it.”7 In his speech, Saarinen is rewriting their modernist manifesto and calling for the same things: truthfulness from the new style and for the style to rise organically from the circumstances and the society in which we live. For Saarinen, the time for linking national characteristics with architecture is over. Yet, Saarinen, on the threshold of a new international architectural career, does not look as if he is ready to give up his idealism about his own country and his own architecture. Earlier, had had helped to build the quality of “Finnishness”; in 1931 he is helping to build the quality of universal “Westernnes”.

         In Alvar Aalto’s writing, the relationship between Finland and international affairs is also topical in a rather exciting way, but the interpretative reference framework is very different. Throughout his life, Aalto had been interested in social questions and in the renewal of architecture, and he considered technology, the advancement of society, economic growth and wellbeing to be inextricably intertwined with architecture. The number and quality of Aalto’s international contacts were already surprisingly high at a very young age: warm personal relationships with many influential people in the Nordic countries and important visionaries in Europe took Aalto straight to the heart of Modernism. His circle of friends included names such as Sven markelius, Erik Gunnar Asplund, Poul Henningsen, Walter Gropius, Sigfried Giedion, Fernand Léger and Laszlo Moholy Nagy. Aalto made a solid contribution to be activities of many important groups intent on renewing architecture. He helped Poul Henningsen to run the magazine Kritisk Revy, took part enthusiastically in the activities of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) from its 1929 congress onwards,8 and in summer 1939 he founded a new cultural magazine Den mänsliga sidan (The Human Side) with Gregor Paulsson, intended to “bring to the awareness of the wider public in a practical and comprehensible manner, new phenomena observed in social life, practical and comprehensible manner, new phenomena observed in social life, business and politics that can be explained socio-biologically and that have begun to appear all round the world and which, taken together, are an indication of the fact that, in all probability, a decisive structural change is taking place in these areas”.9

         The Aalto text chosen for this book was written at a politically significant moment. Finland’s war with the Soviet Union, known as the Winter War, had ended on 13 March 1940, and in April 1940, Aalto had been invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Architecture. Although the Second World War was not finally over until 1945, Finland was already faced with the biggest re-housing project in European history, involving the resettlement of more than 400, 000 Finnish refugees from the areas ceded to the Soviet Union. This called for immediate action, so Aalto’s attention in the early 1940s focused on the housing issue, the rural building issue and town planning generally.10 All the time and in all possible forums both in Finland and the USA, Aalto was calling for systematic, efficient, standardized housing research and housing production, but starting out from architecture. The basic question concerns the relationship between the individual and standardized architecture: “In architecture, the job of standardization is not to aim for types, but quite the reverse, to create viable variation and richness, which in an ideal situation, can be compared with nature’s unlimited ability to produce nuances.”11 Aalto was looking for an elastic standard: a

Arrogance and even malignance towards more human discussion. “The architect firmly believes that the drawing speaks for itself and the drawing says it all”, the wrote. In Pietilä’s opinion, the ruling dictum in 1960s architecture that “good architecture must contain no aesthetics or theory of any kind” was also an obstacle to architects writing. Pietilä saw the prevailing conflict in values between the realist and the theorist that existed in Finland in those days – and perhaps still does – as extremely significant. “The realist is a good man, the theorist a bad one”, wrote Pietilä and went on to say that the reason for fear was concealed in the doggerel that “those who can’t design buildings prefer to write journals. Thus the fact that a man finds writing unpleasant means that he must be a good architect”. Pietilä was at his most cutting when talking about the arrogance of architects:

         Architecture is so elevated, so exalted, as to be almost unattainable. Architecture is an extremely difficult and therefore an incomprehensible issue, an issue that the layman is never capable of approaching in the right way … It is dangerous to explain the nature of architecture to “the people” and this undoubtedly leads to a false simplicity. The calling of architecture demands acquiescence, humility and worship from those who practice it.4

         Pietilä’s analysis provides an interesting context for the Finnish texts selected for this book. They are fine pieces of writing from a country that produces fine architecture, and yet there is a delightfully perplexing common denominator which makes them so easily recognizable as Finnish. Each one of them has been written by an architect who has shown great practical design ability and attained great respect in Finland and even abroad. Each of the texts ponders the nature of architecture and describes architecture as one complete indivisible and perhaps slightly mystical profession of artistic talent. All the texts are, in a way, frozen still-lifes in words: they are favourable portraits of architecture written as if under an obligation. They are not a matter of debate for its own sake, but tokens of faith.

         Historically, the first of the texts is Eliel Saarinen’s “Address”, a speech given in his capacity as president of the Cranbrook Academy of Arts at the annual general meeting of the American Institute of Architects.5 Saarinen had moved from Finland to the United States in 1923 after winning second prize in the international architectural competition for a skyscraper for the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Earlier, in collaboration with his student colleagues and partner Hermann Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, he had attained an important role as someone who had genuinely shown the way in a nation sense. This era had come to an end, however:6 what was needed when he wrote the speech was a new vision, new integrity and consistency, rationalism and modern architecture.

         Perplexingly enough, both the setting and the agenda echo the heated debate that had been sparked off early in the twentieth century after Saarinen had won the two major competitions for the National Museum (1902) and Helsinki Railway Station (1904). Then, the opposition to Saarinen consisted of the pioneers of Finnish Modernism, Gustaf Strengell (1878-1938) and Sigurd Frosterus (1876-1956) to whom architecture was not an independent artistic issue but quite the opposite: “Architecture is – or at least should be – linked firmly with life, and interact with

Finnish Introduction

Anni Vartola

The Mythology of Essentiality

The austere national character of the Finns and the severe Finnish cultural climate have produced splendid modern architecture and cultivated a number of admirably skilled architects. Finland has not, however, provided a particularly favourable substrate for cultivating intellectual discussion among architects. One of the many legends cherished by the Finns is a statement attributed to Bertolt Brecht, which describes the Finns as “the only people in the world who can be silent in two languages”.

         No wonder then that Alvar Aalto’s principle of not using paper for anything but designing has become an unwritten rule.1 Any architects worth their salt who follow the path indicated by Aalto prefer to write their “poems in sand”2 and say what they have to say in their buildings. Finnish architectural debate has focus mainly on practical matters in its rather limited discourse: publication of new designs and new buildings, analysis of topical architectural phenomena from the viewpoint of national aims, and the status of architects and architecture in the march of overall progress through joint action and solidarity.

         Reima Pietilä, one of Finland’s most idiosyncratic architects and productive writers, wrote about this in an article entitled “Why Architects Prefer Not to Write”3 and gave eight reasons for Finnish architects’ apparently poor literary ability and lack of interest in writing. The article was published in one of the principle forums for architectural debate in Finland, Arkkitehti (The Finnish Architectural Review), founded in 1930 and one of the oldest architectural journal in the world still published. Pietilä’s polemical article was a response to an idea proposed by the editor, Pekka Laurila, to provide a special “Apropos” ccolumn for the discussion of topical architectural issues in direct, everyday language, but Pietilä did not hold out a great deal of hope for the success of this new discussion forum.

         According to him, the reason for literary inaction on the part of the profession was not just the lack of column inches, or architects’ temporary, perhaps even general, distaste for writing; as Laurila had assumed in his proposal, there were far more serious reasons. According to Pietilä, things like the gulf of non-communication that had separated one generation of architects from another due to the Second World War, the fact that the basic training was entirely non-written, the cult of self-satisfied speechlessness, the difficulty of understanding the concept of architecture, the fear of one’s peers, and a distinct neurosis about theory were all obstacles to unrestricted polemic repartee among architect.

         Pietilä pointed out that architect’s university education was focused on technical performance and did not encourage debate. This, according to Pietilä, had led to 

In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the ‘in-order-to’ which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become … The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses – in which it manifests itself in its own right – we call ‘readiness-to-hand’.3

         The equipment, while in use, begins to “withdraw” from our perception, as we concern ourselves instead with the larger objective of the task itself. This will continue to be the case unless the tool breaks down in the course of its use, when it will suddenly step forward and assert itself again as an object in its own right. This is described by Heidegger as the condition of being “present-at-hand”, and applies to all those objects that we can’t make use of –like works of art or natural phenomena. These objects which are not considered as equipment, in the sense of being tools or material resources, demand a contemplative mode of understanding, as opposed to the active mode of use.

“Dwelling” and Building – Heidegger and Ortega

Another important notion for later writers on technology is the idea that a piece of equipment forms part of a network or pattern of related activities. A tool such as the hammer can only be meaningfully interpreted when it is seen in terms of the other tools involved in the performance of a particular function. The Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, who also wrote on the philosophy of technology, coined the term “pragmatic fields” to explain this characteristic of items of equipment. The fact that all tools can be seen as belonging to particular activities means that to understand one item we must see it in context with a number of others. This is also extended

3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, New York, 1962, p98.

Husserl’s method. This principle that the study of existence must precede the understanding of essence is based on the notion that consciousness can only be understood as the consciousness of something. By studying the actual conditions of being-there, in a particular place at a particular time, Heidegger was able to suggest that there is no “essential” self prior to the action of the self in the world. It was this action that the self performs in its “reaching out” towards the world that became the key to resolving the subject-object split that had separated the mind from the body. This split which began with Plato and which was reinforced in the work of Descartes was now being addressed by phenomenology in terms of the relationship between interacting forces – the self is no longer a “disembodied mind” or just a fixed object amongst objects, but an ongoing “project” with a historical past and future possibilities.

         This sense of temporality is what sets humans apart from other beings and likewise the responsibility of constructing the self as a project. This responsibility of the individual to carv out their own way in the world is a product of the idea of freedom, which formed the basis of “authentic” being. The freedom to set one’s own objectives, according to a personal goal or project, carries with it what Heidegger claimed was an obligation to live up to being’s “ownmost possibilities”. The need to take responsibility for one’s own destiny in the course of life became a defining characteristic of the existentialist branch of phenomenology – which was led by another of Husserl’s students, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. What was significant about this emphasis on the theme of action in the world was the nature of the knowledge that was produced by the interaction between the body and its surroundings.

         In an important passage of Being and Time Heidegger sets out a clear distinction between the two kinds of knowledge that emerge from the realms of action and contemplation. To illustrate this distinction he uses the famous example of a person with a hammer who, as they take up the tool and use it, gain access to an important mode of experience: