Ten years before her death, Aino Marsio-Aalto entered a competition to design the Finish Pavilion at the New York’s Fair, where she got third place. The first and second places were assigned to only one architect’s proposals: Aino’s husband. She eventually collaborated with him in the exhibition. However, the truth is that Aino would never be placed on the same level as her husband, Alvar. Only nearly seventy years after her death is she finally arising behind the shadow of the great Alvar Aalto. 

Born in Finland in 1894, Aino Marsio-Aalto had a liberal childhood in a rapidly urbanizing country. Her carpenters and joiners neighbours were her first masters, and later in her life, she entered the Institute for Technology in Helsinki, where she met her future husband, Alvar Aalto. The program she studied in this Institute “encouraged an understanding of architecture as a positive societal tool and a holistic process” (Sellers, 2017) that requires consideration and attention to every detail.

Aino graduated in 1920, and four years later she joined Alvar’s architecture firm. After marrying in the same year, they both got to visit many countries of Europe, where they met life-long friends and colleagues, such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. 

Already returned to Finland, the Aaltos set up their joint office and combined the European avant-garde ideas with natural materials, warm colours and undulating lines. Aino’s unpretentious and practical mind was a good balance to her husband, Alvar’s, spontaneity and unpredictability. She brought “functionalism to Alvar’s spirited imagination, she economized around his extravagance and kept strict control over the office administration”. (Sellers, 2017) Without her calm and punctuality, they could not have ensured as many competition entries or finished projects.

In 1935 she became a co-founder of the design company Artek (art plus technology), which aim was to “unite commercial and cultural ambitions through the sale and promotion of a modern culture of living”. (Sellers, 2017)

Along with her death in 1949, her name also started to be forgotten. Artek, that became one of her greatest contributions to the twentieth century, defended Aino’s creative and commercial approaches and values, which are still valid in our days.

Marianne Goebl, the current managing director of Artek, states that “Aino Aalto is a role model of the modern professional woman, which strongly resonated with our current (mainly female) Artek team.” (Sellers, 2017)