Alvar Aalto – A Critical Study by Malcolm Quantrill (1983) assesses Aalto’s architectural development in terms of the Finnish National Romantic movement and the Modern movement in architecture. The study is based on Quantrill’s personal acquaintance with Alvar and Elissa Aalto and his in-depth studies of Aalto’s buildings since 1953.
Malcolm Quantrill (1931–2009) was a British architect, academic and architecture theorist, and one of the most highly esteemed connoisseurs of modern Finnish architecture. His books include Finnish Architecture and the Modernist Tradition (1998) and critical monographs on Juha Leiviskä, Reima Pietilä and Alvar Aalto. Malcolm Quantrill’s Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study (1983) assesses Aalto’s architectural development in terms of the Finnish National Romantic movement and the Modern movement in architecture.
According to Quantrill, Aalto was most concerned about the evolution of traditional architecture rather than the development of an individual style:
By accepting his roots in a national idiom, particularly that of the immediate past, Aalto was able to extend significant design attitudes from the National Romantic movement into his own personal interpretation of modern architecture. For him, the traditions of the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’ must inevitably be rooted in an understanding of known geometries, the exploration of familiar context and the stimulation of vestigial architectural ‘sensations’.
— Malcolm Quantrill, Introduction, p. ix.