Review: Aalto and America, by Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, and David Fixler, eds.

Abstract

Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, and David Fixler, eds. Aalto and America New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 340 pp., 150 color and 100 b/w illus. $85, ISBN 9780300176001 Recent historiographic research reveals the persistence of canonical histories of modern architecture. For example, Sigfried Giedion’s sixth edition of Space, Time and Architecture (1949) presents a poetic vision of Alvar Aalto as a man who had Finland with him wherever he went, and of Aino Aalto as “quiet as the Finnish lakes and forests from which she had sprung.”1 Giedion’s vision has continued to inform many subsequent texts, in the sense that his metaphors endure even when new information is found in previously unexamined sources. Published in the 1980s and early 1990s, Goran Schildt’s three books about Aalto’s life and work, written from a friend’s subjective point of view, have been difficult for younger scholars to contradict.2 Aalto’s centennial in 1998 produced an international wave of new scholarship with fresh approaches, aided by the Alvar Aalto Foundation in Helsinki and the Alvar Aalto Museum in Jyvaskyla, which welcome scholars to visit their libraries and their collections of drawings, photographs, documents, and correspondence. Digitalization has made essential Finnish material available to virtually everyone, and so the research goes on. In this context, Aalto and America is an important book; its topic is clear, and the contributing authors display remarkable competence in the subject and represent a variety of perspectives. The editors have succeeded in compiling a thought-provoking series of discussions, summarized in Stanford Anderson’s introduction. The book opens with a chronology and maps offering an overview of Aalto’s life, especially his travels and work in the United States. The sixteen primary chapters are divided into three main sections. In the first of these, “Aalto’s Modernism,” Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Dorte Kuhlmann, and Colin St. John Wilson all negotiate the line between modernism as technological rationalism and modernism as organicism. At the same time, they critique this petrified dualism, finding fresh …