When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.

Calvino/Invisible Cities

.

.

Alvar Aalto’s Town Hall, Säynätsalo, Finland—yet another building I saw decades ago that touched a chord, that stayed with me but lay dormant, that finally prompted recent construction and re-examination, reflection and introspection. I discovered it in Arnason’s History of Modern Art, a standard textbook of the time, my entry into the art of the last century, the worlds of its creative fervor, for me territories largely unknown.

Arnason only gave brief explanation along with a small, contrasty black-and-white picture of irregular grass-covered steps ascending before a brick pyramidal tower, flanked by sloping brick masses, a poised yet energetic composition of fragments, complete in itself but hard to extrapolate into any whole.

Next to the picture, a plan, also small, detailing separate rooms of varied function but without identifying labels. It answered some questions of overall construction—the steps reach to a raised courtyard around which the other parts, almost continuous, surround it with an approximate square—but led to others of form and function, of expression, questions floating, unresolved, where my sense of the building had rested all these years.

So I built this rough model to better understand the Town Hall and come to terms, perhaps uncover the root of my attachment. As always I studied plans, elevations, and photographs then made the best compromises I could with, at this scale, bulky pieces, all the while trying to conceive faithfully, if only in my head, the actual building, its motive, the interrelationship of parts that would guide my decisions. Program, while somewhat flexible and open, is orderly and was not hard to flesh out with the functions of the various rooms once named. A controlling idea of design, however, eluded me. The varying slight, subtle diagonals, the details that came unexpected, without clear belonging, the uncertain hierarchy, the elusive overall coherence—I doubted my decisions at every turn, and the process led only to mounting confusion and dissatisfaction. Yet I never questioned Aalto’s design itself.

As with my other projects, the days spent in construction opened space for reflection. The process of stacking blocks with a goal in mind, methodically, incrementally, of watching a building rise and take shape posited a place, a form, a container for other kinds of construction, for the assembling of present thoughts, present concerns, the news of the world, always in mind, the state of my world within, whatever connections these might have, what I needed to understand, what might yet be hoped for.

What I discovered upon completion of the model was that I was horribly depressed. I left it on the table and walked away, seldom glancing. I have been months coming to this essay and still fight abandoning it. My life, the world lie scattered in unassembled fragments.

The news has not been good.

More power fell into the hands of parliaments, diets, and estates, so that the old feudal estates enjoyed a resurgence, and many countries fell into a chronic anarchy of “barons’ wars.” England and France became locked in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), in which bands of destructive English soldiery roamed back and forth across a France divided with itself. Germany and Central Europe also were rocked by civil turmoil.

The news has not been good for a long time. I also started reading history, in spots, this from Palmer and Colton’s A History of the Modern World, another standard, years ago.

To all this were added the horrors of plague. The Black Death, or bubonic plague, swept over Europe from east to west, beginning in 1348. In some places half or more of the population, suddenly and within a few months, died in the squalor and misery of the pesthouse. The plague kept recurring, striking blindly and inexorably, for fifty years.

Similarities piled up and festered in my reflective space. We have been sick, we are divided, we are in turmoil, our world is in disarray.

The old moorings were weakened, the certainties lost, the wrath of God seemed to be raining on mankind, and no one had the slightest notion of how the world was going to turn out. Symptoms of mass neurosis appeared.

It is impossible to get attention now, or if you get it you pay a price and can’t keep it very long. Language has descended into noise or pap, community into communal madness.

Some people sought refuge in a hectic merriment or brief sensual self-indulgence. Others became preoccupied with grisly subjects. Some frantically performed the Dance of Death in the cemeteries, others furtively celebrated the Black Mass, parodying religion in a mad desire to appease the devil.

Mood now is fickle, unpredictable, fevered. No one trusts anyone, believes anything, or everyone believes too much.

Now witches were feared, hunted out, prosecuted, and disposed of by burning alive, a form of punishment which also now became more common than it had been in former times. Nor was the belief entirely unfounded, for there was in fact a social phenomenon of diabolism. Some people actually thought they were in a compact with the devil, and if they did not thereby become witches, they were nevertheless, in many cases, antisocial beings who meant no good to their neighbors.

In spots, everywhere, the urge for revenge, seeking targets, moving from one to the next.

If the devil ran for office today, how many votes would he get? How would he run his campaign?

History revealed itself not as a matter of lessons learned but, mist lifted, an unveiling of inexorable process across time. Things could get worse. They could only get worse.

There has been construction the last years, the most extravagant by our present day barons, who, powerful, unimaginably rich, push the boundaries of the possible

in vast projections that stretch belief

housing artificial paradises within, beyond belief, for those who can afford them, separated from the rest of us, the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, in the credible world, I have seen cities leveled, wholesale destruction, unimaginable, a decaying of possibilities, with no end in sight. I am living in a desert, an infernal wasteland.

Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife
There went a fame in Heav’n that he ere long
Intended to create, and therein plant
A generation, whom his choice regard
Should favour equal to the Sons of Heaven:
Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps
Our first eruption, thither or elsewhere:
For this Infernal Pit shall never hold
Caelestial Spirits in Bondage, nor th’ Abyss
Long under darkness cover.

Satan speaks to the hordes of fallen angels, rallying the troops, exploring options.

I have let myself go, of course.

Hence Satan was wrong or irrelevant when he said “space may produce new worlds.” The only new worlds for man are those which the free and disciplined used of words can help create.

I have also been rereading Northrop Frye.

I should to tend to myself, and need the words.

But what I most feel is the desire for a city.

Aalto looks back in time as well, but comes up with a different conclusion. A building centered around a courtyard goes back millennia. What this one resembles is a medieval cloister with its gallery surrounding a rectangular space, providing a spot of seclusion protected from the noise of the outside world, a locus of divine contemplation for monks, open to the heavens, to the Spirit.

He was influenced, however, by medieval towns in Italy, which grew and faltered during the time of civil strife and plague, yet which held local strength and expression, which he visited and sketched early in his career. Aalto had a civil courtyard in mind, as well as, loosely, in miniature, the town square, a public place of spontaneous activity around which various buildings, sacred and secular, of varied styles, of differing heights and presence, complemented and competed with the flat, open geometric center.

Still, his yard remains secluded, protected by surrounding walls. It is not visible from the exterior and, raised one floor, requires some determination and effort to enter. Surrounded by largely glass walls, the square is inaccessible from within. While I assume it is a place of casual visit, more likely it is the site of planned functions, which, because of its size, would be small, perhaps infrequent. The square works more, as in a cloister, as a place for contemplation from within the building, for those who make the climb, inspiring, perhaps, quiet thoughts about why the building exists.

This square is irregular, active with recesses and intrusions. Within it figures basic elements, nature in the grass; in the red masonry squares construction in general, in particular that of the rest of the building; and in the water of the reflecting pool a body of water, whatever it might catch from above. The composition of these geometric shapes, also open, also dynamic, is one of marked differences, the long rectangle of the pond against two squares, one large, one small, and the small square is composed of circles, cut pipes. The marked differences in size and shape contest with any set order, any system of interrelationships. Perhaps these elements suggest our relationship with nature, open and dynamic itself, only partly conceived, partially contained. Constructivism—Aalto had exposure—comes to mind, where active geometric compositions figure a social dynamic. But reference to movements and signs of the past or the present are slight, only suggestive. At any rate, we are moved to a secular world, not the City of God, yet one where we can move around and still look up. Abstraction in Aalto is so refined it escapes definite reference or fixed meaning, yet it leaves us with an active sense nonetheless, concrete and grounded. Symbolic representation exists in suspension between particular and universal without denying either. Options are left open. Aalto himself cannot be pinned down in politics or theory, but his interest throughout his career was social and democratic.

Winter, the square is covered with a deep layer snow, leading us to other reflections.

Aalto didn’t build on the past and modify or join existing construction, rather was given a blank slate, undeveloped land. Whatever memories the town hall might have engendered had to have been first created. Säynätsalo, a municipality of only a few thousand, located on an island of the same name among the lakes of Finland, not far from the Arctic Circle, was a company town, largely devoted to a timber processing plant. The firm, government directed, approached Aalto in 1942 to design a plan for a small community with housing and a town hall, which he provided in 1944. Only the town hall was built, in a wooded area Aalto selected, and wasn’t completed until 1952. The program called for administrative offices, meeting rooms, a council chamber, a library, shops, and a few apartments.

On the ground floor, originally, a pharmacy, a book store, and another shop. Above these the library. This side might be considered the front of the complex, as it features a transparent, open face that promotes what lies behind, largely brick mass from this angle, but also hides the courtyard. The full line of the windows of the library, end to end, suggests the light of knowledge, if we want to project meanings. At night it becomes a beacon.

There is a play of tensions that approaches poise, even stasis. The slight angle of the roof on the left dips down and away from the countervailing mass of the tower, which, squared at the top, cantilevers out in the opposite direction. The windows set a regular rhythm of repeated lines in their posts and dividers (not modeled—see photograph above), straight across. A thin band of brick separates the two floors as well as provides continuity with the masses left and right. The band dips squarely in two places on the right, troughs in a square wave, breaking the rhythm of the divided windows, or providing an alternate rhythm, countervailing. These troughs lighten the mass of the overall composition on the right as well as lead to the tower. Then again, the greater mass of the band on the left shifts left, complementing the left side, pulling in the opposite direction.

The whole building works like that, an exposition of elements that complement and work against each other, without resolution. This is not ambivalence, however, but a dialectic, one whose opposing terms themselves are not explicitly stated, that avoid explicit formal definition.

The partial stasis releases as we move to the corner, where the shifting masses of the tower fully assert themselves against the glass, and we see that the windows of the front building wrap around the corners, leaving an eccentric shape on its side that complements the eccentricity of the tower. Both rise from a narrower base.

The corners of the complex, in fact, might be considered the primary focus, not the front, as they hold the stairs, left and right, the most significant entry points. The notion of entry itself has two complementing and competing aspects, grass against stone, strict order against irregularity, yet both rise to the same place. Ascent from the irregular, rugged grass stairs on the left anticipates and participates in the green field above. From the right procession is formal and rigid, up two flights of granite stairs with a brief rest in between. These stairs lead to the entry of the main building and set the tone for formal proceedings within. Continuing into the yard might represent a diversion, a change of mind. Or perhaps a priority—the steps lead straight to it, as well as to the library.

Circle again and settle on this face. On the ground floor, a bank, a hairdresser, more shops. On the second floor municipal functions—a cloakroom, council offices, the municipal principal’s office, the treasurer’s office, the tax office, a meeting room.

Here the separation of the library from the rest becomes apparent by an opening that splits the building, giving it secondary significance against the tower. This separation creates a tension that both holds the rest and pulls away. Yet another stasis is approached, pyramidal, almost complete, close to symmetry, where the tower rises off-center. But we see that the roof is not square but inverted, and the larger part rises and points away, balancing and pulling against the lower mass on the right. The bottom part of the V of its roof points down, close to center, if not on it. Projecting lines from it to the bottom corners create the pyramid. Yet the base of the pyramid, like the face of the. library, is almost wholly glazed, transparent, calling into doubt its strength. Then again while the upper part, with its continuous brick mass, whose weight reinforces the importance of those offices, seems to defy gravity, uplifted, uplifting. Indentations in the right mass, above the windows, provide another regular rhythm, like that of the library windows, that moves right and up, providing a phrase of order.

Now the tower recedes and its shapes shift again. We become aware it is not solid but has a large window. More slight angles on its roof are revealed, similar, different. We also realize the whole building is essentially solid brick. Stasis and symmetry are abandoned. The only check and complement to the tower comes from the narrow chimney that pulls on the far right.

In back, the archive, a workshop, the boiler room, and a sauna beneath the welfare office, the coffee room, and rooms of two apartments. The indentations, after a pause, repeat, leading to the chimney, away from the tower, which here seems distant, almost incidental. The tower exists in greatly varying relationships to the rest, none fixed. Here its dominance is questioned.

Moving around the building is not unlike the experience of walking through a city, where sight of a dominant feature—a bell tower, a spire, a civic monument—marks spatial relationships of varying distance, varying disclosure, these relationships fluid, changing, whose only constant is the tower’s height above us. With the spatial come varying social relationships, depending on our itinerary, our purpose for being there, our place in the world, how that place shifts as we go about our life, how we interact. With the social comes the possibility that our understanding of the town, the world, exists in varying perspectives, that these perspectives come from us.

At one time, elsewhere, we could have traced the paths of nobles, merchants, councilors, trades persons, beggars, supplicants, and priests and had them look up, down, at each other, then construct our understanding of the town from there. Now, here in Säynätsalo, those identities need to be replaced with stations more down to earth, more encompassing, but whose interrelationships are fluid, shifting.

A laundry room, more apartments on both floors, including one for the caretaker, and a separate entry for residents; on the third level—this side is taller—storage. Again separation of library from the main part, again another near stasis like that on other side, but the tower is nearly hidden. Again the indented lines, another eccentric shape on the side of the library, similar to, different from the other, more variation in the angles of the tower roof.

On this face the complex speaks to the individual. The apartments are separated in three steps, moving inward, suggesting townhouses, which, while connected, maintain separation and independence. The mass and closed fenestration ensure privacy and protection. On the corner, the grass steps, along with stairs leading to another entry to an apartment, almost an afterthought. Above them, a glimpse of the interior rooms around the square, white and glass; above them, more revealed in different aspect, the tower,

The tower is always visible, always in mind as we make the circuit around the building, even if spatial relationships and our conception of it vary without rest. Its shape, in fact, is partly determined by interior stairs that spiral around its core, with narrow horizontal windows at the top of the flights, though from the outside we have little sense of layered stories or this function. We only come to know the stairs by entering and making the ascent.

There is no fixed way to define the tower, and its relationship with the type is tenuous. It does not come to a single point, actually, metaphorically, as in a spire, nor does it support a separate concluding structure or is capped by crenelation or other formal cornice, doesn’t hold a cross or bell or statues to be seen from below or a post for observation out on the city, rather is open to the sky, reaching without conclusion in complex, varying shapes that on three sides invert the expected pinnacle or squaring off. The rising mass is not ancillary to anything: it is the structure. We sense an expressive shape, but are hard put to say what it might represent, other than itself. The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that it is a mass that shifts and rises, and that is what it most represents, both the fact and the idea of rising, of shifting, of approaching some degree of significance without settling.

The dominant theme of the building is that there is no dominant theme. It is stable only in suggestion, complete in its incompletion. The Arnason photograph is apt, as it reflects, in part, the notion of open variation expressed in the tower, in the whole. Yet the town hall, as a whole, has presence and maintains a reserve and a composure throughout that we would equally be hard pressed to explain as well, beyond the careful, undefined diversions from the stable shape at its heart, a square.

And, according to Aalto, “the tower is not a tower at all but a culminating mass under which lies the main symbol of government, the council chamber.”

Here the purpose of ascent is revealed, the importance of the chamber established, order prevails. Councillors sit in three rows before the table of the officials, while rows of benches for the public surround. The room, nearly, not quite square, is informal and comforting in its wood and brick tones, the casual upholstered seating, but also formal and solemn in its high ceiling, the subdued light. This is a place for important work. Closing it off with brick perhaps blocks distraction and allows the members to focus on what they are doing, but they know they are part of a larger structure, that the brick they see inside appears throughout, that they sit above others, residents, shoppers, readers, among other walks in life, a bank, the library, a salon.

Nor are they removed from the dynamics of the whole building. They experience the culminating masses walking up the steps, and, looking up, see the ceiling, well above, where the complex and unresolved variations of the roof are maintained. If the translation holds, “culminating masses” implies a process with a goal, not consummation of the process, a final point for that goal. Democracy is open-ended and depends on ongoing revision and debate.

My circuit around the building is both orderly and suspect. I have a privileged—and artificial—vantage point and can control what I see. In reality, the building can only be known by experience, separate acts, partial exposures that depend upon the citizens’ various reasons for coming, these over time. And vision and that experience are further qualified by the trees that surround and partially obscure. Suggested is the idea that this is not just a town hall, and a town, but a town and town hall in nature. The building itself recognizes that relationship as well as its distance. Weston proposes that the indentations in the walls on three sides represent trees, together a forest. Note that on this side they rise with the steps and hill in which the building is set. As in the courtyard, the symbolic representation is both concrete and highly abstract, the relationship, once more, only partly conceived, partially contained. Implied, both separation and connection of our construction from, within nature, with, from whatever else lies beyond us, the value of symbols, their limitations, their possibilities.

The building, decidedly modern, also, in its representation of past types, however abstract, takes us back in time, placing us in that continuum, in a process in history that might yet hold promise.

Exactly as the Medieval cities once upon a time lost their fortification walls and the modern city grew out beyond them, the concept of the city today is in the process of shedding its constraints.

Aalto

If he goes back to the medieval town, he looks past its turmoil and internal decay, instead looks forward, to what the town is becoming. Again, a process, a culminating, without fixed end, in a building that frees physical constraints of mass and order yet does not give them up.

The medieval period, after all, held the seeds for the Renaissance, around the corner. But Aalto does not orient the Town Hall on its orderly grid, balanced and symmetrical, locate it in a perspective that projects universal order in seemingly infinite space.

Nor does he reference the grid, the purity of the modern utopias of his time, vast, spacious cities, rational, clean, ethereal—unreal. Rather, in the Town Hall he has kept people and the buildings where they express themselves close. As many have noted, the Town Hall is monumental yet at the same time intimate, on a human scale.

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.

Arendt/Weston

To get a sufficient perspective upon the immediate tasks of the moment, I purpose to go back to the beginnings of the city. We need a new image of order, which shall include the organic and personal, and eventually embrace all the offices and functions of man. Only if we can project that image shall we be able to find a new order for the city.

Mumford

Our accelerating growth the last century has moved us apart increasing distance, away from our institutions, the workplace, commerce. And from each other. More and more we have become separated physically in our rising towers, our spreading suburbs, our gated communities, by class and ethnicity, with little exposure to others, only faint notions they even exist. We only see ourselves and speak only to our own interests. But the workplace and commerce are heavily determined by economies of scale and the motives of acquisition and expansion, our separation by policy and bias. Not just the numbers. Decisions have been made, decisions have been put aside.

A group of individuals, who retain the power and desire of genuine communication, is a society. An aggregate of egos is a mob. A mob can only respond to reflex and cliché; it can only express itself, directly or through a spokesman, in reflex and cliché. A mob always implies some object of resentment, and political leaders who speak for the mob aspect of their society develop a special kind of tantrum style, a style constructed almost entirely out of unexamined clichés.

Northrop Frye

With population growth the places of our functions, our government, our workplace, our commerce, have become large, inaccessible, where we feel we have little say, little power, in the last too much choice. We lose our identity and become a mass. The masses are not the people but a large number without differentiation. But, again, not just the numbers. We have surrendered the ability to think for ourselves and become easily manipulated by the leader who can stir our worst instincts. What Arendt saw in her day we’re seeing once more, here and around the world.

Both advertising and propaganda . . . represent the conscious or unconscious pressure on a genuine society to force it into a mass society, which can only be done by debasing the arts.

Mass opinion is sourced and manipulated by whatever will get a rise, a vote, a sale. Policy, commerce are determined by the market, or a mythical conception of it, supposedly free, its rhetoric based on magical speculation and the techniques of marketing, manipulative, self-referring, built on facile syntax, on hollow symbols without content, without extension.

Or we stage conspiracies without ground, Manichean conflicts against phantoms, toxic stereotypes, lose ourselves in free-floating Armageddons. Not only are we distant from government, we do not believe in it. The unqualified individual reigns supreme, most the one with the most money. Instead of deadly totalitarian clarity, we have lethal chaos. We live in a hell of our own creation, yet, like Satan, believe more space can save us and keep building up and out.

When we debase our arts, we debase ourselves, lose our vitality, our self-awareness, our ability to speak.

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance.

If free speech is cultivated speech, we should think of free speech, not merely as an uninhibited reaction to the social order, a release of the querulous ego, but as the verbal response to human situations, a response which establishes a context of freedom.

Aalto creates that context. The Town Hall, Weston argues, provides both a concept of society and a physical place that allows its expression, and does so with reserve, tact, warmth, with subtle expressive power. Collectively we have different interests, varying needs. Here their relationship is flexible and open. The building reminds of us the past and locates us in the present, setting the terms that allow us to look forward. Its abstract symbols, vital, grounded, open, locate us and encourage to look further. It is a place where we can gather and talk yet maintain the separation needed for individual integrity without losing contact from others. Most it is a place where we realize we are human and belong. And it sets a priority, physically, symbolically: we are a society and we have government. The residents, the banker, and the hairdresser are mindful of the library, the library’s readers of the council chamber where representatives they elect make the rules they follow, debate them, revise them, throw them out, the representatives mindful of those who elected them, who may vote them out.

Säynätsalo, of course, is small and can be served by a modest structure. But without it there would be little to promote collective identity, the practice, the idea of society. The Town Hall could provide a model for construction in our own small towns, in our blighted suburbs, places of commerce, education, social gathering, and local governance with connection to the larger. All our needs won’t be served, but we still would have a concept physically expressed that might influence our thought, our behavior, our construction elsewhere in the neighborhood. In our large cities it provides us a conceptual model that reminds us who we are and what matters when we enter the echoing chambers of city hall.

Abstractly, it could provide a model for the self, a framework to think about the world inside, the world without, their connection, their relationship, complex and flexible enough to maintain personal identity. Individually, alone, we have various needs, varying interests. These change, they linger, they persevere, sometimes in spite of ourselves. All need a voice. We assert the self, debate our decisions, we have priorities. There are rules, the rules change. In all cases we are not alone. And it suggests a model for thought itself, a placement, a positioning of terms that keeps us from falling into either/or traps, that does not leave us stranded.

No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue. That is why we are in a kind of lull or interregnum in which we can no longer practice the dogmatism of a single truth and in which we are not yet capable of conquering the skepticism into which we have stepped. We are in a tunnel, at the twilight of dogmatism and the dawn of real dialogues.

Ricoeur/Frampton

I am still depressed. Ricoeur writes in the time of the Cold War, not that long ago. The dialogues have not come, or they are not heard. I have finished this essay, however. The model, though, is gone and has been replaced with another that takes me on yet another uncertain course. I never learned whatever attracted me to the building some fifty years ago, not long after mutually assured destruction was our means of survival, of salvation. Whatever impressions a black and white picture, an unmarked plan stirred in me have been buried, irretrievably, by a half century of forgetting, by layers of diversions, of distractions all those years.

It is not the building that is depressing, of course, but rather my setting it against my expectations, overarching, ill-conceived.

It is a mistake to think we have all the answers, that we have any answers at all.

It is a mistake to think we are supposed to be happy.

And it is a mistake to think our buildings can save us.

God is in the details, Mies once said and Weston reminds us in the context of the Town Hall. Who, what is the deity? Is there one? What is the religion? What is revealed? If the deity has a plan beyond us, why do we think we can understand it?

Still, the details—

the mass of bricks, Flemish bond, rough, warm, unevenly, humanly stacked

the generous cascade of grass steps unevenly falling, rising

lush ivy strung on poles around a square, rising, falling

the spreading wings that support the roof of the council chamber, its timbers impossibly delicate, collectively reassuring—

The absence of wonder is, in itself, a source of wonder.

 

.

 

About the model

All of my observations are checked by looking at actual photographs. While overall dimensions of the model are close and I capture essential parts, much is off. Many details are not represented, others exaggerated. Proportions are not quite right throughout and all the diagonals aren’t accurate, for this building a significant loss. I’m working with large, fixed units, which leads to compromises of varying degrees. In models of other buildings I have been able to work off a regular plan, and, while I don’t achieve exact sizes and relationships, I can represent the overall regularity and departures from that regularity that define them. It is as I said. With the Town Hall there isn’t a regular plan that might be plotted easily on a grid. As I built, one compromise affected decisions elsewhere, in ways that were difficult to predict or correct. I think I could have done better. Then again, I suspect any other solution would have led to unsatisfactory result. For me, this difficulty speaks to the value, even the virtue of the design: it can’t be quickly, completely grasped. Or modeled.

Making a model engages me deeply in a building, and I want my essays to be based on the process and this engagement, thus show them. They are essays—attempts—about building models. As I build, I spend much time considering the actual work, its structure, its relationships, then comparing. I learn by an accumulation of errors and attempts to correct them. This is a problematic and rewarding process. Also a three-dimensional model allows me to see a building whole and move around and consider it from different angles, perspectives I can’t get from photographs or even a visit. In some cases, exaggeration, deeply inset windows, for example, brings forms out in greater relief, highlighting them for analysis. For my readers, seeing the building in a different form, a model, simplified, even exaggerated, might encourage similar engagement and reconstruction.

I didn’t build the interior—the pieces are too bulky—but did contemplate it. Discussion of Aalto’s would have extended my discussion much further.

All photographs of the model except the last have been edited slightly for clarity and coherence.

.

.

Notes/Credits

I am deeply indebted to Richard Weston:

Alvar Aalto, Phaidon

Town Hall, Säynätsalo, Phaidon

The first book is a rich, balanced, and insightful discussion of Aalto and his major works, well researched. The second is a monograph on the Town Hall alone that has extensive diagrams, floor plans and elevations, and exceptional photographs, inside and out, (and repeats much of the text and many of the images from the first). I was utterly absorbed by and dependent on the latter. We need more books like this. Most of my factual material comes from the first, where I also picked up on a few of his core ideas, extending them, perhaps considering them in a different light. Weston suggests the possible influence of Russian Constructivism (Aalto, 141). Schildt, cited, suggests that Aalto’s sketch of the towers of San Gimignano was an influence on the design (Aalto, 137).

“The Municipal Centre of Säynätsalo,” Volume 3 from the DVD series Architectures, Compain, Copans, Neumann, et al., Arte France, is another excellent source, perhaps the best substitute for actually visiting. At the end the film shows citizens sitting on the grass steps watching a dramatic performance, which, along with other open-air activities, was Aalto’s intent here and in other similar constructions. I would be curious to hear a full discussion of how the building was used over the years, how it was received. As it is, the library expanded to the first floor and the city took over other rooms, perhaps inevitable but a source of regret. It lost its variety, perhaps some local presence.

Louis Kahn’s First Unitarian Church, Rochester, was competed some ten years later. Both Kahn and Aalto visited and sketched towns in Italy, including San Gimignano, and there are many similarities between the two in form, theme, structure, and material that it’s hard not to wonder Aalto was an influence. What Aalto did in a secular setting Kahn did in a religious.

Photograph of San Gimignano, cropped, via Wikimedia Commons.

Corner photograph of Town Hall via Wikimedia Commons.

Photograph of the stairs, converted to black and white, via Wikimedia Commons.

Floor plan via Alvar Aalto.

A History of the Modern World, Palmer and Colton, Knopf. This was, in fact, my high school text and at the time it was used in many colleges.

The mug shot of Donald Trump can be found everywhere.

The Line, exterior and interior photographs, via Neom.com.

Photograph of destruction in Gaza via cnn.com.

“Space may produce new Worlds,” John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.650.

He is describing a rumor of a new planet, in fact an entirely new cosmos, created in the wake of his Fall. For Satan, the new world is an inspiration for his plan to seek vengeance through the ruin of humanity.

Lara Dodds, Pulter Project, Northwestern University

All Northrop Frye quotations from the first essay of The Well-Tempered Critic, Indiana University Press.

Detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Government, via Wikimedia Commons. Perspective in the painting has been described as crude, but note what the arrangement does: people are at the forefront are kept physically close to each other and their surroundings. It is the collapsed perspective artists returned to in the 19th. and 20th. centuries.

The interior space as both courtyard and town square:

. . . in parliament buildings and courthouses the court has preserved its inherited value from the time of ancient Crete, Greece and Rome to the Medieval and Renaissance periods.

Aalto, cited in Aalto/Weston, 137

In [Aalto’s] view, providing the citizens of Saynatsalo with a setting in which they could live like the fourteenth-century inhabitants of Siena or San Gimignano was a patriotic act. . . . Aalto envisaged the raised courtyard enclosed by the various buildings as a place for all citizens to assemble in the manner of Sienna’s Campo.

Göran Schildt, cited in Aalto/Weston, 137

This dual conception, perhaps, reflects the openness and flexibility of Aalto’s symbolism.

Photograph, Torre del Mangia and Palazzo Pubblico Torre del Mangia Siena, cropped, via Wikimedia Commons. Aalto had this town hall in mind and wanted to match its height, in fact exceed it by a meter.

“the tower is not a tower at all,” Aalto, cited in Town Hall/Weston.

Photograph of council chamber, Tero Takalo-Eskola, via VisitJyvaskyla.

Photograph of side via Archipicture.

“Exactly as the Medieval cities once upon a time lost,” Aalto, cited in Aalto/Weston, 172.

The Ideal City, anonymous, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier, via ResearchGate.

Le Corbusier in La Ville Radieuse declared that we could finally “say ‘goodbye’ to the natural site, for it is the enemy on man. (Cited in Aalto/Weston, 127)

“The public realm, as the common world” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, cited in Aalto/Weston, 142.

Lewis Mumford, The City in History. He provides a countering view of the medieval city, worth review:

Freedom, corporate equality, democratic participation, autonomy, were never fully achieved in any medieval town; but there was perhaps a greater measure of these qualities there than had ever been exhibited before, even in Greece. For a brief while ‘communitas’ triumphed over ‘dominion.’

He also defends the medieval cloister, and my suggestion of the resemblance of the inner square of the Town Hall to one is apt in many ways. Compare with the trend in Mumford’s time and especially ours for openness and transparency:

In opening our buildings to the untempered glare of daylight and the outdoors, we have forgotten, at our peril and to our loss, the coordinate need for contrast, for quiet, for darkness, for privacy, for an inner retreat.

Hudson Yards/the Vessel, Ajay Suresh, via Wikipedia Commons.

“No one can say what will become of our civilization,” Paul Ricoeur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” 1961, cited in Modern Architecture, fifth edition, Kenneth Frampton, 351, in his chapter “Critical Regionalism.” Ricoeur states a central problem for architecture, just as relevant today if not more so at a time when we appear adrift:

There is the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources, how to revive an old dormant, civilization and take part in universal civilization. . . .

Aalto, I want to believe, solves this paradox in the Town Hall by bringing the particular, the local, in relationship with the world, the universal, by doing so in a flexible and vital way, as I have argued above. The particular asserts itself and at the same time looks beyond. There is active interchange. One does not exclude the other. Weston suggests many possible local influences of landscape and custom, such as the “refined, free-roof formation” of Karelian buildings that allowed “living and flexible forms” (Aalto, in Aalto, 138).

Photograph of bricks, cropped, via Flicker.

Photograph of grass stairs, cropped, via Wikimedia Commons.

Photograph of courtyard via TRULAB.

Photograph of ceiling supports, edited, via Rethinking the Future.

Model, photographs of the model by the author.

 

.

.

.