Architecture and Design
Aino and AlvarAalto, Finnish Pavilion in the New YorkWorld’s Fair, main display wall, 1939. Ezra Stoller, r ESTO. From Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics by Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen.
alism and architecture rooted in Nordic tradition to his embracing of the modern world and the development of a rich symbolic language. Pelkonen attributes Aalto’s openness to new ideas to his bilingual, liberal family, who despised nationalist extremism. She observes his constant search for new places and new people and his negotiation with changing political situations. She explains the context in which he lived: Finland’s independence from Russia, in 1917 while he was a student; its division into Finnish and Swedish speaking regions; his move in 1927 from the small, traditional Finnish-speaking town of Jyva¨skyla¨, where he opened his first office, to the more modern city of Turku with its predominantly Swedish culture. While Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier both lacked formal architectural education, Aalto attended a conventional school of architecture and came under the sway of several outstanding teachers and architects. He read widely and responded in essays and articles. Compared with Wright’s and Le Corbusier’s angry and scathing condemnation of the conventional architecture of his time, we find Aalto reacting critically, in a balanced way, to the ideas and buildings of the more progressive architects of his own country and neighbouring Germany. He was
inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of European unity in Beyond Good and Evil, and by Richard CoudenhoveKalergi’s condemnation of national separatism in Pan Europa (1924) as well as the ideas of the cosmopolitan Clarte´ organisation founded by Henri Barbusse. As Europe rose again from the ashes of the First World War, Aalto cast his net wide. Besides following the birth of the Modern Movement in France and Germany, he experienced exciting work in Riga, Latvia, marvelled at the greater transparency achieved with large expanses of glass in Sweden, and was intrigued by Constructivism in Russia. To Aalto, internationalism was not so much an issue of style as of cooperation in a broad arena for the solution of societal problems and the enrichment of architecture. He travelled widely and forged friendships with artists, architects and thinkers, including Siegfried Giedion, J J P Oud, Walter Gropius, La´szlo´ Moholy-Nagy, Andre´ Lurc¸at and many others, but he tended to reject the utopian determinism associated with Le Corbusier. While Pelkonen describes him as ‘malleable’, she shows how he made strategic decisions that opened up opportunities. She states: ‘Aalto embodied three key ideas of modernity: change, progress and dynamism’. In a chapter entitled ‘Geopolitics of fame’, she deals with his inclusion in the groundbreaking ‘Modern Architecture: International Exhibition’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She follows with an intriguing section on the political background to Aalto’s retrospective at MoMA in 1938. Preceded by Le Corbusier in 1936, he was only the second architect with a solo show there. The author traces his selection for this honour to the success in 1937 of his exhibit in Paris at the ‘Exposition des Arts et Techniques Applique´s a` la Vie Moderne’. By this time, France, Italy and Germany had officially turned away from modernism and contributed neoclassical or downright Fascist designs. The result was that international critics recognised countries such as Finland, Czechoslovakia and Sweden, which had previously been on the fringes. The museum, under the perceptive direc-
tion of Alfred Barr and the curator John Andrews, ‘was endorsing the idea of localized, nationally distinctive trends in modernism’; ‘Aalto was celebrated as an arbiter of post-International Style architecture’. After the retrospective Aalto won the competition for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. ‘As if to fulfill MoMA’s prediction that architecture was shifting from the geometric to the organic’, Aalto ‘designed the pavilion with a dominant, tilted curvilinear multi-media wall’. Pelkonen, suggesting a shift in Aalto’s approach, explains that ‘whereas the acoustic ceiling of the Vipurii library built on a tension between form and function, the New York wall played on the multilayered symbolic meanings embedded in form’. In the final chapter, after pointing out that Aalto was one of the few modern architects included in Robert Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (MoMA, 1984), Pelkonen examines Leonardo Mosso’s assertion that ‘the main problem of Modern Architecture was the emphasis on form and style at the expense of a more complex understanding of architecture’s impact on human life and culture’. Aalto’s approach, she concludes, involving intuition as much as rational processes, accepted the complexity and open-endedness of society and human perceptions. Finlandia House (1975), Aalto’s last building, she writes, ‘can be understood as an open-ended field of meaning and a perfect emblem of Finland’s newly gained geopolitical status’. henry matthews Washington State University
ARCHITECTURAL THEORY VOL. II: AN ANTHOLOGY FROM 1871 TO 2005 harry francis mallgrave and christina contandriopoulos (eds) Blackwell Publishing 2008 d65.00 $119.95 (H) d29.99 $54.95 (P) 656 pp. Unillustrated isbn 978-1-4051-0259-9 (h) 978-1-4051-0260-5 (p)
T
he second volume of Architectural Theory surveys the development of architectural theory from the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 to texts published in the twenty-first century. The textual content continues until 2008 but it focuses on architectural theory up until 2005. The anthology follows on from Volume I: An Anthology from Vitruvius to
r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah volume 17 issue 1 february 2010 The Art Book 61
Architecture and Design 1870 (2005). Together the two-volume work contains a wide range of architectural literature from antiquity to the present day. Harry Francis Mallgrave, editor of volume I, is joined by Christina Contandriopoulos to edit volume II. For the art and architectural student and historian, a quick flick through the pages of this anthology will uplift the spirit. It is filled with critical source material, ideal for locating key texts and for discovering writers on the edge of mainstream architectural theory. To accommodate as many texts as possible, and this book has 300 in total, the editors include many short extracts. This is naturally disappointing – ideally, one would prefer to read a complete text, to understand the wider argument – but the editors’ decision to include a vast number of texts is understandable; and what is included is enough to help the reader evaluate the context. The aim is to look to the anthology for key works and related texts, in order to seek the original text in its entirety, should it be useful to further research. The organisation of texts is thematic. The unillustrated content is split into nine parts: from ‘Early modernism’ in 1871 through to ‘Beyond the millennium’ in 2008. The chronological order is easy to follow. For example, ‘Part I: Early modernism’, is in four sections. It takes the reader from the early aspirations of ‘The Arts and Crafts movement in Great Britain; to ‘Continental reforms’; and ‘Reforms in the United States’, concluding with ‘Conceptual underpinnings of German modernism: Space form and realism’. Each of the four sections within each of the nine parts contains an introduction, followed by Mallgrave and Contandriopoulos’ selection of 10 or 12 key texts, to contextualise the era. Illustrious names spring forth in the first selection of texts devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement: John Ruskin, Christopher Dresser and William Morris, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and Oscar Wilde are just a few of the writers whose texts inform and debate the varying strands of this aspiring movement. Here one can find a Walter Crane text from The Claims of Decorative Art (1892), to link to a Charles Rennie Mackintosh text from Architecture (1893). Many of the text extracts will be known to the knowledgeable reader. Classics include Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow a Peaceful Path to New Reform (1898), Adolf Loos’ ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908) and
Theo van Doesburg’s ‘Toward Plastic Architecture’ (1924). Although longer texts have been cut to focus on the key theories of the writers, the content list is a useful resource to lead a reader, new to architectural theory, to find the most influential texts and manifestos of each era. Hard-to-find extracts are included and the writings of ‘celebrity’ architects are here too. Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas add their theories to the architectural debate on contemporary architecture, to enlighten the reader and explore opinion. Indicative texts on architectural theory and practice are noticeably included in order to understand the intellectual framework of groups such as The Congre`s International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959. The fifth part of the anthology devotes a section to ‘The rise and fall of CIAM’. Chosen texts from pivotal figures such as Siegfried Giedion, Alison and Peter Smithson, Le Corbusier and Team 10, reveal the group aim to advance architecture as a social art. The history of CIAM is complex and ten texts cannot convey the full meaning and ambition of the group. The CIAM anthology is, however, aptly sandwiched between ‘Postwar theory in Europe’ and ‘Critiques of modernism 1959–69’, informing the reader of CIAM’s status and position in the hierarchy of the history of architecture. Each of the 300 texts in this volume defines its period and identifies strands of architectural theory, connecting disparate writers with controversial views. Clearly, the editors’ aim is to inform the student, the historian, and the architect with an ambitiously large array of architectural theories, some of which lead to the identification of new trends in architecture in the 138 years since 1871. The final text of the final section was published by Masdar, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company. It relates to Norman Foster’s design for Masdar City, a zero-carbon, zero-waste environment. The text is a press release: ‘WWF and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative unveil plan for world’s first carbonneutral, waste-free, car-free city’ (2008). It points to the architectural future and One Planet Living. It is a timely note to end on, and one that highlights the editors’ decision to include a variety of informative sources. This second anthology will be a useful resource to historians and students of art, architecture, and design. It is certain to be a well-thumbed edition, and
highly suitable for university, college and school library shelves. rosalind ormiston Independent Art Historian
THOMAS MAWSON: LIFE, GARDENS & LANDSCAPES janet waymark Frances Lincoln 2009 d40.00 $65.00 240 pp. 240 col & mono illus isbn 978-0711225954
T
homas Haytor Mawson (1861–1933) is a familiar name to garden historians, though one that remains relatively unknown to the general public. This was largely because Mawson suffered from the failing, so to speak, of being a very unflamboyant character, a deeply religious nonconformist who worked hard at his chosen career without any professional airs or affectation; the lack of any recent monograph to provide a full account of his life and achievements has compounded the neglect. This excellent publication should serve to bring him the recognition he deserves. Mawson’s life was a rags-to-riches story. Born in Lancashire, he had little formal education and went to work in the building trade at the age of 12. By his twenties he was designing gardens in the Lake District, forging his own distinctive style of restrained, solid formality. Typically, he surrounded a house with stone terraces and balustrades, allowing the garden to open out into a freer planting beyond, which often merged with the natural landscape outside the garden. He rose to become one of the top landscape designers of his day, with clients such as Lord Leverhulme and Andrew Carnegie. In 1908 he laid out the Peace Gardens at The Hague, and in 1917 re-planned much of Salonika following extensive fire damage to the city. Mawson also travelled to North America, undertaking work in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary and Regina. His photographs of Canada convey the immense openness of the landscape. One bleak winter view taken in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1912, shows the huge parliamentary building standing alone on a flat and treeless plain, a canvas so blank that even a landscape architect might find the challenge a daunting one. For this he created intricate carpet-bedding intersected with winding paths; a photograph of the garden in full bloom in 1919 demonstrates the contrast.
62 The Art Book volume 17 issue 1 february 2010 r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah
