“If you’re a Finn, Alvar Aalto is everywhere”, says Juho Haavisto, who is an historian who studies Finnish architecture. In 2024 he curated an exhibition about Aalto’s design of a pool at Villla Mairea, which Aalto did together with his wife Aino in 1939, and how it influenced skateboarding by providing the basis for the pools skated by the Z-Boys. The exhibition also included photos of Arto Saari, who originally comes from the same town as the Finnish architect and once had a pretty well known pool in his backyard. Full circle moment. But to tell the story from the start, we have to go back to the 1930’s, when Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino designed the Villa Mairea.
Petrus Marttila – Frontside Air | Photo: Justus Hirvi
I have a friend named Jussi Takkinen, who is a designer based in Helsinki, and he has been really into Aalto’s work for a long time. He had an excursion at Villa Mairea, and he started to think if that is the first naturally shaped pool ever? About 15 years ago Jussi and I did research, we went through all the stuff we could find about garden architecture or pool architecture, and we couldn’t find any older example with this free flowing shape. Villa Mairea was built on a hill where there was no water. But of course the owners (Mr. & Mrs. Gullichsen, friends of the Aalto’s) wanted to have a sauna so they needed some water to dip in after. That’s when the idea with the pool came up. But they wanted to have this feeling of being in nature so the Aalto’s thought of this natural-shaped pool, like a pond. The original pool is really rough. It’s bumpy as hell because the people who built it didn’t have a clue what they were doing. So it isn’t meant to be skated. There were some photos in Transworld Skateboard Magazine in 2016. They had really good skaters but even for them it was hard to skate and they had to sneak in, because they didn’t have a permit to skate it. We also saw that Thomas Church, who actually started this huge boom of having California style kidney shaped pools in the US with his Donnell Garden, knew Aalto and had met him in Europe before. As far as I know, he never actually went to Villa Mairea, but probably saw the drawings and afterwards the pool was in many magazines. Then in 1948 Donnell Garden was built, which became one of the most published gardening works ever, and all of a sudden, everybody wanted to have a pool like this. And then there was also this technological improvement on how to shape concrete that came at the same time. It was a bit like this upper and middle-class showpiece thing that you had to have this pool in California if you wanted to showcase your wealth. If you look on Google Earth it’s just bonkers how many of these pools you have in California nowadays.
