Alvar Aalto and the Jyväskylä Workers Club
Alvar Aalto (1898–1976)
The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is recognized as being one of the outstanding Modern architects of the twentieth century (Figure 50). His output was extraordinary, designing buildings throughout Finland and in eighteen further countries across the globe. What is less well known (and often later suppressed by him and his many followers) is that in contrast to his later well-known Modern architecture, in the early part of his career, he also made a significant contribution to the Nordic Classical Movement. As Malcolm Quantrill stated in his Finnish Architecture and the Modernist Tradition: ‘Previously there had been an inclination to suppress Alvar Aalto’s complicity in those developments and concentrate instead on the emergence of the main line of his thrust into modernism. But it is increasingly clear that Aalto’s involvement in Nordic Classicism was more than just a passing fancy.’1 So let us consider Aalto’s early Classical work and his contribution to the movement.
FIGURE 50 Alvar Aalto, Credit – Museum of Finnish Architecture.
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was born in rural Kuortane, Finland, in 1898, making him one of the youngest of the Nordic Classicists. His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, was a Finnish-speaking land surveyor, and his mother, Selma Mathilda, a Swedish-speaking postmistress. When Aalto was five years old, the family moved to Alajärvi, and from there to Jyväskylä in Central Finland. Aalto studied at the Jyväskylä Lyceum School, completing his basic education in 1916 when he enrolled to study architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology.2 In 1918, his studies were interrupted for four months by the Finnish Declaration of Independence and subsequent Finnish Civil War in which he fought on the side of the Finnish White Army in the battles of Länkipohja and Tampere. On his return to Helsinki and his architectural education, like many of his fellow students, he was strongly influenced by his professor Armas Lindgren and his former partners, Eliel Saarinen and Herman Gesellius, who were then the leaders of National Romanticism in Finland. Despite his commitment to the National Romantic Movement, it was Lindgren who lectured Aalto on the architecture of Italy and Greece, which, regardless of changing architectural fashions, continued to be regarded as the bedrock of any serious architectural education.
In June 1920, while still a student, Aalto made his first trip abroad to Stockholm. For this committed, ambitious, young Finnish Architect, this must have been an extraordinary experience as he saw first-hand the best of contemporary Swedish design. Ragnar Östberg’s (1866–1945) Town Hall (1907–1923), then under construction, received a critically positive response from the young Alvar: ‘Young architects of the North, who dream of a cool, Classical, linear beauty, may not always approve of Östberg’s Venetian magnificence, but we must all admire him never the less.’3 But it was not Östberg, the National Romantic, whom Aalto had come to meet in Stockholm but Gunnar Asplund (Ch 4), whose recently completed Woodland Chapel (1918–1920) Aalto regarded as ‘the best architecture one can hope to see in the Nordic Countries’.4 Indeed such was Aalto’s regard for Asplund and self-confidence in his own abilities that he had planned to join Asplund’s office and before leaving Finland had even given it as his forwarding address. Unfortunately for Aalto, Asplund was unimpressed with the young Finn and rejected the offer of his contribution. (Despite this, Asplund continued to be a major source of inspiration for the young Aalto and some years later, became a good friend.) After a few months’ work in Gothenburg for Arvid Bjerke (1880–1952), Aalto returned to Finland via Copenhagen where he admired both Martin Nyrop’s National Romantic City Hall (1892–1905) and Hack Kampmann’s rather severe Police Headquarters (1918–1924), which were then under construction.
In 1921, he completed his architectural education and, in 1922, began his official military service, which concluded a year later in June 1923. Rather than seeking a position in one of Helsinki or Stockholm’s leading architectural practices, as might have been expected for such an ambitious young architect, or perhaps being stung by Asplund’s rejection, Aalto decided to immediately start his own practice (despite his very limited practical architectural experience and a portfolio of completed projects which at the time amounted to little more than a new porch for his parents’ house and a youth club building in Alajärvi). Soon, realizing that his only early commissions were all via his father’s contacts back in Jyväskylä, Aalto chose to abandon Helsinki for his home town, where he opened his practice in one room in the basement of the local hotel under the title ‘Alvar Aalto, Architect and Monumental Artist’ (which was displayed on a sign outside the hotel in two-foot-high letters).5
As with most young architectural practices of this period in Scandinavia, the workload consisted of a combination of minor domestic and commercial fee-paying commissions along with speculative, time-consuming entries for architectural competitions. For the young Aalto and soon his one or two staff, while there was often a shortage of money, there was never a shortage of work.
In 1924, he received his first substantial commission for the Jyväskylä Workers Club (which is considered in detail below). This small Classical building drew on an extraordinarily diverse range of sources from Greek market buildings and the Doge’s Palace in Venice to the copper tent of the Haga Palace in Stockholm and attracted attention to his architecture for the first time. ‘In the design of the Workers Club he showed himself, aged only 26, to be the equal of any of his compatriots in connecting Finland with the prevailing Scandinavian mode of expression.’6 Despite the range of sources, it was to Asplund to whom Aalto turned in organizing his composition with the drum of Asplund’s Lister County Courthouse, forming the pin around which the spaces of the Workers Club revolved.
In addition to this first major commission, 1924 turned out to be an important year for Aalto for two further reasons. Firstly, he married one of the members of his architectural practice – Aino Marsio (1894–1949) (who had previously worked for Oiva Kallio in Helsinki (Ch 8)), and secondly, almost certainly as significantly for him, he finally managed to visit Italy. This omission from his CV up until this point must have been an embarrassment for the young Aalto, and following several unsuccessful attempts to fund his trip by travel grants, he used a prolonged honeymoon to address this shortcoming.
As with most of his contemporaries, after a largely Classical architectural education, combined with the missionary zeal of the new Nordic Classicists, Italy had a profound impact on Aalto throughout both his Classical period and indeed the rest of his career. As Richard Weston, one of his biographers, put it: ‘Aalto’s enthusiasm for Italy was unbounded – he named his first daughter Johanna Flora Maria Annunziata – and it was above all the classical landscape of “the holy land of Tuscany” which enthralled him. What Aalto absorbed from Italy was a vision of a living urban culture: his love of Italian towns was without a trace of nostalgia – they were towns “rooted in the earth” which lived in the present.’7
While his contemporaries found inspiration in the Classical buildings which they sketched and photographed on their travels, for Aalto, perhaps more than any other, it was the Italian landscape which had the most profound influence on him. Whether urban or rural, it was the natural, irregular beauty of the ancient cities and countryside with which he was particularly entranced, and in particular, the hill towns of Tuscany and Umbria, which were to have a lasting influence upon him throughout his career.
This crucial year concluded with a further important commission for his growing practice – a Defence Corps Building for Seinäjoki, which he quickly developed in the form of a Palladian farmstead, complete with carved timber Corinthian columns and a protruding circular interior space (which was a further rather overt borrowing from Asplund’s Lister Courthouse, 1919–1921). Design continued on the Workers Club and various other small commissions including a petrol station and a number of domestic renovations, combined with audacious competition entries, such as for the new Finnish Parliament House (which was to launch JS Sirén’s career, rather than Aalto’s (Ch 5)). This mix of minor commissions and major competitions formed the pattern for the practice through the next few years.
In 1926, he and Aino completed the construction of their own summer cottage, the Villa Flora, with its plain rendered walls and timber veranda below a turf roof, and also won the commission for a new church in Muurame, near Jyväskylä – one of a series of his church designs of this period which combined a pedimented Classical basilica with either a fully detached or engaged campanile. Further visits to Denmark and Sweden took in the completed Copenhagen Police Headquarters (Ch 6) as well as Asplund’s outstanding Stockholm City Library (Ch 4).
The year 1927 brought further major progress when, at the age of twenty-nine, Aalto won competitions for both a new Library at Viipuri and for a mixed-use building for the South Western Finland Agricultural Co-operative in Turku (with Hilding Ekelund second in both competitions). This prompted Aalto to move his office to Turku from where he could better supervise construction work on the cooperative building, develop his working relationship with occasional collaborator, Erik Bryggman, and crucially, have easy ferry access to Stockholm, where Asplund continued to lead the development of Scandinavian architecture. Both Aalto’s library and the cooperative building competition designs were for Nordic Classical buildings with plain rendered facades below Classical friezes and heavy cornices – the competition entry for the library in particular being a fine example of Nordic Classicism and providing further evidence of Asplund’s continuing influence, in this case with elements of the new Stockholm City Library (1918–1927) looming large. These were to prove his last Classical designs.
Like many of his Scandinavian contemporaries, Aalto had become more and more interested in the new Functionalist architecture about which much had, by then, been published and the first examples of which completed. The year 1926 had seen both the publication of Le Corbusier’s seminal Vers Une Architecture and the completion of Walter Gropius’s first buildings for the Bauhaus, and in 1927, the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart gave this new architecture further momentum. The younger Scandinavian architects followed these developments closely, and Aalto was amongst those who quickly developed an enthusiasm for this new ‘rational’ approach to design. Göran Schildt (1917–2009), one of Aalto’s biographers, recounted Aalto’s life-long enthusiasm for new ideas and technology: borrowing his father’s car (the first in Alajärvi) whenever possible, his purchase of one of the first movie cameras, his love of the cinema and jazz, and even commencing his honeymoon with a seaplane trip from Helsinki to Tallinn.8 But it was not just technological innovation, the collage of industrial images, the revolutionary slogans or the exciting new architectural vocabulary, which attracted Aalto. He understood very quickly (unlike many others) that Functionalism was less a new style and more a new way of thinking and designing, which he wholeheartedly believed could transform Finland into a more egalitarian, just and healthy society.
Like several of his contemporaries, including Asplund and Lewerentz, there was no going back once the move from Classicism to Functionalism was made – it was irrevocable. All new designs such as the commission for the Turun Sanomat newspaper company of 1927, which included his proposal for the projection of the front page of the newspaper onto the building facade, were in Functionalist style. Aalto’s sources were now the buildings of Le Corbusier and Gropius, rather than Gunnar Asplund. Existing projects under construction such as the Agricultural Co-operative Building in Turku were stripped almost completely of their decoration with a new set of drawings produced in January 1928 in Functionalist style, which included many of the elements of the new architectural language, not least, his first use of tubular steel railings to the courtyard balconies.
The Viipuri Library project metamorphasized into a Functionalist building in the summer of 1928, thus attracting significant local opposition before its completion in 1935 at which point it was acknowledged as one of the most important buildings of the Functional architecture. Perhaps, even more importantly, it was also the first of Aalto’s buildings to include the sinuous natural curves of his mature work – here in the undulating wooden meeting room ceiling.
The year 1929 brought a further major competition win for the new Sanatorium at Paimio with Aalto’s winning design now bearing no remaining hint of classicism either in its plan, section or construction; this was Modern architecture, complete with cantilevered concrete balconies, arranged at oblique angles to catch the sun and the views of the surrounding forest. Together with Erik Bryggman that year, he also designed the Turku 700th Centenary exhibition. This comprised a series of pavilion designs in the new functionalist style, albeit executed in birch and plywood, as necessitated by the budget. In the autumn of 1929 at Swedish architect Sven Markelius’s (1889–1972) suggestion, Aalto accompanied him to the second meeting of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne in Frankfurt, where he met Walter Gropius for the first time.9 Professionally, internationally, he had arrived, and he worked hard to develop his new international architectural network.
Just as his career was taking off, the economy slumped as the Depression hit Finland, and Aalto moved his home and office to Helsinki in the hope of finding further work there. Christmas 1932 was perhaps his lowest point with the bailiff calling on Christmas Eve, by which point his practice had shrunk back to just himself and Aino. It was largely his innovative bent wood furniture designs, which he had been developing for several years, which provided their income through this difficult time. The year 1933 saw the opening of the Paimio Sanatorium to international acclaim, and in 1935, the Artek furniture company which manufactured and sold his designs was founded with the moral and financial support of Maire Gullichsen (1907–1990).
The completion of Paimio established Aalto as the leader of Functionalism (or Funkis as it was known) in Finland. The free plan of the sanatorium buildings represented a dramatic break with the past; oriented to provide fresh air, sunlight and views, and clearly expressing its various functions throughout, Aalto designed every detail of the building from door handles to light fittings as well as numerous further bent wood chairs. The entire building was determined by the needs of its patients, and every element was designed from first principles to aid their recovery. With Viipuri Library opening in 1935 to equal acclaim, Aalto overcame Asplund and established himself as the leading Scandinavian architect – a position he held until his death over forty years later.
The sanatorium and completed Viipuri Library took Aalto beyond the pure planes and cubic forms of early Functionalism into an increasingly personal approach to Modernism which embraced technology and the modern world and yet, in many ways, remained rooted in the forests and lakes of Finland. His work became more and more an architecture which was rich in contrasts – curving or radiating natural forms contrasting with rectilinear elements, natural materials (wood and leather) used with concrete and steel, subtle natural lighting combined with the latest mechanical and electrical installations; it was an approach which Aalto was to go on to develop into an alternative, very humane Scandinavian form of modern architecture and through which he established himself as one of the world’s greatest architects and in the region of Scandinavia as a leader in design. From this point onwards, Aalto actively suppressed any reference to his earlier Classical architecture, which he now regarded as inconsistent with his modern work, and interestingly, most of the Modern architectural critics colluded with him in this respect with JM Richards and Sigfried Giedion both referring to Aalto’s earliest projects as the Turun Sanomat building (1927–1929), Paimio Sanatorium (1927–1929) and Viipuri Library (1927–1935), rather than the Workers Club, the Civil Guard Building and Muurame Church.10
Maire Gillichsen, Alvar and Aino’s partner in their Artek furniture company, and her husband Harry (1902–1954), the CEO of the Ahlstrom Corporation, were to become key clients for Aalto in the 1930s, first in commissioning industrial buildings and workers housing for their Sunila pulp mill and (if he needed it) helping promote Aalto’s work to a wider audience. This resulted in his commission for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, which in turn led to an exhibition of his furniture and architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Following the success of the exhibition, in 1937, Maire and Harry commissioned Aalto to design a weekend retreat for them in the grounds of their family estate at Noormarku. They wished their new home to be a statement of modern Finland, and indeed it was Marie who rejected Aalto’s initial proposals as being too traditional. The outcome of this collaboration was a masterpiece – the Villa Mairea, a dramatically Modern house which managed to combine concrete and steel with birch poles and leather bindings. The L-shaped rectilinear plan of the house encloses a sinuously curved swimming pool, complete with grass-roofed sauna and outdoor fireplace, and within the main living space, a forest of irregular columns echoed the surrounding woods. With the Villa Mairea, Aalto had established his mature style.
In 1939, Aalto was asked to design the Finnish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, and he produced an extraordinary space in which sloping wave-like planes of birch wood once more evoked the forests and lakes of Finland, inspiring even the solipsistic Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) to describe it as a ‘work of genius’.11 Building on his earlier MOMA exhibition, the World’s Fair pavilion launched Aalto in the United States, where he was awarded a visiting professorship and offered several architectural commissions including the Baker House Senior Dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1945–1949),which was to be the first major completion for his practice after the lean years of the Second World War. Peace brought a deluge of commissions and competition successes for Aalto, and one brilliant building design succeeded another: Säynätsalo Town Hall of 1949–1952, which was designed around a raised, open public courtyard, putting the townspeople at the heart of the democratic process; a new paper mill for Enzo-Gutzeit of 1951–1953; the Rautatalo office building and the National Pensions Institute in Central Helsinki of 1952–1956; Jyväskylä University of 1952–1957; his own summer house of 1953; faculty buildings for the Helsinki Technical University of 1955–1966; Vuoksenniska Church of 1957–1959, the first of a series of subtle, modern sacred spaces built throughout Finland and beyond including Seinäjoki of 1963–1966; Wolfsburg, Germany; Bologna, Italy (1966–1976); Alajärvi (1969–1970) and Lahti (1970); a high-rise apartment in Bremen in Germany of 1958–1962; Villa Carré in France, 1959; the new Town Halls for Seinajoki of 1961–1965, Alajärvi (1966–1969) and Jyväskylä (1975); the first of a further series of libraries at Seinäjoki of 1963–1965, followed by Helsinki Technical University Library (1964–1969), Rovaneimi (1965–1968) and Benedictine College, Oregon, the United States (1965–1970); and his last great work, the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki of 1967–1971.12
By the end of the 1930s, Aalto had established himself as the most highly regarded of contemporary Scandinavian architects. By the end of the 1940s, he had joined an elite international club of modern masters which included Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rhoe (1886–1969) and, by the time of his death in 1976, was generally regarded as the most famous, gifted and successful architect ever to emerge from the Nordic countries. After receiving the Royal Institute of British Architect’s Gold Medal in 1957, the Times wrote: ‘It is remarkable that the Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto should have gained a world-wide celebrity in architectural circles on the basis of a number of works that are inaccessible to all but the most assiduous travellers.’13
Jyväskylä Workers Club
In 1924, Aalto was twenty-six and was desperately trying to develop his architectural practice in Jyväskylä. He was yet to embark on the profusion of competition entries that would eventually bring him international acclaim and was picking up local work with little opposition. His first major commission was a new Workers Club for Jyväskylä on a site in the centre of the town. While the brief for the building was relatively simple – a working men’s club, providing a large meeting room, restaurant and two cafes – Aalto extracted every possible ounce of architectural drama from it and, in doing so, delivered an impressive design which, as he hoped, attracted attention far beyond Jyväskylä.
Aalto’s design placed the largest space – the meeting room – at first-floor level, running parallel with the street behind largely blank elevations below which a largely glazed ground floor provided entrance, cafes and restaurant at right angles to the street. The solid mass of the first-floor meeting room was supported on a colonnade of Doric columns at street level, which in turn rested on a grey granite base, thus expressing the two main elements of the building as an inward-looking private solid above an outward-looking public void (Figure 53). The arrangement, strange as it sounds, was far from architecturally unusual with the Doge’s Palace in Venice (1424–1442) being suggested as one precedent14 and ancient Greek Stoa’s (such as the Stoa of Attalos in Athens) another. Whatever the source, Aalto’s intention was clearly to provide a relaxed, civilized extension to the public life of the street at ground level with the more private activities of the club being carried out above. In Italy, the Doric colonnade would have been just that – an open, covered colonnade under which restaurant and cafe tables and chairs would have been set out for customers. In Scandinavia, these civilized urban activities had to take place indoors for most of the year, and thus the glazed screen enclosed these public activities and established the first of a number of internal spaces within the building, which were external in character.
FIGURE 51 Jyväskylä Workers Club Plan, Credit – John Stewart. 1. Club Entrance 2. Cafe 3. Restaurant
FIGURE 52 Jyväskylä Workers Club Elevation, Credit – John Stewart.
FIGURE 53 Jyväskylä Workers Club Plan, Credit – Stephane Auger.
Like other Nordic Classical architects, Aalto saw his buildings not just as individual incidents within a town but also as models for how the rapidly growing towns and cities might develop as more civilized urban environments. In this context, Aalto’s open colonnaded ground floor was seen as an example of how other buildings might similarly provide an open public ground floor to the street with more private activities above, much in the manner of the Piazza della Republica in Rome (1887–1898) or the Rue de Rivoli in Paris (1804–1848).
At street level, from the left, we therefore have the main entrance to the building serving one of the cafes and providing access to the meeting room above, the glazed facade of the main cafe and then a further entrance which gave direct access to the restaurant, whose glazed elevations span to the end of the building and turn the corner. At the centre of the building sits a great drum, which has a number of purposes. In terms of the building’s function, it provides an intimate, circular hypostyle cafe at ground level and a circular rear wall of the meeting hall on the floor above. Architecturally, it acts as a great hinge around which the two axes of the building move, turning the route from the main entrance through 90o to the grand stairs and the lobby of the meeting room above and at first floor, where it disperses the audience for the meeting room around and through it into the hall itself (Figure 54).
FIGURE 54 Jyväskylä Workers Club First-floor Lobby, Credit – Josep Maria Torra.
More importantly, at first floor, its impact in the lobby of the meeting room is to create a sense of anticipation of the principal space behind it. This key element of the design is undoubtedly borrowed from Asplund’s Lister County Courthouse (1919–1921), where the circular space of the courtroom swells out into the entrance lobby, both emphasizing the importance of this space within the hierarchy of the building and arousing the senses before entering the court. In the courthouse, the imposing circular wall anticipates the circular courtroom beyond, whereas in Jyväskylä, the circular rear wall of the essentially rectangular meeting room is much less convincing. (This is just one of many examples within the building of Aalto’s awareness of and indebtedness to Asplund’s then recently completed buildings.)
After the drama of the grand staircase and the richly panelled drum and entrance doors, the hall itself comes as something of a disappointment. Perhaps due to the range of activities, which it was required to support, the space is rather plain, with the impact of the drum now largely lost behind the straight balcony front, and the stage itself framed by a simple proscenium arch. During the day, it is lit from a ‘Venetian’ style window placed centrally to the hall, high on the street wall, while at night, Aalto’s specially designed six-pointed star lights suggest a moonlit piazza and thus a further external element within this social space.
Internally, it is the route to the hall and the quality of the spaces throughout this sequence which provide the highlight of the building. Aalto’s admiration for the works of Asplund is clear, and the festive character of Asplund’s Skandia Cinema (1922–1923) appears to have been Aalto’s aim.15 The detailing throughout these spaces is particularly fine and expresses Aalto’s real confidence and emerging ability. The drum as it swells into the lobby is beautifully and richly panelled below the cornice which stops just short of the ceiling to allow the ceiling plane to float like an Italian night sky, and his Rococo light fittings to the lobby and amphora-like stub columns to the stairs are particularly enjoyable. While this is hardly one of the most original Nordic Classical building of its time, it is nevertheless a very confident essay in the style by a very capable young architect, who understands exactly what he is doing and why.
Externally the Workers Club is an unusual composition with the blank two-storey mass of the meeting hall apparently providing quite a structural challenge for the relatively slight, stubby Doric colonnade at street level below. Similarly, the ‘Venetian’ window, which lights the hall above, bears no relation to the order of the Doric columns below, and indeed the design of the window itself with arches on either side of a rectangular opening rather than the reverse is classically incorrect. These are not accidents. The Nordic Classicists believed that such irregularities or discordant notes expressed the freedom with which they adopted Classicism, bringing a new lightness and freshness to their work and allowing them to respond, without constraint, to the needs of the spaces within their buildings.
The materials are familiar – buff render with stone columns, architraves and balustraded balcony to the ‘Venetian’ window. But it is all executed with a lightness of touch and elegance of proportion, which is a considerable achievement for a 26-year-old architect and thus is superior in this respect to many other contemporary examples of the style. The main entrance is particularly fine with bronze doors protected by a tented canopy or baldachino supported by diagonal lances – this is the copper tent from the Haga Palace gardens in Stockholm (1787) via Asplund’s Villa Snellman (1917–1918) – but carried off with a cavalier panache (Figure 55).
FIGURE 55 Jyväskylä Workers Club Main Entrance, Credit – John Stewart.
Despite the significant debt to Asplund, this is an impressive first major building for a young architect in a regional town in Finland in 1924. It is subtly planned and elegantly detailed throughout, and when one also considers that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, Aalto was only to visit Italy for the first time while this building was already under construction, it is even more impressive. The Jyväskylä Workers Club made a significant contribution to both the development of Finnish architecture and to Nordic Classicism as a whole, and it seems sad that in his later years, Aalto should have regarded this and his other early Classical buildings as a series of embarrassing incidents, which he would rather others forgot.