and was its president from 1963 to 1968. From 1925 to 1956 he was a member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. In 1960 he received an honorary doctorate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Works Aalto's career spans the changes in style from (Nordic Classicism) to purist International Style Modernism to a more personal, synthetic, and idiosyncratic Modernism. Aalto's wide field of design activity ranges from large-scale projects such as city planning and architecture to more intimate, human-scale work in interior design, furniture and glassware design, and painting. It has been estimated that during his entire career Aalto designed over 500 individual buildings, approximately 300 of which were built. The vast majority of them are in Finland. He also has a few buildings in France, Germany, Italy, and the USA. Aalto's work with wood was influenced by early Scandinavian architects. His experiments and bold departures from aesthetic norms brought attention to his ability to make wood do things not previously done. His techniques in the way he cut beech wood, for example, and his ability to use plywood as a structural element while at the same time exploiting its aesthetic properties, were at once technically innovative and artistically inspired. Other examples of his boundary-pushing sensibility include the vertical placement of rough-hewn logs at his pavilion at the Lapua expo, a design element that evoked a medieval barricade. At the orchestra platform at Turku and the Paris expo at the World Fair, he used varying sizes and shapes of planks. Also at Paris (and at Villa Mairea), he utilized birch boards in a vertical arrangement. His Vyborg Library, built in what was then Viipuri (it became Vyborg after Soviet annexation in 1944), is acclaimed for its stunning ceiling, with its undulating waves of red-hearted pine (which grows in the region ). In his roofing, he created massive spans (155-foot at the covered stadium at Otaniemi), all without tie rods. In his stairway at Villa Mairea, he evokes the feeling of a natural forest by binding beech wood with withes into columns. Aalto claimed that his paintings were not made as individual artworks but as part of his process of architectural design, and many of his small-scale "sculptural" experiments with wood led to later larger architectural details and forms. These experiments also led to a number of patents: for example, he invented a new form of laminated bent-plywood