Man at the Center

In his 58-year career as a master builder, Finland's Alvar Aalto won architectural award after award, and became perhaps his small nation's most famous figure--in effect, a national monument. When he died last week, at 78, Finland--and indeed the entire world of architecture--mourned his loss.

Aalto built widely in Finland and Scandinavia with a few structures elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. A total individualist, he broke away from stiff neo-classicism and stark Bauhaus, and ranks with Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe as an architectural innovator. Unlike such men, however, he never issued architectural rules, attracted many disciples, or even handed down sculptural forms to copy. His work remains influential mainly for what are really moral reasons. " Architecture--the real thing," Aalto once said, "is only to be found when man stands in the center." All architects talk about the fact that buildings shape men's lives, but Aalto passionately lived by and built upon that idea.

Hard-drinking and imperious (he once stoned an offending electric sign because it ruined his view), Aalto blazed into prominence in the 1930s. His first celebrated works were a library in Viipuri and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Paimio. Their design was lean, clean, direct and even witty; in Aalto's hands, the meeting of an undulating ceiling and a wall could result in a line as playful and zesty as a Miro sketch.

That delight in line continued. But after World War II, Aalto abandoned crisp functionalism--"inhuman dandy-purism," he called it. His freestanding works became more complicated and took on steadily more mysterious, evocative forms (TIME, Aug. 25). His grand public structures--most notably Finlandia House, Helsinki's conference and concert center--stir an exhilarating sense of place and occasion. Aalto's town halls, designed for Seinaejoki, Saeynaetsalo and other small Finnish cities, use light and space to create a kind of civic intimacy. No concept was too large for his attention (he laid out whole towns and complete universities) or too small; he even designed special door pulls to fit the hand.

Human Experience. Aalto thought that buildings should emphasize man's relationship to nature. In the country side, his irregular shapes tend to echo the asymmetries of lakes, rocks, plants. Even in cities, he created buildings that separated people from street traffic, often by the use of internal gardens. He preferred to work in brick and wood, because those natural materials were closer to "the human experience."

It has been said that no matter where Aalto worked, he carried Finland in his bones, just as James Joyce carried Ireland. Perhaps so. It is a pity for the rest of the world that so much of Aalto"s work is in remote Finland. For a serious lesson is implicit in all his work: great architecture can be for people. His countrymen understood that. They would crowd into tour buses, pass by his office and proudly listen to the guide say, "That is where Alvar Aalto works."

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