Aalto’s landscape ontology : conceptualising landscape in Alvar Aalto’s architecture using phenomenological concepts of place, atmosphere and embodiment

Abstract

This thesis investigates the work of the twentieth-century Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), as involved and intertwined with ideas and experiences of landscape. Late in his life, Aalto said that from his earliest years the Finnish landscape ‘was there all around me, all the time.’ Aalto has been regarded historically as the modernist misfit, a Northern humanist outlier working at the margins of rational modern architecture. Aalto’s architecture arguably extends, expands and evolves modernism to embrace a body-based humanism, informed by a socio-ethical agenda supporting the everyday ‘little man’, confronted by twentieth-century modernity. Aalto’s alternative or heterodox architecture is argued in this study as based in the historically acknowledged, yet largely unexplored, involvement of his work with landscape, evident in the conceptualisation, siting, design, details, and the experience of his work. This thesis investigates the significance of landscape in Aalto’s work by conceptualising his architecture in terms of its relationship to landscape, addressing the lack of a sustained study of the significance of landscape in Aalto’s work. This historical-theoretical study investigates Aalto’s architecture, in buildings, details and elements, drawings, unbuilt projects, and architectural images, from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through these selected historical examples, the involvement of landscape in Aalto’s work emerges as an essential difference, distinguishing his heterodox practice from the orthodoxy of twentieth-century modern architecture. The study innovatively organises Aalto’s work into three landscape-related historical themes, of White, Waves and Ruins. While landscape offered a topic for investigating landscape in Aalto’s work in this author’s MPhil(Arch) research into prospect-refuge symbolism (2010), these three themes emerged as relevant to investigating landscape through research articles published or presented by this author between 2010-2018. This study makes its particular contribution to architectural scholarship through a series of close readings of Aalto’s work, interpreting landscape in his architecture with reference to key phenomenological concepts of Place, Atmosphere and Embodiment. The study investigates renowned Aalto works such as Villa Mairea, Muuratsalo House and Aalto Atelier, along with lesser-known works such as Summa House, Alajärvi Town Hall and Seinäjoki Theatre, as well as sketches, images and details of Aalto works. The thesis describes, analyses and interprets the significance of both Aalto’s architecture in the landscape, and landscape elements in his architecture, with reference to Aalto’s ‘own words’, to the wider Aalto literature, and to interdisciplinary literature on the phenomenology of Place, Atmosphere and Embodiment. Aalto’s lifelong familiarity with the Finnish landscape and his experience of its topography, geology, vegetation, water, weather mythology gave him a unique capacity to involve his work with landscape. Aalto’s familiarity with landscape was further informed by his interests in biology, art, history and literature, and was driven in part by his empathy for the ‘little man’, the everyday person struggling with the conflicts and changes of the twentieth century. The analysis of the study refers to the thinking of Norberg-Schulz and Pallasmaa on architectural phenomenology. It builds also on Wylie’s geographical theorisation of the phenomenology of landscape, and is based indirectly on the phenomenological philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, through architectural readings of their work. The study uses recent theoretical and historical work – including Malpas on place, Böhme on atmosphere, and Goldhagen on embodiment – to locate Aalto’s work within recent and contemporary thinking on phenomenology in landscape and architecture. Landscape is argued through the thesis as giving an ontological basis to Aalto’s method. Landscape emerges as forming a fundamental, originary architectural beginning, without which Aalto could not have imagined and created his architecture, without which experience of his work could not be fully described or investigated, and without which contemporary understanding of his work would remain less comprehensive. As such, landscape, categorised into historical themes of White, Waves and Ruins and read through phenomenological concepts of Place, Atmosphere and Embodiment, offers a unique resource for investigating the meaning and significance of Aalto’s architecture. As an investigation of landscape through its close reading of Aalto’s work, the present study aims to expand understanding of Aalto’s complex and enduring modern architecture, and of the broader significances of landscape for contemporary architectural thinking and practice