The Villa Mairea is a country house, built by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in Noormarkku, Finland between 1937 and 1940 for the couple Harry and Maire Gullichsen, who asked him to consider as an “experimental house”.

Reposted from ArchEyes

 

“After all, nature is a symbol of freedom. Sometimes nature actually gives rise to and maintains the idea of freedom. If we base our technical plans primarily on nature we have a chance to ensure that the course of development is once again in a direction in which our everyday work and all it’s forms will increase freedom rather than decrease it.”

— ALVAR AALTO

 











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.

The plan of the villa takes Mairea L-shaped fond Aalto, but slightly modified. It is a plan that automatically gives a semi-private area on the side, and a more public or more receiving another space. The lawn and pool are located in the hollow of L, with a range of rooms oriented in this direction. The horizontal and door overhang in the overall composition meet the flat expanses of the site, and the curves of the pool lines embrace the topography of the surrounding forest.

In contrast to these devices give some softness in the lines, the main façade, it a more rigid and formal appearance. There’s even a canopy that is repeated in the garden with a pergola incorporating the vocabulary of the assembly, with studs, lath and fasteners. The interiors of the villa Mairea subtly play with wood, stone and bricks. The spaces have dimensions varied, ranging from very generous spaces virtually the cabin.

Although the revised plan followed the existing foundations, the transformation achieved a compression and coherence in the spatial organization which had been almost entirely lacking in the ‘Proto-Mairea’. The entrance opens into a small top-lobby, from which another door straight ahead leads into an open hall positioned four steps below the main level. One enters on axis with the dining table beyond, but the axiality is undermined by the asymmetry of a screen of wooden poles and a free-standing, angled wall which together define an informal ante-room between the living room and dining room.

The angle of the low wall is set from the corner of the white-plastered fireplace diagonally opposite, which becomes the natural centre of attention as one ascends the step into the living room. Similar diagonal relationships are established between Harry Gullichsen’s private library/study and the ‘winter garden’ (which Maire used for flower arranging and from which a stair leads directly up to her studio), and between the main staircase and open sun-lit part of the living room into which eyes are drawn as you emerge from behind the vertical poles which screen the stairs.


“Meaningful buildings arise from tradtion and they constitute and continue tradition. […] No architect worthy of his craft works alone; he works with the entire history of architecture ‘in his bones.”

— TS ELIOT

 

Villa Mairea Plans