Some artists and architects speak to us so directly, immediately, and intensely that an encounter with their work feels more like the realization of a unarticulated feeling. Isamu Noguchi. Louis Kahn. Carlo Scarpa. Joseph Cornell. Andy Goldsworthy.
Alvar Aalto.
My first encounter with an Alvar Aalto space occurred at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, housed in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The mansion’s interior walls are made of intricatily carved teak. I walked up the grand staircase to the second floor landing where large black and white poster’s of Aalto’s work hung on the walls. One poster in particular grabbed my attention. It was a photograph of the Finnish pavillion for the Universal Exposition held in 1939 in New York. The poster showed a space bound on one side by a series horizontally undulating wooden surfaces composed of vertical wooden slats. The surfaces cascaded one atop the other upward at a canted angle towards the ceiling as well as outwards into the space they bounded. These surfaces served as backdrops for juxtaposed photographs of Finnish merchandise, industrial products, and groceries.
The effect was simultaneously riveting, disorienting, and puzzling. While Aalto was a late twentieth century modernist, he divirged from his peers in some profound ways. Prevailing International Style dogma demanded a pallete of stainless steel, terrazzo, glass, corten steel, granite. The grid dictated all spatial manipulation. The idea is to create a context-free sense of cerebral, rarified, detached purity. Think Lever House. Think Seagrams Builiding. Alvar Aalto’s palate includes wood, ceramic tile, plaster. His spaces mix curved and undulating sections with obliquely angled elements. The feeling is intimite, harmonious, inclusive, and highly contextual.
For the last seven years I have been living and working in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. There is a marvelous Aalto jewel here called Nordic House. In 1998 I built a small personal Alvar Aalto shrine based on Nordic House in honor of the centenury year of his birth. Be sure and check out the interactive panoramas (Java support required). It was a sublime pleasure clamboring over every inch of the building shooting pictures. I had the perverse pleasure of actually hugging an Aalto building. Cool.
