This year, on the occasion of the centennial of the birth of Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect, and in order to honor his stature in contemporary architecture and re-examine the value of his works, ceremonies have been held in various countries and articles published in architecture journals. For this occasion, two texts -- one by Alvar Aalto himself -- are presented in this issue.
Excerpted from Alvar Aalto's article in Technology Review, 1940; reprinted in Domus, 801, February 1998.
The architecture that we know by the name "functionalism" stands in contrast to architecture whose characteristic is a formalist style that a building must don like a garment. The emergence of the functional idea and its expression in structures may well be the most invigorating event in the architecture of our time. And yet the precise interpretation of function in architecture, and of functionalism, is by no means a simple matter. "Function" -- the use, work, or action characteristic of an object. "Function" is at the same time an entity dependent upon another entity with which it changes. In dictionaries, functionalism is boldly defined as: "the conscious adaptation of form to use." Functionalism is both more and less than this, for truly both meanings of function must be known and taken into account.
Architecture is a synthetic phenomenon covering practically a field that may be functional from one viewpoint and non-functional from another. In recent decades, modern architecture has been mainly functional from a technical viewpoint, and its main emphasis has been on the economic aspect of building activity. This emphasis is of course desirable, since creating good shelter for people is far more expensive than meeting all human needs. If architecture is to find greater human value, the first step is to organize its economic dimension. But since architecture covers all areas of human life, it cannot be merely a matter of technical functionalism -- it must go far beyond that.
The architecture we know as "functionalism" must above all be functional from the human viewpoint. If we cast a deeper glance at the processes of human life, we discover that technique is merely a means and not in itself an independent or definitive phenomenon. Technical functionalism cannot create definitive architecture. Architecture covers not only all areas of human activity but must evolve simultaneously in all these areas. Otherwise, it will yield only one-sided and superficial results.
The present phase of modern architecture is undoubtedly a new phase, and its special aim is the solution of problems in the humanistic and psychological domain. But this new phase does not stand in contradiction to the first phase, which was the phase of technical rationalization. In fact, to understand it one should see it as an expansion of rationalist methods to encompass related areas.
In decades past, attempts were often made to turn architecture into pure science. But architecture is not a science. Architecture is still that same vast synthetic process that integrates thousands of definite human functions. And architecture remains the same. Its intent is still to create harmony between the material world and human life. Humanizing architecture means functionalism far beyond merely technical functionalism. This goal can only be achieved through architectural methods alone -- the creation and synthesis of various technical elements in such a way as to provide the most harmonious life for human beings.
Architectural methods sometimes resemble scientific methods, and the same research process used in the sciences can be applied to architecture. Architectural research can be made increasingly methodical, but its essence can never be purely analytical. In architectural research, instinct and art always have a greater share.
In my personal experience in the field of hospital buildings, I was able to discover that certain physical and psychological reactions of patients provide good clues for conventional housing design. If we take technical functionalism as our point of departure, we discover that in our current architecture many things are not functional from a psychological or a combined psychological-physiological standpoint.
Technical functionalism is correct only if it is expanded to encompass even the psychological domain. This is the only way to humanize architecture.
Karsten Harries, "Matter, Meaning, and Mind in Architecture," Domus, 801, February 1998.
A passage from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra bears this thought-provoking title: "The stone is more of a stone than it was before." Was stone ever less of a stone than today? What does this mean? There was probably something in the architecture of the past -- something that gave that architecture an atmosphere that concealed the stoniness of stone. Nietzsche leaves no doubt about what used to conceal the stone: meaning was the veil of the stone's stoniness. Once upon a time, stone spoke; it expressed something beyond itself. "This infinite halo of meaning, like a magical veil, cloaked the building." "What is the beauty of a building in our eyes today? The same as the beauty of a beautiful face of a soulless woman -- something resembling a mask."
The increasing stoniness of stone and the mask-like quality of beauty in modern architecture are related. But did not modernism decisively distance itself from this kind of ornamented architecture? The buildings of Alvar Aalto show a markedly different orientation. And yet, consider the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, by Frank Gehry. This architecture, in a more or less conscious manner, evokes Nietzsche's metaphor of the mask -- a metaphor that makes us notice the loose synthesis of ornament and the ornamented, beauty and the stone that carries it. Here beauty has not transformed the shape of the stone, has not saturated it with meaning -- it has applied a mask to it. And whenever such a mask is removed from a building, whenever its cosmetics are washed away, its materials stubbornly reveal themselves as they are -- as mute, silent matter.
I quoted Nietzsche's phrase -- "the stone is more of a stone than it was before" -- as though it were a self-evident reality. But does a look at our built environment truly confirm this claim? Consider the Weisman Museum once more. Is its brick more of a brick than before? Is it not rather used in a way that almost makes it disappear -- reduced to a shell, a covering, a garment? These materials, however heavy they may be in reality, increasingly become like reflections of photographs that can be peeled off the body of the building. They too become something like masks -- devoid of spirit, lightweight. And the more our power to distinguish original from imitation decreases, the more the danger of losing voice threatens the materials.
The contrast between Gehry's gleaming, folded, artificial cliff and its very material counterpart underfoot -- the stone of the fading bluff, shaped by the Mississippi, still in the process of crumbling -- is deeply striking. Architecture holds the thread of this conversation between the stone of the bluff and the facade, especially at dusk, when the setting sun ignites Gehry's mirror-like architecture with blinding light. The stone of the bluff nearly disappears. And yet it remains, standing calmly above the flowing water that wears it away, with its fragile yet enduring materiality, speaking to us, reminding us of our own fragility.
We experience objects as real only to the moment we discover, through experience, that they exceed the limits of our words or concepts. To discover the reality of something, we must discover the vital or conceptual spaces that objects must find their place within in order to be understood. The experience of the materiality of materials depends on receptiveness to what I have called material transcendence: that which presents itself to us is experienced as something given, not something our perception has created.
The source of meaning is neither in the knowing mind nor in the silent realities that this knower sees before them, but in what lies between them and has always already joined mind and object: in our captivity within a world of things that always already, in manifold forms, call out to us and speak with us.
Therefore, what I have called material transcendence -- lest it be reduced to the silent presence of objects -- to receive it necessarily means to be moved by it, to belong to it. Material transcendence concerns that manifestation of meaning in matter that, if we want our thought, speech, and building to have value, we must be receptive to. It is from this perspective that the architecture of Alvar Aalto gains its worth.
Notes
1. Cyberspace.