Aalto and Australia

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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.



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.

Aalto Centenary Connections
  • For general material on ‘Aalto 100’ happenings, first contact the Finnish National Tourist Board in Sydney, ph (02) 9290 1950 or fax (02) 9290 1981.
  • For information on tours by foot, cycle and coach, try Eevaliisa Hannukainen, a private guide in Helsinki who is contracted to the Alvar Aalto Centenary Committee. She is leading a group of British architects on a tour arranged by Global Link Travel, London. Eevaliisa: ph +358 9682 0122, fax +358 967 2630.
  • Architecture Australia has a kit of press releases about key events. Ph (03) 9646 4760 or (03) 9646 4918.
  • New York’s Museum of Modern Art will be showing an Aalto retrospective from 22 February to 26 May.
  • The vital take-away book is Michael Trencher’s The Alvar Aalto Guide, Princeton University Press, 1996.
  • Allocate 7-10 days to see the principal works. The Villa Mairea, still a private home, could be difficult to visit.

Davina Jackson recently toured Aalto sites in Finland as a guest of the Finnish National Tourist Board, Finnair (which flies to Helsinki from Singapore) and the Sokos hotel chain.

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Published online: 1 Jan 1998

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