Alvar Aalto Living room of Mäntylä - WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTESeries

Series Window Behaviorology on Nordic Architecture

Alvar Aalto
Living room of Mäntylä

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory (Institute of Science Tokyo)

14 May 2024

Keywords: Alvar Aalto; Architecture; Columns

This is the living room of a house designed for a senior engineer at the Tampella factory in Inkeroinen, an area that thrived on the wood industry. An array of 20 square double-layered windows covers the full width of the south-facing room. The outer windows are fixed, but the inner windows can be opened for cleaning. The two columns of windows at the edges are hinged at the sides, and the three middle columns are hinged at the top. There is a radiator built into the sill, which has slits to let the warm air flow through to the windows.

Living room of Aalto’s Mäntylä
Alvar Aalto
Inkeroinen, 1938

This article is an excerpt from “Windows Stranding the Ethnological and Industrial Networks,” a joint research project concerning windows and the behaviors around them done in collaboration with Institute of Science Tokyo’s Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory.