November 2008

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Perhaps it helps to get on in the world to have a surname beginning with a double ‘A’. It certainly means that books about you are stacked first on the library shelf. But that is not the reason why there is so much published on the 20th-century Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, nor why his work has been so highly regarded and so influential. Most of it is in Finland (although there is a curving brick dormitory block for MIT at Cambridge, Massachusetts) but it has echoes all over Europe, and in England in particular. Perhaps the largest and most sincere tribute to Aalto is the British Library by Colin St John Wilson, one of the most consistent and articulate of his admirers. As well as reproducing some of his stylistic mannerisms, the library has something of Aalto’s thoughtful humanity while lacking the perverse and seemingly arbitrary shapes that often characterise his later buildings.

The show at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, displays the work of Aalto ‘through the eyes of Shigeru Ban’, the Japanese architect who constructs buildings out of cardboard tubes – and, indeed, Aalto’s undulating timber ceilings are recalled in Ban’s constructions in the gallery. The exhibition is a clear, intelligent exposition of models, drawings and photographs, old and new, and includes a superb computer reconstruction of the complex timber interior of the temporary Finnish Pavilion at the 1938-39 New York World’s Fair (Fig. 1) – something that so impressed even that egomaniac Frank Lloyd Wright that he declared Aalto a genius.

Aalto, like Wright, represents that alternative, more humane and pragmatic strand of modernism that now seems so attractive – and so necessary. He came to reject the crude functionalism and flat-roofed aesthetic associated with Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and searched for something richer, less orthogonal, more spatially complex, and humane. In consequence, that Swiss dogmatist Siegfried Giedion called his work ‘irrational’. As with other alternative traditions in 20th-century architecture, such as expressionism, that may be part of its appeal, but Aalto’s rich formal invention had purpose. As the architect Nicholas Ray well puts it in one of the best modern studies of Aalto, published by Yale in 2005, ‘Not only were his buildings compositionally adept and formally elegant, they also gathered to themselves the meaning of the society they served, and appear to be capable of reinterpretation in succeeding decades as symbols of the highest human aspirations.’

Aalto’s earliest buildings are in an austere and mannered Nordic classicism but – like Asplund in Sweden – he soon made a seamless transition from this to a conventional white functionalism, of which the most celebrated manifestation is the Paimio Sanatorium. But, to his credit, Aalto soon found this mechanistic approach lacking in humanity and, by the 1930s, considered that rationalism was not enough or, rather, that it should encompass psychological factors. It was, he later said, ‘my personal, emotional view, that architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology’. This approach soon became evident with regard to furniture, for which Aalto was a prolific and accomplished designer (Fig. 4). He considered that typical Bauhaus furniture made of tubular steel, although rational, was cold and suffered from ‘a flagrant inhumanity’, so he preferred to experiment with warmer and friendlier moulded plywood. Similarly, he took a close interest in the design of light fittings, finding that the typical Bauhaus opal globe ignored the more important question of the quality of light – a concern manifest in all Aalto’s buildings.

This change in thinking, encouraged by the poor performance of functionalist buildings, led to a new manner of design. Aalto’s buildings of the 1940s and 1950s used red brick, copper, timber and ceramic finishes (Fig. 5); they had pitched roofs and exploited a much more free and expressive approach to form. The most famous of these include the Säynätsalo Town Hall (Figs. 2 and 3) and the House of Culture in Helsinki. The qualities evident in these buildings, closely tied to their sites, responsive to human needs and tactile as they are, made a particular appeal to the British, who awarded Aalto the RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal in 1957 – an occasion on which the architect, in his acceptance speech, remarked of the Modern Movement that, ‘like all revolutions, it begins in enthusiasm and ends in dictatorship; it has run off the track’. All this, combined with what is known of his character and his sympathy for ‘the little man’, makes Aalto seem so much more sympathetic than that inhuman would-be dictator, Le Corbusier.

And yet. Despite Aalto’s roots often being traced back to the Arts and Crafts movement and to Classicism, his buildings still have many of the failings of orthodox modernism. Although he employed a rich palette of materials, there is a disturbing flimsiness about his use of them – especially the brick and tile – particularly given the nature of the Finnish climate. (Notoriously, the white marble cladding of the Finlandia Hall, his last masterpiece, failed.) And then there is the seeming arbitrariness of many of his forms, an arbitrariness which, although possibly explicable in psychological terms, is different from the oddness of expressionism and the curvaceousness of art nouveau. In both plan and section, Aalto’s tentative, ungeometrical curves can seem disturbingly subjective. It may be unfair, but given what is well documented about the Finns’ relationship with alcohol during those long, dark nights near the Arctic circle, his smudgy soft pencil sketches can, I fear, be interpreted as the drunken line.

What is clear is that, despite the qualities in his work taken up by admirers abroad, Aalto cannot be fully understood outside the context of his native land. Sir James Richards, who did so much to introduce his work to an English-speaking audience, wrote that, ‘it is impossible to think of him – as one thought of many of the other of modern architecture’s pioneers – as a man who lived with a suitcase ready packed, avid for the opportunity of offering his ideas to any country that would listen’ – which is much to Aalto’s credit. His work was intensely national and responded to the Finnish landscape. I have a huge admiration for Finland, that remote country with a small population speaking an obscure language that has given the music of Sibelius to the world and produced several great architects – not just Aalto but also Eliel Saarinen and that master of granite with the deliciously euphonious name, Sibelius’s architect, Lars Sonck. It is a nation tenacious of the independence it secured from Russia in 1917, which had to fend off the Red Army twice during World War II (eventually losing much of its territory to Soviet Russia in the process, together with Aalto’s early masterpiece, the library at Viipuri, now Vyborg).

But there are aspects of that nationalism which must remain obscure, not least the mystical reverence for the ritual of the sauna, which the non-religious Aalto shared. On my one – intense and memorable – visit to Finland, I visited the famous restaurant in Helsinki designed by Aalto, for lunch with one of his principal admirers and interpreters. I was disconcerted when this distinguished modern Finnish architect revealed that what he liked to do in his spare time was to retreat to the remote countryside and there, in the quiet of that compelling landscape of lakes, islands and forest, to catch live fish and rip them apart with his bare hands, getting covered in blood. Hmm… I realised then that, despite my passion for Sibelius’s music, I would never understand the Finns. And I suspect that I will never really fully comprehend the peculiar architecture of Alvar Aalto.

‘Alvar Aalto through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban’ is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, +44 7638 4141, until 13 May. Catalogue by J. Pallasmaa, et al., ISBN 9781904772644 (cloth), £29.95
(Black Dog Publishing)

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