The Paimio Chair

Alvar Aalto - The Paimio Chair

The Paimio chair

 Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino won the architectural competition in 1928 to build a 

tuberculosis sanitarium near the Finnish city of Paimio. They were also commissioned to do the building’s interior design.

The Aaltos designed several different types of furniture and lamps for the Paimio Sanatorium (1929). The best known of the furniture pieces is his cantilevered birch wood Paimio Chair, which was specifically designed for tuberculosis patients.

The Paimio chair was designed also to make it easier for patients to breath. Aalto argued that the angle of the back of the chair was the perfect angle for the patient to breathe most easily.

In my opinion, this approach combines the design values of health, ergonomic and comfort, was very advanced for that time, when there was not awareness to combine medicine and design.

Wassily Chair

The design of the chair have been influenced by Marcel Breuer's metal Wassily Chair. However, instead of using the traditional metal tubes, Aalto wanted something warmer and more human for the furniture. “For much of this nickel and chrome-plated steel furniture seemed to us to be psychologically too hard for an environment of sick persons. We thus began working with wood, using this warmer and suppler material in combination with practical structures to create an appropriate furnishing style for patients".

I believe that besides the warmness of the wood, the Paimio chair's shape is more organic and seems more natural, which I find it more appropriate for the environment of sick people.

I think that Aalto succeeded to combine functionalism, beauty and at the same time taking care for the patients' well-being.

The technique to create the Paimio chair was advanced to that time, it is made of bent laminated veneer and it is the result of numerous bending trials using birch wood that is in part naturally damp.

The degree of bending of the wood tested the technical limits of that time.

Besides the advanced approach for health and technique, the chair is also financially frugal. As birch wood is plentiful throughout Finland and the production method required no expensive technology, it was possible to manufacture the chair at relatively low cost.

Despite its lack of upholstery, the springy seat afforded comfortable sitting, and was suited for modern interiors with its contemporary, natural, and unobtrusive form. The Paimio chair shows a perfect balance between abstraction, tradition, natural materials and organic form.