The Cultural Role of Architecture: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives by Неизвестный

Author:Неизвестный [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135765439
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-11-11T22:00:00+00:00

Rearranging the Familiar

Aalto's post-war work possesses those humane traditions of the city that Aldo Rossi (a colleague of Rogers) identified as lying “between inventory and memory.” But while Rossi argued for certain diagrammatic types, unbesmirched by contingency, as the way to establish absolute continuity, Aalto worked in the opposite way, attending to their typicalities of use so that type arose as a solution and not as an imposition. Once again, this reflects the concept of continuatà, which for Rogers begins with a search within the architectural act itself for Zweckmassigkeit (purposive intention — Rogers used the German word in his Italian text), a statement of each project's uniqueness, and its delineative parameters, drawn from the life, customs and intuitions of the era in which the project is situated (Semeriani 1999: 76–78). Following on from this, typology is then availed on to comment on, and to provide an extension of, history, so that the act of design becomes the identification of a type that would extend the preesistenze ambientali (surrounding pre-existences) and resolve the issues implicit in the design context.

Aalto's taxonomy of divulging types and stylistic tropes act in the manner of Moholy-Nagy's “dynamic stimulus” to reveal new contents, the uniqueness of which are discovered through the accretion of experiences acted upon them (Moholy Nagy 1930: 34–37). Responding to habits and effects, rather than formal appearance, Aalto avoids the “trap” of typology in which the architect chooses a type “because it is the way [s]he knows” (Moneo 1978: 27). In his series of sketches of the theatre at Delphi from 1953, it is not a conjecture of pure type that Aalto sees, but an enduring, inhabited and weathered idea that transcends its geometric form; and it is these congregational, social and landscape relationships which are later recast in buildings from the House of Culture onwards (1952–1958).

Figure 10.3

Alvar Aalto, Ahto Virtanen grave, Helsinki, 1937

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