Finland’s Alvar Aalto was one of the great 20th century architects. Japan’s Shigeru Ban is one of today’s brightest stars. Aalto, who died in 1976, worked primarily in his home country through an age in which hand-craftsmanship segued into industrialisation. Ban, 50, studied in the US and now works between offices in Tokyo and Paris, navigating an increasingly computerised and automated industry.
The two men come from different times and cultural, economic and technological backgrounds. Their work differs aesthetically and technically. Yet they are united by a design philosophy that ranks humanitarian values above style. And that is why London’s Barbican Art Gallery has asked Ban to co-curate the first UK exhibition celebrating Aalto’s work.
“I hold Aalto’s compassionate approach to architecture in the highest regard,” Ban says. “His ultimate goal as an architect was to promote comfort and happiness to ‘the little man’ – to ordinary people. His great innovations were not just intended for his own artistic expression but were an exploration of ways to distribute better housing and living conditions to the greater part of society.”
So Aalto worked not only on innovative private residences and civic and cultural buildings but also low-cost housing and industrial estates. He focused on the details – furniture, light fittings, glassware, textiles, jewellery and book covers – as well as the big picture – town and even regional planning projects. Taking the environment as an inspiration, he employed or created organic shapes and promoted the use of natural and local materials. His rational approach to problem solving resulted in some wonderful ideas. And a capacity to explore a structure’s emotional and psychological impact led him to believe that “architecture is not mere decoration; it is a deeply biological, if not a predominantly moral matter”.
For Ban – who founded the Volunteer Architects Network charity in 1995 and is known for designing emergency shelters and temporary housing for survivors of wars and natural disasters in Rwanda, Japan, Turkey, India and Sri Lanka – Aalto’s ethos is deeply resonant. In fact, Ban’s eureka moment – his realisation that he could use light-weight, low-cost paper tubes structurally – happened during his involvement with an earlier exhibition of the architect’s work at Tokyo’s Axis Gallery in 1986.
This came two years after his first in-person exposure to Aalto-designed buildings as a photographer’s assistant in Finland. “In Aalto’s architecture I found a space created to complement its context,” Ban recalls. “It was the kind of space that one wouldn’t be able to comprehend through photographs and text in a book; one would need to experience it on the spot in order to understand the quality of it.”
Although Ban’s architecture is different from Aalto’s, it is clearly fired by it, with natural shapes and innovative uses of materials. Aside from the international aid work, he has been lauded for private homes, including the Curtain Wall House, which has glass walls folding back to open the rooms, elementally, on two sides, and the Picture Window House, in which a terrace, garden and front room are designed as a single space.
For the Barbican exhibition, Ban has created curving cardboard tube walls and platforms and undulating paper ceilings, transforming the gallery interior. He and Juhani Pallasmaa, former director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki, have selected 15 key projects to chart Aalto’s career and designed analytical models to show how he used materials, handled space and dealt with details.
These sectional models are, in themselves, quite beautiful. The one of the House of Culture in Helsinki, famous for its undulating brick walls, shows not only their shape but also a cross-section of structural brick-work, while the Baker House model shows how light was diffused within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dormitory. Alongside these are specially commissioned photographs of Aalto buildings that highlight the beauty of his shapes, textures and details.
Ban thinks the chosen projects are fundamental to understanding Aalto’s architectural philosophy and directly relate to contemporary building dilemmas. Others include the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanitorium, Villa Mairea and the AA System houses, all of which are in Finland.
The first project embraced numerous humane concepts – splash-free sinks for patients’ rooms, mobile side tables that double as patients’ dining tables, sloping floors near windows to avoid an accumulation of dust and double-glazed windows to keep out cold air. Aalto’s attention to detail meant finding the exact angle for a birch bentwood chair that would best aid a sanitorium patient’s breathing. Examples of it are still produced and sold today.
Villa Mairea epitomises Aalto’s signature style in terms of space arrangements, use of materials (forest-like vertical wooden pillars) and its nod to traditional Japanese architecture, rustic Finnish farms and continental modernism. The architect aimed to harmonise buildings within their settings and blurred indoor-outdoor boundaries, often reversing convention. So the villa living room became a forest space with a corner garden gazebo. Furnishings and lighting designed for the house were later produced commercially by Artek, the company that he set up with the villa owner’s wife, Maire Gullichsen, and design critic Nils Gustav Hahl, and which still exists today.
Because Aalto hated the idea of mass-produced houses, he strived for “flexible standardisation” – a way of offering maximum variation through different building parts, using them as “living cells”. This concept is exemplified by the prefabricated wooden AA System houses commissioned by the Ahlstrom Corporation in 1940 and intended to relieve wartime housing shortages.
Two other projects – La Maison Carrée in France and Scinasoki, an Aalto-planned Finnish town – are presented alongside one another to show how his ideas about space, access and flow were consistent, regardless of scale. The house’s hall serves as a communal space, much like a village square. Tomoko Sato, the Barbican Gallery curator, observes that Aalto’s civic buildings were also designed like comfortable houses rather than monumental institutions. “His interest was to make people feel at home, not to create a hierarchy,” she says.
Aalto’s focus on lighting is highlighted by his Viipuri City Library reader’s room, where rows of cylinder-shaped top lights minimise the shadows cast under readers’ hands, and the Church of the Three Crosses in Imatra, Finland, where skylights and sculptured white walls transform the building into a luminous light source. Aalto “explored the most efficient ways to take in natural light in the northern latitudes,” Ban explains. “When he designed a building, he always seemed to have been conscious of incorporating an efficient system to diffuse [light] indoors.”
It’s ironic that the venue for this exhibition is the Barbican Centre – a place that is architecturally uncomfortable, cluttered and not easy to use. It’s a far cry from the “earthly paradise” that Aalto believed to be “the ultimate goal of the architect”. Still, thanks in large part to Ban’s involvement, the show is an interesting one, that says as much about the future as it does about the past.
“I hope [it] will raise questions about architecture’s role today and generate debate about issues such as sustainability and resources that are common to all of us,” Sato says. At the very least, visitors can observe the interplay between two architectural soulmates.
‘Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban’ runs from February 22-May 13 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. A rare talk by Shigeru Ban about his work and Aalto’s legacy will take place at 7pm on February 20. Tel: +44 0845-120 7550; www.barbican.org.uk/gallery
