Architecture
Aalto appeal
Alan Powers
To judge a building, there is no substi- tute for seeing the real thing. To see the most important works of the Finnish archi- tect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), a visit to Helsinki is not sufficient, and only a four- or five-day trip to various parts of Finland will do. If your itinerary during the next month includes New York instead, there is nonetheless a rewarding encounter to be had at second hand with this 'Master of the Modern Movement', a phrase which must be placed in deliberate post-modern quote marks, in the exhibition Alvar Aalto, Between Humanism and Materialism at the Museum of Modern Art until 19 May. Fail- ing that, a renewed interest is arising in Aalto's centenary year, and will include an exhibition on his 'House of Culture' in Helsinki at the RIBA Heinz Gallery in November. The centenaries of Aalto's older companions in the modernist pan- theon (particularly Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe) were burdened by a greater or lesser degree of guilt-by-associ- ation at the time, but Aalto, a warm per- sonality, a joker and drinker, has a more immediate appeal, although it is difficult to convey just what makes him special.
A non-specialist may recognise Aalto's plywood furniture, like the circular stool with three legs which used to sell for half a crown in London before the war, after a slightly unlikely initial launch at Fortnum and Mason's in 1934 (current price for a new stool is more like £75). His irregular glass flower vase, originally called 'the Eskimo woman's leather breeches', is almost as well-known. Aalto's buildings were constructed between the 1920s and the 1980s (when his Opera House at Essen I see you've acquired a Van Dyke.'
was posthumously completed) and include a range of types, from institutions and fac- tories to simple houses and saunas. From an early start in the Nordic Classical man- ner of the 1920s, Aalto leapt into the mod- ernist wave which swept the Baltic in 1930 and had a stimulating douche of cold ratio- nality, but his natural warm-bloodedness soon returned. By the mid-1930s, he was always popular among English architects, and some, such as Sir Colin St John Wil- son, are happy to acknowledge Aalto's strong influence on them.
Aalto is a good companion in the effort to place at arm's length the issue of what is or is not modern architecture, a question which has occupied far too much effort for far too long. The title of the Moma exhibi- tion comes from a phrase of Aalto's own. The place between (or perhaps, more right- ly, beyond) Humanism and Materialism is Nature, which Aalto understood and appreciated with a fine instinct. When asked by a Danish journalist what a city should be like, he replied, 'You should not be able to go from home to work without passing through a forest.' Aalto's under- standing of nature was deeper even than the many metaphorical references to trees, forests and lakes that critics have found in his buildings. He understood the otherness of nature, the impossibility of reducing truth to a formula, the need to play and enjoy rather than to reduce and refine. This is in no way contradictory to the aims of modern architecture and indeed has been manifested by many who are consid- ered among the 20th-century 'greats', yet such an approach remains somehow under suspicion. His instinctive feeling for land- scape, for producing an individual solution adapted to place and circumstance was the natural result of his attentive awareness of the immaterial and non-human realities of the world. Through Aalto's eyes we can revisit the 'Modernist project' in a refreshed mood and perhaps recapture some of its original careless rapture.
It helped Aalto that Finland was, and remains, a country with a high general standard of design, which visitors to New York can appreciate through the exhibition Finnish Modern Design, Utopian ideals and everyday realities at the Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts (until 14 June). This places Aalto in a con- text, filling in the background rather than diminishing his glory. It shows how hand- making remained in harmony with industri- alism, giving to objects as well as buildings an inherent sense of quality. It reinforces that very anti-Cartesian equation between the local and the universal, showing how appreciation of local differences is the nec- essary precondition to any depth of feeling or understanding.
Finnish design seems in many ways root- ed in a special cultural experience, rein- forced by the country's sufferings during and after the war. In New York or in any other cultural capital, national differences can too easily be commodified and sani- tised. This was perhaps the chief shortcom- ing of the Aalto exhibition, which never quite summoned up the experience of an actual building and stayed well within its compound of good taste, helped though it was by neat models and videos of buildings in pine forests with soundtracks of bird- song. There is no substitute for the real thing.
Previous page
