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I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.

Alvar Aalto

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Alvar Aalto
Age: 78 †
Born: 1898
Born: February 3
Died: 1976
Died: May 11
Architect
Designer
Urban Planner
Aalto
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto
City
Easier
Personal
Cities
House
Opera
Tell
Grand
Center
Build

More quotes by Alvar Aalto

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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.
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Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.
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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.
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Beauty is the harmony of purpose and form.
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The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life. This is the only true style in architecture
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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.
Alvar Aalto
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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.
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Our time is so specialised that we have people who know more and more or less and less.
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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.
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God created paper for the purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is at least for me an abuse of paper.
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Architecture is not merely national but clearly has local ties in that it is rooted in the earth.
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Even the smallest daily chore can be humanized with the harmony of culture.
Alvar Aalto
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Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.
Alvar Aalto
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We should work for simple, good, undecorated things
Alvar Aalto
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It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.
Alvar Aalto
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Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.
Alvar Aalto
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We should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.
Alvar Aalto
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Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.
Alvar Aalto
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In almost every task involving form, there are dozens, often hundreds of contradictory elements, which need to be forced to work in harmony by man's will. This harmony can be acheived only through art.
Alvar Aalto
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Objects are made to be completed by the human mind.
Alvar Aalto