2014 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize Awarded to the Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library with the Central City Alvar Aalto Library, Vyborg

Bonnie Burnham, President of World Monuments Fund (WMF), announced today that the project to restore Alvar Aalto's seminal Viipuri Library in Vyborg, Russia, which took two challenging decades to complete, has been awarded the 2014 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize. The award will be made to the Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library with the Central City Alvar Aalto Library, Vyborg, the Russian Federation.

Designed by Alvar Aalto and constructed between 1927 and 1935 in what was then the Finnish city of Viipuri, the library reflects the emergence of Aalto’s distinctive combination of organic form and materials with the principles of clear functionalist expression that was to become the hallmark of his architecture.