{"id":366130,"date":"2010-02-26T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybooks.com\/post\/413282140"},"modified":"2010-02-26T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T14:00:00","slug":"aalto-survives-geopolitics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/366130","title":{"rendered":"Aalto Survives Geopolitics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Filler<\/a><\/h4>\n
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Alvar Aalto\u2019s Villa Mairea (Flickr\/08 ROTCH simoneau<\/a>)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Although Alvar Aalto first won worldwide attention in the early 1930s as a leading exponent of the International Style\u2014a reductive form of modern architecture proposed as equally applicable anywhere on the planet\u2014his more expressive, site-specific work from the mid-Thirties onward marked him as a regional designer in the best sense, and the quintessential Finnish master builder. In 1989, however, thirteen years after Aalto\u2019s death, his friend and official biographer G\u00f6ran Schildt revealed Aalto\u2019s rollicking 1943 junket to Germany at the invitation of Albert Speer, Hitler\u2019s court architect-turned-munitions chief, to inspect construction there just as the Final Solution shifted into overdrive. Schildt\u2019s tragicomic account reads like a plot outline for The Three Stooges Go to Hell<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thus, it is startling that Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen chooses to omit that episode in Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics<\/em>, particularly in view of her publisher\u2019s claim that the new book offers a \u201cdramatically different interpretation\u201d of Aalto\u2019s central part in defining Finland\u2019s international reputation during the Cold War\u2014or, more to the point, after his homeland sided with Germany against the Soviet Union during World War II.<\/p>\n

Through an ingenious postwar public-relations campaign, the resourceful Finns\u2014implicitly anti-Communist notwithstanding their official neutrality after 1945\u2014exploited Aalto\u2019s humane, organic version of high-style Modernist design (along with work by his like-minded though lesser compatriots) to dispel unpleasant memories of Finland\u2019s Faustian bargain with Hitler, a misalliance apologists ascribed to age-old hatred of Russian oppression and rationalized by the truism \u201cthe enemy of my enemy is my friend.\u201d (In fairness<\/a>, Finland was attacked by Soviet troops in 1939 and hoped to use its alliance with Germany two years later to protect against further Soviet encroachment and regain the considerable territory it had lost.)<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n
Alvar Aalto (center) visiting the studio of Arno Breker, Hitler\u2019s official state sculptor, with Finnish architects invited by Albert Speer, Berlin, 1943; from G\u00f6ran Schildt\u2019s Alvar Aalto: The Mature Years<\/i>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Indeed, apart from his reprehensible dalliance with Nazi Germany, Aalto\u2019s humanism\u2014exemplified by his love of warm, natural materials and move away from severe, mechanistic imagery\u2014remains beyond question. By the time World War II began, Aalto had abandoned the International Style and developed a far more personal approach reflected in buildings responsive to their natural settings, exemplified by his Villa Mairea of 1937-1939 in Noormarkku, the interior of which connects with and evokes its surrounding landscape with remarkable immediacy yet an utter lack of representational kitsch.<\/p>\n

Uneasy with the industrial connotations of tubular metal furniture designed during the Twenties by modernists including Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Aalto devised bent and molded plywood chairs, stools, and tables that are warm to the touch and less reflective of light and sound. Tellingly, many of those pieces are still in production after almost eighty years.<\/p>\n

There is no evidence that Aalto harbored any Fascist sympathies either before or after that one major lapse. But because Pelkonen (a Yale architecture professor and co-editor of the catalog for the traveling Eero Saarinen retrospective now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery) purports to address twentieth-century geopolitics\u2014an ambitiously broad topic\u2014her fixation on Soviet-Finnish relations and her silence on Finland\u2019s and Aalto\u2019s wartime involvements with Germany fatally undermine her stated intention.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, there is nothing novel in Pelkonen\u2019s observation that Aalto\u2019s work embodied the same patriotic values earlier expressed by the architecture of Finland\u2019s National Romantic movement, a regional variant of Arts and Crafts \u201ctotal design\u201d that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century. Likewise, Aalto\u2019s sensitivity to nature and responsiveness to the environment have been amply illuminated by many other scholars who have noted his subtle evocations of arctic terrain in schemes such as the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World\u2019s Fair.<\/p>\n

The architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane\u2019s National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries<\/em> (2000) placed Aalto firmly within the broader setting of culture and d\u00e9tente that Pelkonen promises but fails to fully elucidate. Lane\u2019s pioneering research into the architecture of the Third Reich\u2014epitomized by her classic 1968 study Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945<\/em>\u2014helped legitimize that long-taboo topic by confronting stark realities this new book ignores. Despite the Finnish-born Pelkonen\u2019s linguistic advantage in dealing with Aalto, she seems subject to the same willful amnesia that still enshrouds this dark chapter in their country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2009)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Filler Alvar Aalto\u2019s Villa Mairea (Flickr\/08 ROTCH simoneau) Although Alvar Aalto first won worldwide attention in the early 1930s as a leading exponent of the International Style\u2014a reductive form of modern architecture proposed as equally applicable anywhere on the planet\u2014his more expressive, site-specific work from the mid-Thirties onward marked him as a regional designer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}