ACADEMIA Letters Alvar Aalto and Japan: Mutual Discovery of Environmental Integration Architecture Idioms Evgeny Pyshkin, University of Aizu Introduction Though the famous Finnish architect Al var Aalto (1898-1976) never visited Japan, his works include a number of important links to Japanese culture. Nowadays we observe constant public interest in architecture and design exhibitions organized in Japan, which are infuenced by Aalto works and introduce the connotations to Aalto’s rational modernism and environmental design. Particularly, we can recall the 2019 Artek project with a fagship exhibit of the classical Ystävä stool designed by Aalto, the 1986 glass and furniture exhibition organized in Tokyo Axis Gallery, which presented art deco works into the context of exposition space using ceiling panels constructed from recycled paper tubes and referring to the interiors of Aalto’s Viipuri Library, and the project “Al var Aalto Sec ond Na ture” in Tokyo Station Gallery, to cite a few. The curators of these projects introduced Aalto’s iconic designs ranging from furniture and household items to his architectural masterpiece constructions including such conceptual projects as Villa Mairea, Fin lan dia Hall, Jyväskylä Uni ver sity, and many others. Thus, there is an inherent interest of Japanese public to the emblematic works of Finnish modernism and rationalism through the careful investigation of the existing links and mutual dependency between contemporary Western and Japanese cultural traditions in architecture, design, and applied arts. Academia Letters, July 2021 Corresponding Author: Evgeny Pyshkin, pyshe@u-aizu.ac.jp Citation: Pyshkin, E. (2021). Alvar Aalto and Japan: Mutual Discovery of Environmental Integration Architecture Idioms. Academia Letters, Article 1749. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1749. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0