03/27/2025
The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is known for a lot of things. What’s lesser known, though, is that much of the work that made him famous was crafted alongside or with the help of his wife, Aino Aalto, who was a talented architect and designer in her own right. A new monograph is attempting to change that, though. In the book, the pair’s grandson, Heikki Aalto-Alanen, uses private correspondence discovered in an old suitcase in the attic of the couple’s Helsinki home to piece their history together. The visual biography, Aalto-Alanen writes in the intro, is a look at the couple’s love story through the lens of their work. See everything he found in that suitcase: https://www.dwell.com/article/the-complicated-love-story-of-modernist-design-duo-aino-and-alvar-aalto-ed3baba2