This book reveals Alvar Aalto's creative performance through a series of conversations with the members of his atelier spanning a period of fifty years from 1944 to 1994. Over sixty projects covering the full range of Aalto's work are discussed, giving the reader a sense of Aalto's work that goes far beyond the limited canon of buildings usually discussed in critiques of Aaltc's work. The conversations place these projects in their time, and among the people and milieu that wrought them, so we hear about the buildings not just as art historical artefacts, but also as part of a dynamic, and often contentious, environment, as well as how the atelier itself formed an integral part of Aalto's achievement