PRICKLY INDIVIDUALIST: FINLAND'S AALTO

BRIGHTEST star among the bright young architects of the 1930s was a dour-looking, dynamic Finn named Alvar Aalto. His TB sanatorium at Paimio, Finland, with its cantilevered decks, was a landmark in the new international style. Almost singlehanded he had made wood a "modern material," used it in a dazzling variety of ways--an undulating ceiling for a library in Viipuri, an undulating wall for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair--and the tastemakers of the era all sat in Aalto's curved plywood chairs. But as the glass-and-steel revolution sparked by Mies van der Rohe swept into power after World War II, Alvar Aalto (rhymes with hall-toe) dropped out of sight, seemed close to becoming architecture's forgotten man.

Today architects are developing uneasy qualms as the glass-curtain wall begins to turn whole streets into reflecting canyons and reinforced concrete seems headed toward a kind of new brutalism. As a result, the buildings Aalto has been quietly erecting among the pine forests and birch trees of his native Finland are coming up for a searching reevaluation. Result: Aalto's reputation is once again skyrocketing.

Man at Center. Actually, the times have changed more than Aalto. His use of traditional materials--wood, brick, copper--and rough textures now seems a welcome antidote to too much slickness and gloss. Aalto still insists as firmly as ever: "Architecture--the real thing--is only to be found when man stands in the center."

At the age of 61, Aalto remains a prickly individualist who drinks hard, works all hours of the day and night. Once while designing Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Baker House in 1947, he turned out the whole staff at midnight, for three hours paced the office floor without a word, thinking furiously, finally dashed off the drawings. Believing that "the Creator created paper for making architectural drawings," Aalto refuses to open mail, replies only to telegrams. Accepting a commission to act as a consultant to Helsinki's city planning commission, he insisted on a clause that the city fathers would not badger him with too many conferences. As an artist-architect, he controls the design to the smallest detail. As a man, he stays in tiptop shape, swimming in the icy Finnish lakes in summer, going cross-country on skis during the winter.

Gathering Place. To keep on working while enjoying a change of scene, Aalto maintains three bases of operation. One is an office in downtown Helsinki, another his studio on the outskirts, which he calls "the fortification of quiet"; still another is his island hideaway, where he can plunge into the lake on a moment's notice with his pretty new wife Elissa. She is an architect herself (as was his first wife, Aino, who died in 1949), works on his staff.

Only a short boat ride from his experimental summer house is one of Aalto's favorite projects--the small town hall for Saynatsalo (pop. 3,000). "I wanted to make it a town center, a building that would gather in people," Aalto explains, making a gathering-in motion with his arms, "so I put the garden inside, and then the inside is no longer neutral. I lifted the building up to make a vertical difference between the traffic in the street and the people meeting inside. The street is full of the gases of automobiles. We lift up the human being and put him in a better world."

The finished town hall is full of Aalto signature details, from the homey touch of grass growing on the informal stairway entry to the dramatic cantilever of the council hall, within which is the visitors' balcony overlooking the town council chamber. Wood, which the Finns call "green gold," is used exuberantly in the playful trusses in the roof and with caressing respect in the solid red pine furniture specially designed by Aalto for the interiors. Aalto can also be intensely practical, as he is in his design for the Lutheran Church at Vuoksenniska, finished earlier this year. Knowing the problems of funerals during the hot Finnish summers, he installed a refrigerator with sliding shelves in the basement mortuary.

In his own land, Aalto can do no wrong, is held in awe as a kind of national monument. When Saynatsalo allowed the electric-light company to erect a hideous neon advertising sign that marred the view, Aalto led a night boat-raiding party, stoned the offending sign to smithereens. The electric company started to sue for damages, then thought better of it.

Children at Play. Aalto makes no secret of his views on the state of architecture. The endless repetition of glass squares and synthetic metals, he maintains, has become a dead-end street. "Grownup children play with curves and tensions they do not control," he snorts. "It smells of Hollywood. The human being becomes forgotten." His office now has projects for a new cultural center for Wolfsburg, Germany (home of the Volkswagen works), a museum in Denmark, a semicircular apartment house in Bremen and a new opera house for Essen. Says U.S. Architect Eero Saarinen, himself the son of a famed Finnish architect: "In the postwar decade, Aalto seemed headed away from the mainstream of architecture--until now. The development of the last few years has proved him right. Architecture, while maintaining its gain in technology, is turning to Aalto's treatment of natural materials."

But fellow architects doubt that there will ever be an Aalto school of architecture. "How can there be?" one asks. "You can't copy Aalto. When he comes up against a new problem, he finds a new solution."

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