Aalto’s Renown Rises From the Chair

[lllARKlll]

'> Far left, western exterior of the Villa Mairea, a house that many consider Alvar Aalto’s finest work. Right, Gustaf Welin/Alvar Aalto Museum; Kalevi A. Makinen/Alvar Aalto Museum

TO promote Britain’s first major retrospective of Alvar Aalto’s work the Barbican Art Gallery felt the need to link him to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe as Modernism’s third tenor. And to add topicality it turned over design of the show to a leading Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban, who regards Aalto as his principal influence.
The message is clear: Aalto may be a monument in his Finnish homeland and revered in many architectural circles. But three decades after his death even those conversant with today’s high-profile architects may have trouble recalling Aalto’s contributions beyond his influential chairs and vases. “Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban,” which runs through May 13, aims to rectify this.
Even in his lifetime Aalto was something of an outsider. Born in 1898, he was 10 to 15 years younger than the Bauhaus leaders who were transforming architecture and design in the 1920s. He also did most of his work in Finland. Most important, his architecture was defined by a humanist philosophy more than by a distinct style.
While inspired by Modernism, he grew wary of that movement, noting in a speech in London in 1957 that, “like all revolutions, it begins in enthusiasm and ends in dictatorship.” Even so, in the years before his death in 1976, he could not escape the backlash against Modernism prompted by the banality of much postwar reconstruction.
Aalto’s reputation recovered. And it did, the Barbican show suggests, because his hand can more easily be seen in the natural materials he used — wood and brick — and the details of his designs than in the overall look of a building. He was, one might say, a friendly architect, concerned with people more than power, with pleasing more than impressing. (...)

Fonte: New York Times