35 Quotes by Alvar Aalto

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We should work for simple, good, undecorated things

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.

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

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.