Architecture
Finn ishness
Malcolm Quantrill
Sitting in the sauna he had designed by the lakeside at Eliel Saarincn's famous home
and studio 'Hvittriisk' last January, Pro fessor ,Reima Pietilii, the distinguished Finnish architect and critic, posed this ques tion: 'Why is Finnish architecture so good?'
The answer he gave me was, because it conformed to the 'Christmas card syndrome': 'The Finnish year is mostly winter; the Finnish winter is mostly snow.
Any view of Finnish architecture in winter therefore has three metres of snow in the foreground. Then the sky and the trees are also full of snow. And in the middle of all this snow is just one metre of Finnish architecture. Therefore, because everyone is focusing on this little bit, the windows and the doors, It just has to be very good.'
From 1928, when he was only thirty, until the end of the last decade, a period of forty. years, the undisputed master of that quality in Finnish architecture was Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto. Beginning when he was only twenty-seven in the neo-classical manner of Czar Alexander l's German-born architect Karl Ludwig Engel, Alvar Aalto created an entirely new international style. At first this was rooted in the so-called international Style-of the 1920s and '30s, but he went on to make a unique contribution to modern architecture. He achieved this by passing over the graph-paper diagrams of witless . modernists and reconnecting Finland to the ethos of European culture. He rediscovered the theatricality that characterised the Baroque inventions of Bernini kind BorrOmini. Aalto died in May 1976 at the age of seventy-eight and a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his life's work opened recently in Helsinki. A worse day for the opening could scarcely have been chosen, for it came the day after the presidential election. Therefore, this truly important event, when Helsinki became again — as it had been between 1948 and 1968 — the world capital of architecture, was largely lost on the press and the ordi
nary Finnish citizen. • Aalto really was a household name: the tram-conductor, a street-sweeper, your beautiful and normally ungregarious ladybarber, would all tell you how important he was to the expression of the quality of which they are all so proud — `Finnishness'. And Aalto's great success both at home and abroad lies in his creation of an architectural language which overcame our difficulty in coming to grips with spoken Finnish. Already, before the Second World War, he demonstrated how the identity of a nation lay in its cultural cohesiveness and integrity. His aim therefore was to create a national rather than a personal style. But he had also witnessed Elie! Saarinen's failure to achieve a lasting influence through the obscurity of a National Romantic expression (nothing odd will last, as Johnson had it). Aalto saw his responsibility, therefore, was to combat the petty prejudices of national boundaries and speak an architectural language that had the comprehensiveness and the universality of, say, English. He achieved this above all with his sense of humanity.
Aalto built not only in his native Finland but was invited to do so in the United States, in Germany, in Denmark, even in France and Italy; but never in England. Our great opportunity to invite him was when St Catherine's College, Oxford, was designed but our rationalists opted for the matterof-factness of Jacobsen in preference to the sensitivity of Aalto. Yet, his beautiful little town-hall complex at Saynatsalo, for example, showed him to be a master of collegiate scale and character. And Leslie Martin paid homage to these qualities in his extension to Caius College, Cambridge, which is directly derived from Aalto's Saynatsalo building.
It is our loss that we possess no example of Aalto's unique genius. It was certainly not on grounds of ignorance that we failed to invite him to make a contribution here. Sir James Richards, the former editor of the Architectural Review, has been championing Aalto's work in this country since the mid-'thirties. Fortunately for British architecture the Finns have a more generous view of the work of our own architects in the post-war period. The opening of the Helsinki exhibition was chosen as the occasion to present the Alvar Aalto Medal to Liverpool-born James Stirling.
The award of the Aalto Medal to Stirling marks the first time it has gone out of Scan dinavia. And also, as a tribute to the very high place that British architecture holds in the minds of our Finnish colleagues; the first showing of the Aalto Exhibition outside Finland will be here at the Royal Academy from mid-September to mid-October. Since the bookmakers are currently favouring an October or November general election in this country, Alvar Aalto has a chance here of getting some attention before we are con fronted by the 'Callaghan syndrome'. The Royal Academy's opportunity to make amends for our exclusion of Aalto's work during his lifetime has been eagerly seized by its architect-President Sir Hugh Casson and there is already intensive architectural activity between Burlington House and the Finnish Museum of Architecture in Helsinki,
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