden starcase of the living room arrives in an
intimate upper hall. It is also an abstraction of the forest in
the house's interior.
Mr an Mrs Gullichsen's bedrooms are paired either side of a
bathroom; while the three children's bedrooms lead into a large
playroom.
The guest bedrooms are disposed along a single-banked corridor
and look out north-east into the forest.
In 1936 for the Paris World's Fair Competition, Aalto began to
explore the development of architectural space as an abstraction
of the forest. For now it is sufficient to recognize that the
idea of "forest space" provides a key to understand his
intentions in the Villa Mairea. For example the bedroom windows
project out at an angle to address the line of approach to the
house through the forest. Moreover the main entrance's door is
under a canapy, which is supported by timber columns and screened
by a miniature "forest" of timber poles.
Aalto conceived that "architecture's inner nature is a
fluctuation and a development suggestive of natural organic
life", and asserts the presence of nature within the
dwelling.
So Aalto evokes the experience of the forest in several ways: by
destroying the square of the living room, by inserting into it
the volume of garden room, by the continuos pine-strip suspendend
ceiling, by natural stone in the garden room and around the
fireplace which marks out the transition from natural forest to
civilized dwelling, finally by a series of tree-poles which
screen the stairs.
The timber cladding serve to "naturalize" and
"humanize" the standard industrial products.
Other interesting features of the villa are the terrace, which is
linked to the sauna roof, and the villa's roof. They are covered
in grass on birch bark, forming a forest setting.
Also the north-east corner of the Villa Mairea, which is wropped
by climbing plants, reinforce the idea of a natural environment.
Finally the villa includes both Finnish elements (sauna, wooden
materials...) and modern characteristics, for example white
surfaces of main volumes and glazing screen which had already
appeared in Le Corbusier's "Villa Savoye" and Mies van
der Rohe's "Tugendhat House".
The collage technique enabled Aalto to use incompatible materials
(birch for roof, black slate for basement, tek for shutter), to
express vernacular and modern, free-form and geometric, Modern
and Finnish.