Alvar Aalto’s glass designs.

The Aalto vase or the Savoy vase has been referred to as The World's Most Famous Glass Object. Designed for the Karhula-Iittala glass competition in 1936, it has been in continuous production since that time. The competition submission was made under the working title of Eskimo Woman's Leather Breeches. Aalto's glass collection was presented for the first time at the Paris World's Fair in 1937 in the Finnish Pavilion designed by Aalto. In the same year he also used his vase in the Savoy Restaurant in Helsinki, for which Aalto had done the design. 

Aalto's free form glass designs are intimately connected to the themes that recur in his architecture. The use of free, organic curving forms has been  characteristic of Aalto since the 1930'ies. These forms have at times been seen as expressing the outlines of Finnish lakes and forest ponds. Allusions have also been made to Aalto's early childhood impressions. His father was a land surveyor and young Alvar would climb up on a chair to observe the typographic contour maps on his father's table. Their winding lines have become part of Aalto's vocabulary and in some respects his signature. It is interesting that the Finnish word aalto means a wave or a ripple. The Aalto vase is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and many other museums.

The Aalto glass collection is a beautiful fulfilment of the guiding principles of Aalto’s work: to create harmony in people's lives in such a way that the buildings, its objects and surroundings are in harmony with each other.