Industrial Organisms

Abstract

This paper explores the role of industrialisation in Alvar Aalto's work, with a particular emphasis on his Sunila pulp mill and associated housing and community projects, completed, for the most part, by 1939. While it is well known that Aalto was heavily involved in industrial projects, and this had an enduring influence on the trajectory of his practice (both directly and indirectly), the scholarship on this topic tends to suggest that this was secondary to his more well-documented interest in the cultural, site-related and humanist aspects of spatial design. This paper challenges this position, arguing that Aalto's industrial works were not only central to his creative oeuvre, but presented a coherent and sustained attitude towards the urban challenges of modernisation. Aalto's exposure to the work and ideas of Sigfried Giedion at this critical time, as well as his increasingly international profile, gave Aalto's projects a resonance with broader historical issues that were having an effect on Europe at the time. Aalto used the Finnish industrial context to promote an expanded social and cultural context for modernism, negotiating a complex truce between the concerns of an emerging class of bourgeois industrialists and a migratory regional proletariat. Drawing from the model established at Sunila, the paper investigates the political and historical role that industry played in framing Aalto's work and the relationship this has to the broader issues of architectural history and modernism.

Notes

^1. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1948] 1967), 645.

^2. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, [1947] 1969). Giedion's name is spelt both “Siegfried” and “Sigfried” in his various publications. In Space, Time and Architecture it is spelt Sigfried, although in Mechanization Takes Command it is Siegfried. Sigfried has been generally adopted throughout for consistency.

^3. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.

^4. This, as Giedion notes, gave the country a strategic advantage over Russia, where the rivers meet the ocean in the north, and the river mouths are frozen for large parts of the year. See Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 622.

^5. Pekka Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” in Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism, ed. Peter Reed (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 72. See also Alvar Aalto Architect (Vol. 7) Sunila 1936–1954, ed. Pekka Korvenmaa (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Foundation; Alvar Aalto Academy, 2007).

^6. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 640.

^7. Göran Schildt, “Introduction,” in The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 11: Tailinn Art Museum, Kauttua Terrace House, Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and other buildings and projects, 1937–1939, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), xiii.

^8. Elsewhere, Schildt is more cautious in the “revolutionary” aspect of Aalto's industrial works, conceding that “he often had to be content with designing factories and workers' housing that were free from the worst ills of industrialism caused by unscrupulous speculation and indifference to the environment.” See Goran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: Masterworks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 38.

^9. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry”, 72. Korvenmaa cites Le Corbusier's famous passage from Vers Une Architecture on “Architecture or Revolution”.

^10. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.

^11. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.

^12. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.

^13. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.

^14. See Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, “Alvar Aalto and the Geopolitics of Fame,” Perspecta 37 (2005): 86–97.

^15. Giedion arrived at a similar conclusion, describing Aalto as “restless” and with “one foot in America”. Giedion sees Aalto as an embodiment of traditional and modern values. He writes: “Finland is … at the crossroads of east and west, but for the moment, we would only stress the fact that many remnants of primeval and medieval times still remain alive there and intermingle with modern civilization. This double nature is instilled in Aalto too, and gives creative tension to his work.” See Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 621.

^16. Aalto's “humanization” – a central trope of the Aalto literature since the 1960s – seems to derive from the proximity of Aalto's universal user, the “little man”, to the natural world, rather than, say, scale, materials or plan organisation; Giedion noticed Aalto's concern for his fellow humans: “Each line [of Aalto's] tells of his close contact with human destiny. This may be one of the reasons why his architecture encounters less difficulty in overcoming the resistance of the common [man or woman] than that of others of his contemporaries.” Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 666.

^17. Goran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life (Jyväskylä: Alvar Aalto Museum, 2007), 130.

^18. Schildt sees the views of Aalto's father as “little short of radical”, which “looked to the Russian revolutionaries as welcome allies in the struggle against Czarist oppression.” Despite this, he goes on to concede that for many in Aalto's generation there was a turn away from interest in political and international events, and this was partially responsible for Aalto choosing a career in architecture. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 130.

^19. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 192.

^20. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 326.

^21. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 325.

^22. See Detlef Mertins, “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,” Assemblage29 (April 1996): 7–23.

^23. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 177–92.

^24. Siegfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Los Angeles: The Getty Center, [1928] 1995).

^25. On this, see Mertins, “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory”; Hilde Heynen, “What Belongs to Architecture? Avant-Garde Ideas in the Modern Movement,” Journal of Architecture 4 (Summer 1999): 143; Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (London: The MIT Press, 1999).

^26. This has left a particular influence on the work of Hal Foster. See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 157–91; Hal Foster, “The ABC of Contemporary Design,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 195–96; Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002), 138–39.

^27. Siegfried Giedion, Architektur und Kunstgewerbe (1922) quoted and translated in Sokratis Georgiadis, Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Colin Hall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 2. This can be compared with Aalto's statement in “Art and Technology” that: “[a]lmost every formal assignment involves dozens of conflicting elements that can be forced into functional harmony only by an act of will. This harmony cannot be achieved by any other means than art.” Alvar Aalto, “Art and Technology” (1955), in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, ed. Göran Schildt (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 175.

^28. See Spiro Kostof, “Architecture You and Him: The Mark of Siegfried Giedion,” Daedalus 105, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 189.

^29. Herbert Read, Art and Industry (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). This work went through numerous reprints and editions. The second edition came out in 1944, as Giedion was working on the manuscript for Mechanization Takes Command.

^30. The formative work for Mumford, published in the same year as Read's work, is Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilisation (New York: Harcourt Press, 1934).

^31. Amongst the numerous works of Mumford on the topic of industrialisation are Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (London: Martin and Secker, 1967); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (London: Martin and Secker, 1964).

^32. Abbott Payson Usher, An Introduction to the Industrial History of England (London: Houghlin Mifflin Co., 1920); see also Abbott Payson Usher, A History of the Grain Trade in France: 1400–1710 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1913).

^33. Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1929).

^34. Of particular note is Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity and Postmodernity,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 11; Peter Bürger, “The Significance of the Avant-Garde for Contemporary Aesthetics: A Reply to Jurgen Habermas,” trans. Andreas Huyssen and Jack Zipes, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 20.

^35. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: In His Own Words, 171.

^36. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.

^37. Schildt, Alvar Aalto, 161.

^38. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 73.

^39. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.

^40. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 117–18.

^41. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 3: Viipuri City Library, Turun Sanomat Building, and Other Buildings and Projects 1927–1929, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 108–228.

^42. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 2: Muurame Church, Southwestern Finland, Agricultural Cooperative Building, and other Buildings and Projects 1926–1927, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 367–71.

^43. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 5: Helsinki Stadium, Zagreb Central Hospital, and Other Buildings and Projects, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 27–111.

^44. This proposal (never realised) was for a piece of land owned by the Stenius Company (later purchased by the City of Helsinki). The project comprised a cluster of high-rise towers designed in 1934–35. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 6: Aalto's Own Home in Helsinki, Finnish Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris and Other Buildings and Projects 1932–1937, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 126.

^45.The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 4: Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium, City of Turku 700th Anniversary Exhibition, Standard Furniture, and Other Buildings and Projects 1929–30, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 62.

^46. Richard Weston, Alvar Aalto (London: Phaidon, 1996), 76.

^47. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 74.

^48. Göran Schildt, “Introduction,” in The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917–1939: Volume 11: Taillinn Art Museum, Kauttua Terrace House, Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and Other Buildings and Projects, 1937–1939, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), xiii.

^49. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 406.

^50. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 641.

^51. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 641.

^52. Giedion writes: “[n]o men are visible … No one is to be seen on the stairways connecting the different levels in the numerous halls. There is an atmosphere like that in Captain Nemo's Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.

^53. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 130–67.

^54. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 169–201.

^55. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 209–40.

^56. See: Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 99–100.

^57. Taylor himself made this connection, referring to this model as a “military type of organization”. See Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 99.

^58. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 410.

^59. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 641.

^60. Alvar Aalto, quoted in Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 408.

^61. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.

^62. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.

^63. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 407.

^64. Schildt uses this word when comparing the houses to the Swiss–German experiments in urban planning from the same time period. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 410.

^65. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 404.