When you have got the bus off, you are nervous, you are looking
everywhere, but you only can see forest. Then, you start the march and you can
intuit a particular shape behind the mist of wood. It‘s a special moment and
you are too excited to understand what you are contemplating. When you want to
react, it’s late, you have crossed the hall, and you are inside but you don’t
know it until the guide Sais you: you can’t take photos.
The house was bought between 1936 and 1939 in a clearing in the woods of
Noormarkku. It was designed by Alvar Aalto for a couple of wealthy friends who
managed a wood company. The clients gave
Alvar Aalto total freedom to design their new house, and he and
his wife Aino Alto make the villa Mairea up.
The house is shaped by the addition of four volumes: one for the
servants and the kitchen, another one for the dining room (some authors
relation this room with the core of the house) other for the library, the
living space and the winter garden, and finally, the volume which contains the
main hall. The bedrooms are upstairs and there is a study above the winter
garden. Outside we could find the swimming pool and the sauna connected to the
house by a covered terrace.
Certainly, the layout of the villa Mairea is organic, but Alvar Aalto
never took any decision deliberately. To find support to the distribution of
the volumes and spaces, he resorted to the grid of squares, playing with the
halves, thirds and quarters. However, this theory is established by Simon
Unwin. In fact, when the reporters ask Alvar Aalto, he said that his module
was a millimeter.
Another fact that we could remark of the house attached by the forest is
the entrance. It’s for Alvar Aalto, the most important space in the house, as
he explains in his writing titled: “from the threshold to the living room”. He
explains that the hall has to be the expression of the house, but after all, it
must be the connector “in-between” the inside and the outside. The dwelling
can’t begin in the hall, because it has to begin in the courtyard. So, the house and the garden, have to be in a
continual relationship. In this house, the halls are caring with these premises
out, suddenly we can find an organic porch, a covered terrace or maybe the transition
doesn’t exist because the whole house is the transition by itself.
Also, it is true that the rectangular shape of the two storey house is a
rough split between inside and outside, but I think that Alvar Aalto used the
overlapping shapes of the in and out spaces to melt it with the natural shapes
of wood. I’m referring to the swimming pool, the porch of the main entrance,
the expansive volume of the study and the changes in the levels of the plot.
But, adaptation not only consist of organic distributions and crazy
shapes, in my opinion are the leaves scattered around the courtyard, the clouds
reflected on the water of the pool, the mud in the stairs of the
winter garden, the moss over the stones in the terrace and even the transparence
of the sliding glass wall, the facts that melt the villa Mairea into the
forest.
Summing up, we could describe the villa Mairea like a whole of overlapping
layers, where the edge between human and nature is blur ,where nature tries to
come in the house layer by layer, and where someone could lose the sense of
time, and confuse a quarter with one hour of visit, like me.
Sources:
Twenty
buildings every architect should understand. Simon Unwin. Ed: routledge.2010.
Alvar
Aalto. Richard Weston. Ed: Phaidon. 2011.
Villa Mairea. Noormarkku. Alvar Aalto- Museo,
Jyvaskyla
