The Maestro's Late Works

By Philip Herrera

A current listing of the world's leading architects would certainly include such globally known powers as Japan's Kenzo Tange, Italy's Pier Luigi Nervi, England's James Stirling, and I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson, among some others, in the U.S. Another entry, however, would have to be Alvar Aalto of Finland, who, at 77, may well still be the most original designer building anywhere. Aalto? He is scarcely a household name in the U.S., because he has done little work in America.* But "the maestro," as he is often called in his native land, remains a seer with a special transnational influence--one that is characteristically not so much doctrinaire as moral.

Aalto is utterly unconcerned with architectural movements or polemics. He deflects theoretical discussions with the imperious reply: "I build." For him, every structure poses its own questions of balance between man, machines and nature. Every answer is therefore fresh, poetic, charged with the identity of its architect. Mies van der Rohe had this quality; so did Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Now Aalto, whom Wright called "a genius" 40 years ago, stands alone.

Aalto once described to some students his approach to a tuberculosis sanatorium he had designed in 1929 at Paimio, in southern Finland's pine forests. Aalto considered how each occupant, from the director on down, not only would use the building but also might feel about it. The janitor, he decided, should have his own closet, not just an impersonal clothes hook. When it came to the hospital rooms, Aalto put himself in the place of the patients. The result: designs for windows that would admit fresh air but not drafts, wash basins that would not splash, and chairs of resilient wood so that convalescents would not touch cold steel frames.

"The most difficult problems do not occur in the search for form," Aalto says, "but rather in the attempt to create forms that are based on real human values." The bold, simple form of the Paimio sanatorium thrust Aalto into the vanguard of European functionalism in the 1930s. But that straightforwardness gradually changed as he won other commissions for everything from furniture to factories to whole towns, mostly in Finland. Over the years, his buildings have grown ever more intricate and idiosyncratic, taking odd, seemingly arbitrary shapes. But their genesis--profound thoughtfulness leavened by the free play of emotion--has never changed.

Humble Brick. Nor has his sensuous joy in handling his sites and materials. Aalto's complex of buildings for the technical university at Otaniemi, with its mighty play of geometric masses, is also a hymn to the humble brick. In Seinajoki, he daringly faced the town hall with curved blue tiles that soften the structure's abrupt angles and change hue from blue to gray to black, depending on the light. In his recently opened North Jutland Museum of the Arts in Aalborg, Denmark, Aalto confronted the most difficult challenge in museum design: natural lighting. Most architects avoid the issue by putting up blank walls of solid masonry or tinted glass. But Aalto allows sunlight to pour through high windows, then tames it by bouncing it off curved structural beams so that the light diffuses evenly over the interior walls. The Aalborg design reflects one of Aalto's guiding convictions: man must always stay in contact with nature.

This idea is carried even farther in Aalto's latest building, Finlandia House, Helsinki's concert and convention center, where the European security conference was held (TIME, Aug. 4). Standing alone in a bayside park, it looks like a beached iceberg--an immense, rugged structure clad in snowy white marble. On one side, the building rides gently over some rocky ledges (which in the U.S. would probably have been dynamited away); on another, it retreats in scalloped curves from nearby trees.

The subtle homage to nature's irregularity continues on the inside too: there is hardly a right angle to be found in the entire building. Indeed, the interior layout seems so complicated as to be al most recklessly baroque. Yet Aalto holds off excess by designing every light fixture, door handle and stair tread to fit the whole -- and suit the user.

Surprise and Grace. Aalto's downtown architecture is as comfortable with city life as his freestanding works are with nature. There are half a dozen recent Aalto buildings in central Helsinki that seem as austere and reserved as the surrounding streetscape -- until one notices the little surprises and grace notes. On one shaded facade of an Aalto-designed bookstore, for example, the architect framed every window with white marble to give the cheery illusion of more light than actually exists. His U-shaped headquarters for the Enso Gutzeit paper company steps down to a startling courtyard between its wings. But Aalto deliberately turned the building's bland flat sides to its 18th century neoclassic neighbors, matching their cor nice lines and echoing their fac,ade patterns. Only through such respect for place, Aalto seems to say, can cities keep their harmony, continuity and zest.

The old master's health is frail now. Yet he remains active, employing 16 architects to work on new projects in Finland, Brasilia, Tel Aviv and Eau Claire, Wis., where Aalto is planning a center for the Midwest Institute of Scandinavian Culture. Always reclusive, he gets hundreds of letters daily but answers none of them himself. In a recent interview, however, he received his visitors graciously in his sun-filled Helsinki studio. Surrounded by wispy, mysterious sketches -- the first stirrings of new designs -- he was far more interested in asking questions than answering them. Questioned about a house he had created for the Finnish composer Joonas Kokkonen, Aalto merely shrugged: "It's very small, very simple."

Kokkonen sees it differently. He still treasures Aalto's tablecloth sketch of a piano. "Which way do you walk around it?" the architect asked. Then he designed the composer's studio around the piano, creating an asymmetrical space that culminates in a high window looking out on nearby treetops and the Finnish sky -- inspiration without distraction. The layout of the rest of the house followed from there. As a fee, the architect laughingly asked for two bars of music. But Kokkonen sat down in his new studio, wrote a cello concerto and dedicated it to Alvar Aalto.

*A dormitory for M.I.T., a library for the Mount Angel Abbey in St. Benedict, Ore., and a conference room for the Institute of International Education in Manhattan.

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