page_title: Villa Mairea
section_title: Serpentine
hierarchical_section_title: Villa Mairea / Initial concepts / Serpentine
caption_attribution_description: English: Fireplace, exterior view
context_page_description: Villa Mairea is a villa, guest-house, and rural retreat designed and built by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto for Harry and Maire Gullichsen in Noormarkku, Finland. The building was constructed in 1938–1939.
  The Gullichsens were a wealthy couple and members of the Ahlström family. They told Aalto that he should regard it as 'an experimental house'. Aalto seems to have treated the house as an opportunity to bring together all the themes that had been preoccupying him in his work to that point but had not been able to include them in actual buildings.
  Today, Villa Mairea is considered one of the most important buildings Aalto designed in his career.
context_section_description: The influence of Fallingwater is evident in several sheets of studies, which show boldly cantilevered balconies and an undulating basement story intended as a substitution for the natural forms of the stream and rocks. In later sketches, the free-form basement appears as an upper-floor studio with a serpentine wall sunk into a one-and-half storey entrance hall, forming a drop-ceiling around the fireplace. The undulating, wave-like form was already established as a leitmotiv of Aalto's work: it was familiar from the vases designed for the 'Savoy Restaurant' in Helsinki. It also featured prominently in the second-prize-winning entry for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris World Fair of 1937), named ‘Tsit Tsit Pum’. Aalto won the first prize with a different design and, never one to waste a good idea, used vast sinuous partitions as the primary spatial device of his masterly design for the New York Fair of 1939.
  The free forms of nature were seen as symbols of human freedom, and as early as 1926 Aalto remarked that the ‘curving, living, unpredictable line which runs in dimensions unknown to mathematics, is for me the incarnation of everything that forms a contrast in the modern world between brutal mechanicalness and religious beauty in life. The fact that the Finnish word aalto means ‘wave’ doubtless added a certain piquancy to his attraction to the motif.
caption: Fireplace, as seen from gardens
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