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Published in 5/2020 - Monument
More Than “Water”
The new books on Else Aropaltio and Alvar Aalto urge Anni Vartola to pause and take the architecture in.
* To alleviate potential concerns over an undeclared conflict of interest, please be advised that the author of this piece is a part-time, impecunious bookshop-owner and both publications covered in the article are currently being retailed by her.
David Foster Wallace’s now-famous commencement speech to Kenyon College graduates in 2005 starts with an anecdote. “There are these two young fish swimming along”, he told his audience, “and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Two new books have been released in Finland this autumn that, in an unconventional and Foster Wallace-esque manner, shed light on the way we ascribe value and meaning to architecture. At a public event, an architect might find themselves confronted with a question they’ve never stopped to consider before. Laypeople, local residents and tourists alike can inhabit built environments without ever giving a moment’s thought to their architectural significance. The question is which people, and what topics, deserve to have books written about them, and what kind of analyses and interpretations do we deem worthy of being published? These new releases, on Else Aropaltio and Alvar Aalto respectively, are unafraid to confront tricky architectural themes; both authors, and each other’s namesakes as it happens, give a thoroughly stylish and highly enjoyable account of their subjects.
Esa Laaksonen: Else Aropaltio. Arjen arkkitehti. Pen Paper 2020. 187 p.
Esa Laaksonen’s Else Aropaltio: Arjen arkkitehti posits Aropaltio, an architect renowned for her prolific professional output, as the doyenne of truly homely apartment design and as a woman architect neglected by the history books. The relationship between writer and subject is marked by a polite distance. Laaksonen, an experienced and skilful architectural writer, chooses not to engage in a qualitative assessment of Aropaltio’s oeuvre, focusing instead on charting, recording, describing and narrating Aropaltio’s remarkable career, using earlier publications, archive resources, and the voices of other researchers and her family members to do so. This is a commissioned piece of work; the impetus for the project came from an initiative set up by residents in the Lauttasaari neighbourhood of Helsinki, where many of her works are located, to have local streets re-named to reflect her contribution to the area. It is only occasionally that Esa Laaksonen allows the high esteem, in which he clearly holds Aropaltio, to show through. For the most part, he picks his words with great care and restraint: Aropaltio’s houses, he tells us, are “fine”, “harmonious”, “beautiful” – but even at their most conventional their presence is clearly felt. Much of the architectural photography featured in the book is by Laaksonen himself, and the author has spared himself no pains with his research, his efforts reflecting the historic significance of this book.
In Alvar Aallon jalanjäljillä, the author has opted for an altogether different approach. Petri Laaksonen, a Helsinki-based local newspaper journalist and graphic designer, finds himself powerfully drawn to a white-rendered property close to his home. It soon turns out that the building is the world-famous residence of none other than Alvar and Aino Aalto. The ensuing journey of discovery into the Aalto universe is ultimately turned into a series of articles, and with guidance and encouragement from Aalto’s former colleague Jussi Rautsi, the articles continue to grow and evolve, becoming a veritable treasure trove bursting with observations and insights.
The resulting book, much like Virpi Suutari’s documentary film Aalto, also from 2020, is a love letter to Aalto and an invitation to join the author on an architectural journey. In contrast with Esa Laaksonen’s reserve, Petri Laaksonen’s words reveal his passion and enthusiasm for his subject, though both authors are committed to serious, factual writing and clearly seek to lend visibility and give voice to the architects themselves. Petri Laaksonen’s relationship with the Aalto brand is marked by a sense of curiosity and humility: his joy of learning is apparent in the richness of the illustrations, the diversity of the critical approaches he employs, the sheer number of interviews he has conducted, the variety of archival sources explored and the wealth of photographs taken by the author himself that also demonstrate a series of highly personal insights made along the way.
It’s almost as if the two books are in literary cahoots with one another, working together to reveal the potential obscured in the familiar.
It’s almost as if the two books are in literary cahoots with one another, working together to reveal the potential obscured in the familiar. Alvar “done to death” Aalto and humdrum suburban housing are both made meaningful through the addition of an important extra element; a fresh, new voice. Petri Laaksonen shows us that there is another way to approach Aalto; unfussy, unstuffy, unconcerned with formal qualifications and free of pedestals. And we also learn that it is possible to celebrate Lauttasaari’s housing as the professional, career-defining achievement of one highly skilful architect and as a product of its time, without also having to critique it for the “ordinariness” of Aropaltio’s design language, to get caught up in endless speculation about quantity over quality or to engage in moralising over the professional and private relationship between architect and her developer.
These books leave me with the sense that we are all swimming amongst the architecture that surrounds us like Foster Wallace’s fish, moving through our built environment without ever really experiencing it. We pass buildings dripping with history and architectural merit every day without pausing, let alone stopping, to take them in. Our understanding of architecture relies on a series of conventional and widely accepted notions, because we would prefer not to have to question the truths, powerfully etched, again and again, onto our collective set of values to the exclusion of others. It is only when an outsider – innocently, sincerely, intelligently – invites us to explore these notions, that we find the courage to confront the biases inherent in and the all-encompassing networks integral to our field along with the role sheer dumb luck often plays in it all.
Architecture comprises both the obvious and the unobvious, but what constitutes remarkable as opposed to unremarkable architecture depends entirely on the perspective of the beholder. As long as we continue to research, write about and publish on architecture and read and talk about it, architecture need not be reduced to mere “water”. ↙
ANNI VARTOLA (s. 1965)
DSc (Arch.), who writes about architecture, lectures about theory of architecture, conducts research on postmodern architecture and runs an online architecture bookshop.