What used to be called the “Inter­na­tion­al Style of Mod­ernism” in archi­tec­ture may have filled the plan­et with iden­ti­cal glass box­es, but there were always some archi­tects who nev­er quite fit into its straight­jack­et. Among them, the one that appealed to me most when I first start­ed being inter­est­ed in archi­tec­ture (as a teenag­er) was the Finnish archi­tect and indus­tri­al design­er Alvar Aal­to (1898–1976). The Inter­na­tion­al Style worked with the cre­do of “form fol­lows func­tion,” but it was, I could see, a hol­low slo­gan. The rigid orthoxy of that kind of “mod­ernism” had noth­ing to do with “func­tion,” since all build­ings, no mat­ter what their pur­pose, loca­tion, or con­text, were the same. Build­ings in rain-soaked places that need­ed eaves could­n’t have eaves. The “func­tion” of cheap­ness, of course, deter­mined build­ing lay­outs, not the func­tion of what you were going to do in them. At first, Aal­to paid lip-ser­vice to the mod­ernist ortho­doxy, but soon his build­ings start­ed to devi­ate from it. Even­tu­al­ly he evolved a flu­id style, often work­ing close­ly with his wife Aino, in which every aspect of a build­ing was con­sid­ered, includ­ing inter­nal sur­faces, light­ing, and fur­ni­ture, as an inte­gral whole. His scale was human, out­er forms were play­ful and visu­al­ly inter­est­ing. He loved curv­ing, flu­id lines, so that even today much of his work feels “sci­ence fic­tion-ish.” White­ness dom­i­nat­ed the aes­thet­ic, but it was nev­er a bor­ing blankness. 

These three images illus­trate what I mean. The one on the left is a tuber­cu­lo­sis sana­to­ri­um designed for the small Finnish town of Paimio in 1928, and com­plet­ed in 1932. At this time, Aal­to was still in the orbit of offi­cial Mod­ernism, fol­low­ing Le Cor­busier’s basic rules, but he was already lay­ing the foun­da­tions of his more holis­tic approach. Note the date of the design —- it still looks mod­ern. The sec­ond and third images show the kind of inte­ri­or space that Alvar and Aino con­ceived when the silent film had bare­ly been dis­placed by the talkie. Notice that the forms are sim­ple, but not ster­ile. Human­i­ty and com­fort are the “func­tions” being served, not ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty, cheap­ness, or man­u­fac­tur­ing con­ve­nience. It still looks good.