 Aalto won the first prize with a different design and, never one to waste a good idea, used vast sinuous partitions as the primary spatial device of his masterly design for the New York Fair of 1939.The free forms of nature were seen as symbols of human freedom, and as early as 1926 Aalto remarked that the ‘curving, living, unpredictable line which runs in dimensions unknown to mathematics, is for me the incarnation of everything that forms a contrast in the modern world between brutal mechanicalness and religious beauty in life.The fact that the Finnish word "aalto" means ‘wave’ doubtless added a certain piquancy to his attraction to the motif.