Architecture
Northerner
Gavin Stamp
With Sir Hugh Casson as President, it is to he expected that the Royal Academy should give more attention to that often neglected art: architecture. But Alvar Aalto seems a slightly odd choice of subject for a big exhibition; an 'architect's architect', his work is now neither avant garde nor sufficiently remote, (or forgotten) to be interesting historically. Aalto (1899-1976) deserves attention, however, if only because this 'Finnish Master of the Modern Movement' was very influential in Britain after the early Thirties — here was a man who was unimpeachably Modern, yet who rejected the rigid formal stereotypes of Corb and the International Style. The sad and distracting result of this is that rather too many of the buildings in the exhibition seem all too redolent of community centres or interdenominational churches in our New Towns. But Aalto has much less to answer for than, say, Corbusier; he never imposed the tower block, he disliked excessive standardisation and he had little of that arrogance typical of the public architect who is also a social engineer. He began his career in the newly independent Republic of Finland, by employing the mannered neo-Classic, an idiom so characteristic of Northern Europe early this century. A most interesting building is his earliest: the Jyvaskyla Workers' Club of 1924, severe, imaginative and, for some reason, largely windowless. By 1929, with the famous Paimio Sanatorium, his aesthetic was consciously Functionalist. After this, Aalto's art becomes very difficult to charactense or to assess, because its essence seems to be an arbitrary asymmetry and, often, curious curves. He always remained consciously an 'artist' and — rare in his generation —rejected the mechanistic in favour of harmony with nature. In 1938 he wrote that 'in contrast to the view which sees in established forms and the standardisation of new forms the only way towards architectural harmony and a building technology that can be successfully controlled, I . want to underline that the most profound property of architecture is a variety and growth reminiscent of natural organic life. I should like to say that in the end this is the only real architectural style.' This is all very well, but architecture is not a pure, abstract art and the best buildings are often those in which an architect has had to grapple with specific problems. Many of Aalto's bleak interiors are clothed in strange forms which seem determined neither by the discipline of the site nor by that of style. Some of his plans, comprised of quite arbitrary shapes and wobbly, almost drunken lines, defy rational analysis and this personal expressionism can be as arrog ant as mechanistic formalism. Aalto tells us, in the catalogue, that he employed 'a method of working which is very much like abstract art, I just draw by instinct, not architectural syntheses, but what are sometimes childlike compositions', which is disarming but worrying.
Perhaps this is all very Finnish. In that brave land of cold and forests, men must resort to extremes: drink, saunas and Mod ern Architecture. One of Aalto's strengths was that he was firmly rooted in his country and culture. Sir James Richards, who intro duced Aalto to the readers of the Architectural Review in the Thirites, notes that 'it is impossible to think of him — as one thought of many of the other of modern architecture's pioneers — as a man who lived with a suit case ready packed, avid for the opportunity of offering his ideas to any country that would listen' — which is more damning to Richards's other heroes than he may realise.
The Finns are not like their neighbours, and Aalto's work lacks that chilling col lectivist quality evident in much modern Swedish and Danish architecture, (as in that supremely necropolitan creation: Arne Jacobsen's St Catharine's College, Oxford).
But his positive qualities are not helped by this exhibition, which is almost entirely monochrome apart from the yellow of the selection of Aalto's interesting bent plywood furniture (he was an undoubted mas ter of the treatment of wood) and the colour in some terrible 'abstract' paintings. Aalto's later buildings demand colour photographs, as he could revel in the texture and variety of brick. Indeed, if the purpose of an exhibition is ultimately didactic, then neither Aalto nor the cause of more architectural exhibitions are well served, for the general public must be repelled by endless black and white photographs and dull plans, which are quite meaningless to all but the specialist.
As this exhibition (open until 15 October) has been imported from Finland, the Academy must not be blamed for its shortcomings; indeed, Sir Hugh deserves praise for putting on architecture at all. Rumour has it that much greater treats are in store: with a major and popular British architect — Lutyens — whose genius will demand a much more imaginative and lively display than this interesting Finn has received.
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