 Aalto is at such pains to subvert any clear geometric reading of the structural and spatial organization that it comes as something of a discovery that the whole plan is in fact regulated by a series of squares.This is in contrast to Mies van der Rohe, by whom the structural grid was conceived as a regular counterpoint to the independent spatial disposition of the ‘free plan’.Although this geometry contributes to the formal discipline which underpins the episodic spatial composition, and is emblematic of an ‘ideal’ house, it is only in the dining room that one can directly sense the underlying order.