Literary Dose #21

"[Alvar] Aalto's prize-winning entry for the Finnish Pavilion in the Paris World Exhibition of 1937 was a rhetorical display of different techniques of timber construction, each expressing certain characteristics of wood...The importance of the Finnish Pavilion lay in its demonstration of Aalto's site-planning principles, wherein the plan of the building is invariably separated into two distinct elements, and the space between them being articulated as a space for human appearance, as we will find later not only in the Paris pavilion and Villa Mairea but also in the brick-clad Synatsalo Town Hall dating from 1949."

"Aalto was categorically opposed to treating the topography surrounding a building in a decorative manner. He thought that the natural movement of people in and around a building should be exploited as the primary means for shaping the site...Aalto wrote:

One of the most difficult architectural problems is the shaping of the building's surroundings to the human scale. In modern architecture where the rationality of the structural frame and the building masses threaten to dominate, there is often an architectural vacuum in the leftover portions of the site. It would be good if, instead of filling up this vacuum with decorative gardens, the organic movement of people could be incorporated in the shaping of the site in order to create an intimate relationsip between Man and Architecture."

- Kenneth Frampton, from The Evolution of 20th Century Architecture (2007).

The Aalto quote within a quote is from Alvar Aalto (1963) by Alec Tiranti. Photograph of the Synatsalo Town Hall by Atelier FLIR.