temple, which is mainly intended to be seen from the outside (interior is really only a superfluous empty space lighted only through the entrance) – that represents the preliminary stages on the route to the flowing, dynamic sense of space which is expressed so consummately in his mezzanined villa interiors. In the Gothic cathedral the eye is not drawn exclusively to the absorbing vertical movement of the nave; one also seeks out, between a forest of columns, the side aisles, the transept, the rich garland of chapels surrounding the choir, and everywhere a bewildering wealth of perspectives is perceived, a stimulating play of light and shadow. And how typical of Baroque that the splendid, imposing stairwell became the favourite subject of its secular architecture; the stairwell, where movement is the soul and the beauty of its constantly changing perspective can only be fully appreciated during a “promenade architecture”. That is the genealogy of modern spatial expression; the Parthenon plays no part in it, nor the Pantheon.

         (An historic predecessor of Le Corbusier’s great mezzanined living room is found, incidentally, in the Hanseatic burgher’s “Diele”, the spacious two-storey hall with its views of the adjoining rooms, its balconies, spiral staircase and large windows; sometimes one could, in fact, speak of a glass wall.)

Why this deep concern with Le Corbusier, why argue with him? Because he is one of the spiritual leaders of our times who, in his field, has meant as much as Freud, for example, did in his. One cannot make light of his achievements, as they have tried to in Germany, any more than psychoanalysis can be spirited away. You can conquer a continent but you can’t force it to read German type, and the Germans have had to learn this.

         It would not be surprising if one fine day the Germans sounded the retreat on this point, as they have on the question of German type; they might even proclaim that the new architecture is actually their discovery! And they would do so with a certain justification: Jahrhunderthalle at Breslau showed decades ago that monumental effects can be achieved with modern constructions, and no other country put so-called Functionalism into effect so early or on such a large scale in residential buildings. This last may well have contributed to the reaction in Germany: the public was not ripe to accept so much that was new and the architects were not ready to use the new forms rightly. How different it was in France, for instance! At that time – during the 1920s – there were only a few art enthusiasts there who had villas built for them according to the modern construction forms. France lacked a counterpart to the innumerable settlements which sprang up like mushrooms on the outskirts of all large and medium-sized German towns.

its magnificent and complete symmetry (every idea is presented of necessity more or less “symmetrically”), a worthy latter-day descendant of the ideal towns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the arrangement of the lamellar housing is a direct reminder of Jacques Perret’s ideal project.

         However, though Le Corbusier’s greatest significance may have been as a preacher, one should not forget that he was at the same time a superb architect, worthy of inclusion in the ranks of great masters of the past. In the world of architecture one seldom gets such an impression of intensive purity, clearness and lightness as is encountered in his works. And if there are things one does not approve of, which invite opposition, his buildings and projects are in any case stimulating; they make you want to actually plan and build yourself.

         The elements of modern architecture were to a large extent in existence before Le Corbusier. The open plan is found, for instance, in English domestic architecture, in Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and in the villas of the 1880s, with their projections and glass verandas, to say nothing of examples as famous as the Japanese house, the East Karelian farm house or the castle layout of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, if anybody is to be honoured with the title “father of modern architecture” it should be Le Corbusier. His everlasting service is that he has collected the odd elements and welded them into a new organic whole, in roughly the same way as the Gothic master builders combined and interpreted motifs already in existence – the ogical arch, the rib vault, the portal that recedes inwards, the twin-towered west façade – and created from them a new style, the most individual style brought forth in the Western hemisphere before the emergence of contemporary concrete architecture.

Le Corbusier’s aversion to Gothicism is one of the most surprising results of his one-sided classical aestheticism, which only approves of the simplest stereometric forms, among which the Gothic pointed arch cannot be included. And yet Gothic is nothing less than the only historical example of a skeleton construction consistently carried through in fireproof material. In buildings from earlier times – for example the concrete constructions of the Romans – the wall mass was always over-dimensioned. It was the Gothic builders who first scaled it down to the indispensable minimum and as a result of this broke up the walls with huge windows. When Le Corbusier moves the supporting columns on the outer walls inwards and turns the walls into uninterrupted glass surfaces, it is merely a logical sequence to the Gothic idea.

         But Le Corbusier prefers the temple to the cathedral… And yet one would think that the cathedral, related as it is to modern constructions, would for that very reason be more prolific in our times than the Parthenon. In the field of architecture, the cathedral represents the declaration of the coming of age of the Western spirit, and in comparison Renaissance architecture is an atavism, an interlude, a return to older and more primitive means of construction and a conventional spatial concept. As far as spatial concept is concerned the Baroque did overcome this outside element and represents a return to original sources.

         Le Corbusier, the obstinate Classicist with Romance background, does not seem to see that it was Gothic and Baroque, the styles he dislikes – not the Greek 

distinctions, resulting in a sort of spiritual “thermical death”. Something of that sort is already discernible in the common Hellenistic culture of the Mediterranean countries during late Classicism, and there the area was both limited and, geographically speaking, fairly uniform. Take architecture as an example. An “international” architecture is already something unnatural for the simple reason that the world is not the same all over. The cupola roofs on the bazaar buildings of the Eastern Mediterranean countries are as naked as Greek athletes. The “play of muscles” in the construction can be observed in abounding sunlight, whereas in our Medieval churches the upper side of the stellar vaulting is concealed under a saddleback roof, in the same way that people cover their bodies with warm clothes in a country where two-thirds of the year are more or less wintry. With present-day methods of insulation, vaulted constructions can very likely be made without an outer roof, even on the Arctic Circle, and probably there is nothing to prevent churches on the Mediterranean from being built with high saddleback roofs. But all that is possible is not necessarily natural. When the hecklers of Functionalism called the famous “Weissenhofsiedlung” in Stuttgart, where there are buildings by Le Corbusier and other renowned architects, “Stuttgart’s Casablanca”, the criticism was without doubt to a certain extent legitimate. It also may be justifiable to resume the use of building materials and the methods of construction characteristic of various parts of the country which were swept away by the effect of equalization in big city architecture. But such a reaction should not stop at a protest, because then it would easily result in the state atmosphere found at Skansen in Stockholm: one should aim at a synthesis with the scorned Functionalism. It cannot be argued that modern concrete architecture never existed.

As a writer, Le Corbusier’s role in doing away with the surviving prejudices and putting things straight has been of inestimable importance. But the philosophy of life propounded in the theses he formulates in brilliant rhetoric and with lyrical verve seems to use arrogant and hostile to life. He is an object lesson in “Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele”, and seems to idolize the leaning toward the mechanization of human existence which D.H. Lawrence opposed so passionately. Nothing is as off-putting to a northerner as a lack of “heart”, or “temperament”, which by no means is the same thing as sentimentality (the most coolheaded intellectual may very well be sentimental). To understand what is meant here, just think of old Frank Lloyd Wright. He has what Le Corbusier lacks – a touch of the wide-open spaces, smells, wind, sun, rain; Walt Whitman and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

         Le Corbusier is an unusually downright and fanatically one-sided proponent of the Latin spirit. Others before him had created architecture in iron, glass and concrete. All the architectural theorists of the Renaissance and Baroque were Italians or Frenchmen, and now again, it called for the Latin intellect to classify the new architecture, to write its law tablets, to form a school. However much Le Corbusier warned against “L’école Corlu”, that is just what we have seen grow up. It is astonishing how again and again one encounters among young architects all over the world proposals and solutions first put forward by him. Le Corbusier has become the Palladio of Functionalism. His plan for a city of three million inhabitants is, in 

of built-in cupboards, the opportunity to open the rooms on the garden, the intimate connection with the natural setting throughout, to say nothing of the actual artistic design of the detail, with large, empty surfaces or discreetly patterned ones, a lot of unstained wood, plaited straw – an aim t let materials speak for themselves without the burden of ornamentation – in a word, without the stimuli from Japan, contemporary Western architecture would not be what it is today.

         In some quarters one notices a tendency to again regard what has gradually grown up more highly than the outcome of rational thinking, the organic, as it were, as superior to the geometric. According to this the symmetry introduced by the Renaissance in place of the freer style of composition of Gothic times would seem to be a lapse, the lifeless and unrelieved chessboard pattern of the Renaissance town plan a clumsy abomination beside the meaningful hierarchy of large and small, wide and narrow, of the Medieval town, its organic adherence to the terrain, its supple adaptation to wind and sun. The relationship of the Medieval town to the ideal town of the Renaissance is like that of a juicy sun-ripe orange to a polished, geometrically perfect steel sphere – to use the image quoted earlier. But it should not be imagined for that reason that hose Medieval towns were created haphazardly, purely by instinct. They are more than one at first thinks the fruits of practical calculation and a conscious sense of beauty. The difference is mainly that the town builders of the time were greater artists than the architects of the Renaissance, who – as the Swedish romantic poet Atterbom put it – got too wrapped up in a sheer idea. During the nineteenth century the last remnants of this wonderful ability were lost, the ability that enabled earlier people to build their houses and towns so that they seem as natural where they stand as rocks and rivers, forests and meadows, so that they seem to belong to the surrounding countryside as though they had been there since the beginning of time.

“Functionalism”, “the new architecture”, or what you will call it, is the offspring of the age of bourgeois Liberalism. It has found its most cherished tasks in industrial buildings, housing and business buildings; it has scoffingly put “monumentality” inside quotation marks and is therefore somewhat taken aback when confronted with the new demand for monumentality. Like the idols of earlier epochs – the church during the Middle Ages, the Baroque princes, progress under Liberalism (temple – palace – “the temple of Mammon”, “the bank palace”) – the god of our times, the State, demands homage in the form of monumental buildings, our new “sacred buildings”.

         It is, incidentally, a strange coincidence that two of the great pioneer works constructed in glass and iron – the Crystal Palace in London and the Glaspalast in Munich – were both erected during the first part of the 1850s and both burned down around 1930. Rarely is an important era in architectural history brought so clearly to a close.

A dream has been nourished of a “telluric” culture, a culture common to the entire world which would assimilate all the best achievements of different peoples. Far-reaching evolution in this direction would, however, involve the danger of losing all

Pantheon, the giant halls of the Roman baths and the basilicas, Hagia Sophia, the Gothic cathedrals, Baroque churches, banqueting halls, stairwells. In East Asia, above all in Japan, monumental spatial architecture, those bold techniques of vaulting, is notable for its total absence. How limited, how strangely similar over a period of one thousand five hundred years East Asian architecture seems to us beside the European, with its changing styles, sudden reverses and constant ability to renew itself. There are, of course, shifts in style there, too, and that they seem less different from one another than their European counterparts depends no doubt to a certain extent on the unifying distance. It is probably indisputable, however, that the changes really have been greater in West than in the Far East, and that the fruitful mobility and unrest of the European spirit, its world-embracing taste for adventure, is reflected in a wider amplitude in the swing of the pendulum of formal and artistic expression.

         Already the fact that Japanese architecture is architecture in wood (the earliest stone houses were erected by Portuguese Jesuits in the sixteenth century) implies considerable limitation. There is nothing even to approach the gigantic concrete structures of the Romans, or the dressed-stone Gothic cathedrals, reaching up to heaven, with their stained-glass windows in flaming colours. But within this limited world, which does seem to a detached observer to have been marking time for a long while, an architectural miracle is growing. This miracle is not expressed in terms of magnificence, but in absolute perfection, polish, an utter refinement surpassing well-nigh everything built by the hand of man: the Japanese house.

         In terms of absolute perfection it equals the Doric temple. But it has qualities that make it more widely prolific in our times than the temple. It has been said that Greek temple architecture is standardized, but it is a standardization which rides dangerously near to the concept of a uniform house type that Aalto is fighting. Not only the elements but their composition, the spatial whole, is strictly according to norms (throughout time cult buildings have been more or less “standardized”). It is here that the Japanese house asserts its superiority as a source of inspiration for contemporary architecture. Since it is not the whole but only the elements that are standardized, it allows the possibility of varied combinations according to taste and space needs. If you compare the Parthenon to a polished crystal, in which every line, every surface is calculated exactly, and nothing can be taken away or added without spoiling the whole, then the Japanese dwelling house can be compared to a bush, or a tree, putting out new twigs and shoots in different directions without the free equilibrium being upset.