Alvar Aalto Centennial: Humanizing Architecture

A passage from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human bears this thought-provoking heading: “The stone is more of a stone than it was before.” Was stone ever less of a stone than it is today? What does this mean? There was probably something in past architecture — that architecture had an atmosphere that veiled the stoniness of stone. Nietzsche leaves the reader in no doubt as to what veiled the stone: meaning was the veil of the stone's stoniness. Once, stone spoke; it expressed something beyond itself. “This infinite halo of meaning, like a magical veil, covered the building.” “What today is the beauty of a building in our eyes? The very beauty of the beautiful face of a soulless woman — something resembling a mask.”

The greater stoniness of stone and the mask-like quality of beauty in modern architecture are related. The architecture of Nietzsche's day had ready to hand the images of that mask-like beauty. But did not modernism decisively distance itself from this kind of ornament-laden architecture? Alvar Aalto's buildings, for instance, show an altogether different orientation. And yet, has the situation truly changed? Will you not concede that many works of contemporary architecture appear to us as something added to soulless edifices? Consider the Frederick R. Weisman Museum in Minneapolis by Frank Gehry. This architecture, more or less consciously, calls to mind Nietzsche's metaphor of the mask — a metaphor that makes us attend to the loose synthesis of ornament and the ornamented, of beauty and the stone that bears it. Here beauty has not transformed the shape of the stone, has not infused it with meaning — it has placed a mask upon it. And whenever such a building's mask is removed, whenever its cosmetics are washed away, its materials stubbornly reveal themselves as they are: mute, silent matter.

Nietzsche's words — “The stone is more of a stone than it was before” — I quoted as though they were a fact so self-evident as to require no further argument or elaboration. But does a look at our built environment really confirm Nietzsche's claim? Consider the Weisman Museum, Frank Gehry's work, once again. I said that because its mask-like character is self-conscious, it draws our attention to the loose synthesis of ornament and the ornamented — in this instance the decorative facade of stainless steel and the warehouse it shelters. And the warehouse itself? Is its brick more of a brick than it was before? Is it not in fact employed in such a way that it nearly disappears, reduced to a skin, a covering, a garment? Is this not characteristic of the way materials are used today? These materials, however heavy in reality, increasingly seem like the lightness of transfers that, if need be, can be peeled away from the body of the building. Although truly brick, truly stone, do they here not play at being brick and stone, become images of themselves, in such a way that they certainly diminish the value of their distinctive voice and silence it? They too become something like masks — devoid of spirit, lightweight; and the more our power to distinguish the genuine from the imitation diminishes, the more the loss of voice threatens the materials.

And the museum's facade? Certainly something has been done to that facade to make the metal gleam and glitter, so that the reflective quality of stainless steel nearly overcomes its materiality. Has stainless steel here been presented as stainless steel? If so, then it has been offered as a kind of synthetic material remote from brick and stone, from their weight and solidity — a material more readily yielding to the play of the architect's imagination. The contrast between this folded, gleaming synthetic cliff and its very material counterpart at its feet is exceedingly striking: the more-or-less colorless bluff-stone still in the process of crumbling, raised up by the Mississippi that flows past and gave it its shape. Architecture holds the thread of this conversation between the bluff-stone and the facade, especially at evening, when the setting sun ignites Gehry's mirror-like architecture with blinding light. The bluff-stone all but disappears. And yet it remains, calmly present, standing tall above the running water that erodes it, speaking to us with that fragile yet enduring materiality of its own — reminding us of our own fragility.

It would seem Gehry's crystalline facade should be resistant to such erosion. And yet it is precisely this architecture that gives rise to such a question: we may ask ourselves how it will weather, in several senses. To be sure, its appearance makes such a question seem irrelevant. What has this facade to do with the passage of time, or with the dead weight of earth and stone, with the materiality we look for in them? But to affirm ourselves fully, we must affirm too that we are subject to time, anxious about death. And precisely for this reason we have need of buildings that, if they are to shelter the whole human species, must also be receptive to death — and that means receptive to earth and to time, embracing time as we do, who build not only for ourselves but for those who will come after us. Perhaps the only thing Gehry's gleaming cliff has to say to us is to listen more closely to what the crumbling bluff-stone beneath its feet, and the river, are saying.

We perceive things as real only at the moment when, through experience, we discover that they exceed the limits of our words or concepts. The definition of a circle does not put its construction into our hands; in this sense the circle has no reality. A circle made of wood, stone, or metal certainly has reality — precisely because these materials cannot be ideal constructs. To grasp the reality of something, we must apprehend the linguistic or conceptual spaces in which things, in order to be understood and grasped, must find their place. The experience of the materiality of materials depends on the capacity to receive what I have called material transcendence: that which presents itself to us is experienced as something given, not as something our perception has created. This capacity, the awareness that the reach of human artifact, however wide, remains nonetheless limited, is inseparable from our experience of the reality of things. Speech that refuses to accept this limit degenerates into chatter; so too does speech that will not or cannot distinguish reality from the semblance of reality.

And precisely for this reason we cannot dispense with an architecture whose treatment of materials makes their meaning manifest. For we live in an age in which the mastery of what is taken for granted has reached its zenith — to the point where giant shopping malls give us a new earth and a new heaven, both of them synthetic; an age in which Baudrillard can ask himself whether what is called reality is not something the media have invented. The house this craftsmanship has built is not a prison; the world in which we live should not be confused with the American shopping mall. That mall too has an exterior, though it urges us to forget so. And the synthetic human dwelling has windows. The renewed presentation of materials in a way that allows the experience of the gift of reality may be likened to a kind of opening of these windows.

But what do we grasp from the manifestation of meaning in matter? How do we reconcile it with that understanding of matter which is the presupposition of our sciences and our technology? In order to remind ourselves that the reality so understood may not be equivalent to reality itself, it is enough to consider what it means to know another: when I look at another, I do not merely perceive a face presumably beautiful; that face must present itself to me as matter quickened by mind. When I realize that what I took to be a person was in fact a mere semblance, the aura that alone makes me see the other as an individual like myself and know that I am not alone vanishes. If the laws of science are to be more than my arbitrary constructions, then something quasi-spiritual must present itself in nature. When we say that science gives us real power, what we mean is that the manner of consolidating that sovereignty — which leads humans to stand before nature as its masters and owners — contains a presupposition; and that presupposition is precisely the recognition of real order, of meaningful patterns and resemblances in nature.

The source of meaning is neither in the knowing mind nor in the silent realities that this knower beholds, but in something that lies between them and always already joins mind to object: in our captivity in a world of things that already and always, in manifold guises, call out to us and speak with us.

Therefore, what I call material transcendence — lest it be reduced to the silent presence of things — demands that to be receptive to it is necessarily to be affected by it, moved by it, to belong to it. Material transcendence has to do with that manifestation of meaning in matter to which, if we wish our thought, our speech, and our building to have worth, we must remain receptive. It is from this perspective that the architecture of Alvar Aalto acquires its value.