for prestigious state public buildings, in Finland and abroad. This included two competitions for the Finnish Parliament building in 1923 and 1924, the extension to the University of Helsinki in 1931, and the building to house the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1926–27. Aalto's first church design to be completed, Muurame church, illustrates his transition from Nordic Classicism to Functionalism. This was the period when Aalto was most prolific in his writings, with articles for professional journals and newspapers. Among his most well-known essays from this period are "Urban culture" (1924), "Temple baths on Jyväskylä ridge" (1925), "Abbé Coignard's sermon" (1925), and "From doorstep to living room" (1926). Early career: functionalism The shift in Aalto's design approach from classicism to modernism is epitomised by the Viipuri Library in Vyborg (1927–35), which went through a transformation from an originally classical competition entry proposal to the completed high-modernist building. His humanistic approach is in full evidence in the library: the interior displays natural materials, warm colours, and undulating lines. Due to problems related to financing, compounded by a change of site, the Viipuri Library project lasted eight years. During that time, Aalto designed the Standard Apartment Building (1928–29) in Turku, the Turun Sanomat Building (1929–30), and the Paimio Sanatorium (1929–32), which he designed in collaboration with his first wife Aino Aalto. A number of factors contributed to Aalto's shift towards modernism: his increased familiarity with international trends, facilitated by his travels throughout Europe; the opportunity to experiment with concrete prefabrication in the Standard Apartment Building; the cutting-edge Le Corbusier-inspired formal language of the Turun Sanomat Building; and Aalto's application of both in the Paimio Sanatorium and in the ongoing design for the library. Although the Turun Sanomat Building and Paimio Sanatorium are comparatively pure modernist works, they carried the seeds of his questioning of such an orthodox modernist approach and a move to a more daring, synthetic attitude. It has been pointed out that the planning principle for Paimio Sanatorium – the splayed wings – was indebted to the Zonnestraal Sanatorium (1925–31) by Jan Duiker, which Aalto visited while it was under construction. While these early Functionalist bear hallmarks of influences from Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other key modernist figures of central Europe, Aalto nevertheless started to show his individuality in a departure from such norms with the introduction of organic references. Through Sven Markelius, Aalto became a member