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The best way to evaluate a photographer is to look at their portfolio. No matter what is written in my biography, my photographs themselves will tell everything about me. So invite you to watch my favorite and the most complicated project. This shooting became unexpected but much more unusual offer for me.

The Viipuri Library , built from 1927 to 1935, is an internationally acclaimed design by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and one of the major examples of 1920s functionalist architectural design.

It’s one of Alvar Aalto’s best-known early works. Alvar Aalto is one of world’s top symbols of the trendy Scandinavian design style.

During his multi-decade long career Aalto projected more than 200 buildings, but was equally successful as furniture and interior objects designer. Vast number of items that he designed became symbols of Scandinavian modernism and are still in production.

Aalto differed from the first generation of modernist architects (such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier) in his predilection for natural materials.

Like other works constructed from Aalto, this project was the result of a competition for the construction of the Viipuri Library won in 1927, but did not begin to build until 1933. The library was opened in October 1935.

Construction ended in 1935, but its residency in Finland was to be short-lived. The Finnish government officially ceded Viipuri to the Soviet Union by treaty after the Winter War of 1939-40, upon which it was recaptured by Finnish troops during World War II and then retaken by the Soviets in 1944. Located in the center of the fighting and largely evacuated by its population, Viipuri lost well over half of its buildings to war and most that remained were heavily damaged. What was once Finland’s second most populous city suddenly became a ghost town, a Soviet boundary outcropping thereafter named Vyborg.

Against the odds, the library survived the wars. In the late 1950s, a renewed interest in the town led to the first hasty renovation of the building by Soviet architects who allegedly did not have access to Aalto’s original plans.

A restoration begun in the 1990s has recaptured the splendor of the original building.

The two-decade restoration of Alvar Aalto's Viipuri Library in Vyborg, Russia, has been awarded the 2014 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize.

On my photos you can see how the building looks today.

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