This is an auspicious year to visit Finland, the relentlessly beautiful homeland of
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (1898-1976). Through coming months, Finnish cultural
organisations are launching new books, exhibitions, architectural tours and
memorabilia to celebrate the birth centenary of an architect who ranks as one of
the most influential of the 20th century—yet is still described as ‘unsung’.
Aalto’s key projects have been a vital source for some of Australia’s most resonant
works of architecture since the late 1950s. Elements of his tuberculosis sanitorium
at Paimio (1928-33) are visible in various antipodean hospital blocks and apartment
towers. Dozens of east coast beach houses owe debts to the Pacific-Japanese
interiors, lawn-pool court and timber batten plays of his Villa Mairea at Noormarkku
(1937-39). And how might our institutional buildings of the 1960s and 1970s have
been designed without the precedents of Aalto’s town and university complexes at
Seinäjoki (1958-87), Jyvväskalä (1951-76) and Saynätsälo (1950-52)? It has been suggested that Aalto’s influences on Australian architecture before the
1970s were often indirect—that the Aaltoesque elements of some local projects
came second-hand from Architectural Reviewpictorials of tributes designed by
his acolytes in Britain. Certainly Aalto had many English disciples during the 1960s:
so many that a London architectural journal recently felt it necessary to cite Aalto-admiration
as a distinguishing characteristic of the UK profession’s current old
guard. It has always been a priority for most Australian architects to travel to
Britain, France and Italy before going to Scandinavia.
Even if they hadn’t seen his work personally, leading Australian architects were—
and continue to be—inspired by Aalto’s brand of expressive pragmatism. However
few have captured, or even really pursued, his dynamic fusions of irregular and
orthodox geometries in plan and form, and his climate/site-responsive layering of
sections. For example, Glenn Murcutt, Australia’s winner of the Alvar Aalto Medal,
visited Finland early in his career and used Aalto-designed furniture in many of his
houses, but took Mies on board as the modernist to inspire his early thrust.
The Australian who most boldly brings Aalto up to date is Peter Wilson in Germany,
whose Münster public library and WLV office building—designed with Julia Bolles-Wilson—
appear to snap-freeze the maestro’s organic humanism and sneak it onto
the next technological edge. Yet this supposition is resisted by Wilson, who says his
firm is far more influenced by the productions of Denmark’s Arne Jacobsen than
by Aalto’s works.
Why do Australians look towards the Artic Circle for insights relevant to a “critical
regionalism”, as Frampton phrased it, in the sub-tropics? How could Aalto’s tactics
for snatching reluctant rays of sun to brighten snow-cloaked buildings in birch groves be found useful by antipodeans needing verandahs and Venturi effects to
alleviate scorching summers by the beach?
It’s necessary to walk through the works to learn why Aalto’s strategies of
ventilation, skylighting, battened sunshading, practical fenestration and indoor-to-outdoor
hierarchies are appropriate for Australia.
Visiting central Finland—especially the areas around Kuortane and Alajärvi, the
villages where he was born and raised—makes it clear how much his houses
advanced the living standards of their occupants, and why his public buildings
continue to be cherished by the communities which built them. His portfolio of more than 100 works remains remarkably intact compared with the productions
of most of his International Style contemporaries—surely a sign that several
generations of his consumers think he got it right.
Before Aalto began designing buildings involving open planning, daylighting and
courtyards, many Finnish families lived either in two-storey gabled timber cottages
or in lakeside log cabins with one smoky cooking-living-sleeping room that might
be shared with the animals. After a handful of early projects which reinterpreted the Grecian sensibilities of Norway’s Gunnar Asplund, Germany’s Frederick Schinkel and a Russian who built imperialist monuments in Helsinki, Carl Ludwig Engel, Aalto turned towards modernism and joined the manifesto writers of CIAM–then began to diverge, along with Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and hans Scharoun, from the planar aesthetics and authoritarian rationales of Mies and Corb and their faction. With a surname that translates to mean ‘wave’ in English, it would be disappointing if Aalto had conformed to right angles. that sense of destiny is strentthened by his tale (in an essay named ‘The White Table’) that he used to sit as a toddler under the drafting table of his surveyor father; copying the meandering map contours which later appeared in the vases designed for his 1937 fitout of the Savoy restaurant in Helsinki.
Despite a lyceum education, Aalto’s upbringing in religious rural villages obviously triggered a resistance to industrial-age architectural doctrines which ignored the dependence of country people on a church-centered spiritual and community life faciliated by handwork. The emotional impact of that triad of anthropological factors is felt in all his key works: even the most sophisticated of his civic and cultural buildings.
To conclude with an oblique
comparison, Aalto’s geometric
gymnastics and landscape-conscious
site-planning has an ancient parallel in
the Islamic medressas and public
ensembles of Samarkand, Bukhara and
Khiva; three central Asian desert cities
which are now celebrating their 2500th
anniversaries. Sure, it’s a leap to link
Seinäjoki’s buoyant democracy with
the awesome monoliths of the
Registan. But don’t discount some
freaky cosmic connection, because
historians and linguists are certain that
the Finns draw their ancestry from
nomadic tribes along the silk routes. |
TopAalto’s Villa Mairea, 1938 Above Clares’ Thrupp and Summers house, 1986 Kerry and Lindsay Clare
For us the most significant lessons to
be learnt from studying the work of
Aalto, from visiting his works and home
ground, are how he respected
technology, acknowledged art as
inseparable from life, how he was
disciplined by landscape and climate
and responded to culture and society.
Scandinavian architects have been able
to deal with such issues without
becoming sentimental or provincial, and
with their prime motivation being the
quality of habitation.
Above Corrigan’s RMIT Building 8,1994 Peter Corrigan
In the summer of 1939, Aalto visited
New York to supervise the erection of
his World Fair pavilion. He travelled
widely and lectured throughout the USA.
He was lionised. After four months,
Aalto returned home and Hitler declared
World War II while diminutive Finland
was attacked by Stalin’s Soviet Army.
The Finns beat them off after five
months fighting in the snow.
Aalto knew who he was.
Top Aalto’s Säynätsato Town Hall, 1952 Above AMW’s Newcastle Student Union 1965-71 Ken Woolley
I was young and my work was
reflecting an influence from a number
of architects at that time—Mies van der
Rohe, Le Corbusier … and Aalto. Those
influences alone are the background to
a new brutalism which emerged in that
period … there was a synthesis of
attitudes in which I found a kind of a
style. I wasn’t so interested in Aalto’s
use of detail—although you’ll tend to
see the use of brick, copper and
wood—but I appreciated his ability to
formally resolve what would normally
be regarded as clashes. He was game
to let different geometries come
together and could make the resolution convincing at a time in architecture
when everything was subordinated to
the formal entity.
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Top Aalto’s Finlandia Hall, 1962-71 Above ARM’s St Kilda Town Hall, 1995 Howard Raggatt
Aalto is an architect’s architect … bold
in that Nordic sense. Our work with him
is part of our pursuit of the copy as a
critical strategy. We’re interested in
testing him down here—not with an
‘I’m in love with Aalto’ attitude but with
the idea of testing his work against the
local. This was the rationale behind our
Finlandia Hall incorporations at the St
Kilda Town Hall. In doing so, we found
out an interesting thing … he’s one of
the few architects whose buildings have
such iconic quality in both plan and
elevation that our critical translations
and quotations remain recognisable,
and the erudite observer is allowed a
very disconcerting deja vu. Few
architects have constructed such power
of recognition. We love him because he
puts up a good fight.
TopAalto’s Seinäjoki Town Centre, 1960 Above Bolles-Wilson’s Munster Library, 1995 Peter Wilson
Our connection with Aalto is probably
second-hand. Our work certainly has
strong Scandinavian influences but we
have focused on Arne Jacobsen and
Gunnar Asplund. At Münster Library we
used some details taken from
Jacobsen’s blueprints for the town hall
at Aarhus in Denmark … built during the
war [1938] when there were very few
materials available but lots of time.
I am not familiar with Aalto’s Seinäjoki
City Centre [from 1958] that you
mention and I was disappointed with
the few projects I recently saw in
Helsinki—including his university library
and lecture hall. I expected Aalto to be
more pure. His handworkmanship is
almost mannered. But you do sense
that his references are from nature
rather than urban forms. In Scandinavia,
one reads paths in forests as being
architectural—which one doesn’t
do in Europe.
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