The great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was temporarily ill when he began work in the late 1920s on one of his early masterpieces, a tuberculosis sanitorium that rises like a sleek white ship from the thick green forests of southern Finland. His power of empathy heightened by his weakened physical condition, Aalto viewed his task in the most appropriate way–through the patient’s eyes.
The ordinary room, as Aalto later wrote, is for a vertical person. But a hospital room is for a horizontal human being, who typically spends weeks in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling helpless. As a result, Aalto’s ceiling is a muted color, not a glaring white. The ceiling is lit indirectly, not with a fixture that shines directly into the patient’s eyes. Radiators send heat onto the patient’s feet, keeping the head cool. The window is placed so the patient can see the surrounding forest.
The effect produced by these details is precisely what it should be: calm, healing, enabling.
The story of the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanitorium shows why Aalto still speaks to us today: He knew that a purely rational approach to architecture, as advocated by the pioneering 20th Century modernists, was not enough. Rationalism had to go beyond reason and function; it had to examine psychology as well as physiology. As Aalto prophesied before his death in 1976, an architecture shaped solely by functionalism was destined to be dysfunctional. From battered public housing projects to bleak downtown office plazas, soulless stretches of the modern city bear him out.
For that and other reasons, the major Aalto retrospective now at the Museum of Modern Art here is doubly timely: Not only does this intelligently assembled, handsomely illustrated exhibition celebrate the 100th anniversary of Aalto’s birth, but it also comes at a historical moment, the dawn of a new millennium, when Aalto’s humanistic impulses ought to matter more than ever.
Through his elegant, understated architecture–libraries, town halls, cultural centers–and in other works ranging from furniture and glassware to regional plans, Aalto synthesized nature and culture, the contemporary and the traditional, the regional and the international. He insisted, above all, that architecture emanate from human values rather than the cold logic of machines.
The strength of MOMA’s exhibition, titled “Aalvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism” and organized by associate architecture curatorPeter Reed, is that it presents Aalto in a straightforward, historical perspective that conveys all the complexity of his 54-year career–and the complexity of the modern movement in architecture.
We see the master modernist as he moves from neo-classical beginnings to a mature, free-form aesthetic, often executed in wood and brick, that departed from the right-angled, steel-and-glass orthodoxy of the International Style. The sophisticated manner with which his architecture addresses contemporary concerns, such as our desire to build in harmony with nature, suggests that his influence may be stronger in the 21st Century than in the 20th.
A built-in problem facing a show like this is that it cannot adequately convey the three-dimensional experience that distinguishes architecture from other arts. Mounting an exhibit about Aalto is doubly difficult because, in contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright, who produced dazzling and easily grasped perspective studies, Aalto worked in more prosaic fashion, cranking out working drawings that are tough for non-architects to comprehend.
But MOMA has compensated by supplementing the core of the show, 150 original sketches and drawings by Aalto, without resorting to kitschy populism.
A sound-proofed theater at the exhibition’s midpoint offers brief video “walkthroughs” of five Aalto buildings. Twenty models of key projects suggest Aalto’s powerful manipulation of interior space. And full-scale constructions, like a wall of bright blue glazed ceramic tiles, illustrate Aalto’s fascination with color and materials. My only quarrel is with the museum’s minimalist wall text, which springs from the museum’s tradition of presenting architecture as art.
Still, the show makes it easy to grasp Aalto’s appeal to the senses, as when the chronologically arranged installation shifts from a black and white palette for Aalto’s neo-classical phase to vibrant, warm colors for his first years as a modernist. You look at a picture of the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanitorium on a bright yellow wall and it’s as if someone had turned on the lights–or the sun. Indeed, Aalto specified a bright yellow linoleum for the stairs of the sanitorium, knowing that the color would bounce back to the ceiling, soothing reclining patients being wheeled around on gurneys.
While Aalto has long been known for buildings that are exquisitely attuned to their natural setting, the show spectacularly illuminates the way nature informs his architecture. Free-form vases in green, yellow and gold that he designed for the Paris International Exhibition of 1937 suggest the contours of the lakes that dot Finland’s landscape. Clusters of thin wooden columns that form a stairway in his renowned Villa Mairea of 1939 poetically evoke the trees in Finland’s forests. The same naturalistic effect is present in the two-tiered, undulating wooden wall Aalto created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Upon witnessing this stunning backdrop for photo murals and product displays, Frank Lloyd Wright (rarely one to praise the competition) proclaimed Aalto a genius.
From early on, then, the show makes us aware how much Aalto differed from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose influence far exceeded Aalto’s (in part because MOMA so vigorously championed Mies). Aalto and Mies both believed in the power of abstraction to reveal aesthetic truth. But whereas Mies subtracted, stripping architecture to its essence, Aalto added, creating human-scaled assemblages of parts that inflect pure geometric forms so they respond to their users and their sites.
Compared with Mies’ revolutionary pavilions of steel and glass, Aalto’s architecture is at once familiar and unique. It incorporates nature and history, emotions and cultural associations, even comfort and decoration (though, in the modern mode, the decoration is abstract). “Architecture must have charm,” Aalto once said–words one never heard coming from the Bauhaus.
Aalto expanded upon these ideals in the postwar years, when his organic aesthetic stood in sharp contrast to the worldwide Miesian hegemony. He was an apostle of appropriateness–doing the right thing in the right place. He could fit in quietly, as in his National Pensions Institute of 1957 (a low-rise brick office complex that is perfectly scaled to the traditional European city). Or he could sound the drums, as in the main building of Helsinki University of Technology of 1966 (a spectacular, wedge-shaped structure containing an auditorium).
True, Aalto’s later monuments, like 1971’s white marble-clad Finlandia Hall, a cultural center, verge on the pompous. But most of his postwar work, such as the Saynatsalo Town Hall of 1952, is grand, not grandiose. The hall proclaims its civic identity by etching a diagonal brick profile into the Northern sky, but scales down to an intimate courtyard where children could romp in the grass.
And so, we may wonder, what if Aalto, instead of Mies, had fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s and landed at the Illinois Institute of Technology to head the architecture school? What if Aalto, not Mies, had been the most influential architect of the 20th Century? How might the world be different?
Perhaps it’s the wrong question. Mies’ right-angled architecture was easy to copy, though hard to match; Aalto’s free-form geometry was far more difficult to imitate. In the end, what separates the two are differences of degree rather than of kind. Both were humanists. But what Aalto did was widen modernism’s field of vision–or, more accurately, deepen it.
“The most difficult problems are naturally not involved in the search for forms for contemporary life,” he said in a 1955 lecture. “It is a question of working our way to forms behind which real human values lie.”
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“Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism” runs at the Museum of Modern Art through May 19.
