6 - ALVAR AALTO and the state of Modernism

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Al Var Aalto and the state of modernism. The year in which Aalto launched his career, at the age of 24, with the group of structures at Tampere was a remarkable year: 1922. It was, for instance, the year in which Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Wasteland, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus were published; Mies Van der Rohe had just produced his most astonishing vision of the glass tower, and Le Corbusier has completed his project for a contemporary city for 3,000,000 people. He was the only one for whom the enemy was not the dead hand of the past but false Modernism, a sort of bad faith. In his discourse at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1957, Aalto started by saying, of the revolution of modern architecture, “like all revolutions, it starts with enthusiasm and stops with some sort of Dictatorship.”