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

Calvino/Invisible Cities

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

Arnason only gave brief explanatory text along with a small, contrasty black-and-white picture of irregular grass-covered steps ascending to 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, without identifying labels, detailing separate rooms of varied function, that answered some questions of overall construction—the steps rise 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, floating, where my sense of the building has rested all these years.

More coming. . . .