In fact, Aalto's almost as famed for his Bentwood armchairs and Savoy vases as his architecture.
However, deep in a Finnish forest, there is a direct descendant: Alvar Aalto's Villa Mairea.
In all respects, it is a fitting cap on Aalto's long and illustrious career.
The museum's permanent exhibition is dedicated to Aalto's buildings and interior design pieces, as well as his personal life.
This wing was also designated to experiment with solar heating, an area where Aalto was way ahead of his time.
Aalto's mission was to build a house as expressive of nature as the one in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, and he succeeded.
The white period is also on display at the nearby Alvar Aalto Museum, which the architect completed a decade later.
In Helsinki, at the Aalto University architecture school, a studio in timber design offers students the possibility for a particular focus.
Consider that the last time you visited the Genius Bar at an Apple store, you sat on one of Aalto's High Stools.
In the early 1960s, Aalto proposed an extensive city plan for this area, including a series of institutional buildings that would ring the bay.
The natural starting place for an Alvo Aalto tour is the Helsinki house where the architect lived and worked for much of his career.
Why, then, with this assured position, is Aalto's name so little known to a public that recognizes Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright without difficulty?
Aalto tinkered with ideas based on vernacular Finnish construction, but in 1938, when images of Fallingwater started being published it graced the cover of "Time" inspiration struck.
It is estimated that Aalto designed more than 500 buildings during his career, of which around 300 were built (in Finland and around the globe).
Why, then, with this assured position, is Alvar Aalto's name so little known to a public that recognizes Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright without difficulty?
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Maire Gullichsen also worked with Aalto and others several years before Villa Mairea to found Artek, which manufactures his furniture and decorative wares to this day.
As Aalto's career progressed, he needed more room to work, and in 1955 he designed a separate atelier nearby, Studio Aalto (also open for tours).
Born in 1898, Alvar Aalto is ranked by many design aficionados as the 20th Century's number one architect -- and not just in the phone book.
Featured on postage stamps and the now obsolete 50-Finnmark note, the marble-clad masterpiece reflects Aalto's late-career interest in Monumentalism and has become a symbol of Finland itself.
Like Wright, Aalto was building a summer home for wealthy clients timber-fortune heirs Harry and Maire Gullichsen, who commissioned a house in Noormarkku, near the west coast of Finland.
Now a museum, the unassuming Villa Aalto is located in Munkkiniemi, a seaside neighbourhood that was barely developed when Aalto designed and built the home in 1935.
Directed by Peter Reed, associate curator of the museum's department of architecture and design, the exhibition celebrates the centennial of Aalto's birth and encompasses a career of more than 50 years.
Farther uptown, an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, "Finnish Modern Design, 1930-1997" (up through June 14), is a perfect complement to the Aalto retrospective.
These walls were a testing ground where Aalto experimented with different textures, materials and designs, playing with brick, stone and ceramic swatches and setting them against various finishes and ornamental plants.
They took advantage of the time difference between California and Finland and held conference calls before the Stanford students went to sleep so the Aalto University students could pick up where the Californians left off.
The Viipuri Library's suspended, undulating, acoustic wood ceiling and roof landscape of skylights not only reappeared in Aalto's own work over the next 40 years, they encouraged a concern for form and light in its purest aspects.
This solid, stunning and serious exhibition of the work of the great Finnish architect, "Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism" (up through May 26), delivers a clear, timeless and incontrovertible message: These are some of the most original and beautiful buildings of our time.
Containing distinct studio and living spaces, the home exemplifies the functionalism of Aalto's early career, with such practical features as a walk-in closet in the bedroom (unusual at that time) and a two-sided china cabinet that is accessible from both the kitchen and the dining room.
Anyone who doubts that this has been a century of spectacular architectural achievement as well as radical technological change need only visit the Alvar Aalto show that has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art here for evidence that shatters the myth that modern architecture failed.
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