The nature of the refuge or retreat that Sibelius and Aalto sought in the Finnish backwoods seemed to attract their interest again later, and retained a central place in their creative and personal lives. As adults, they both chose to explore forest culture. In the Kalevala, Sibelius had found an epic composed of fragments of individual runes: the seemingly endless lines Elias Lönnrot had recorded and synthesized were taken from an oral culture, created on the spur of the moment by singers from received narratives or folk tales, which they spontaneously wove into song: what the ethnologist Milman Parry called “composition in performance.”46 There was an attractive flexibility in this process—a way of enabling something larger to grow from small parts depending on the individual circumstance of its performance.
Aalto sensed something very similar in the backwoods way of making buildings—particularly as he was working for the Propaganda Office during the Second World War, when he began to be increasingly interested in the observation that deeper into the forest (and farther east in Finland) settlement patterns were less geometric and more “organically living and flexible forms.” He also noted that in the east, the Swedish influence of the Lutheran Church (which resulted in buildings clustered in rectilinear formations as a sign of civilization) had noticeably less influence. Instead, an Orthodox, or even pagan influence remained.47 Aalto challenged the views of some who maintained that the Euclidean logic of the Western tradition was inherently superior to the “chaotically fragmented” and “wretchedly disorganized” grouping of vernacular settlements in the East.48 In eastern Finland, he believed, settlements tended to be determined through dialogue with their environmental context and more subtle indigenous or circumstantial forces. The Finnish architectural writer Juhani Pallasmaa has developed this idea and suggested: “Finns tend to organize space topologically on the basis of an amorphous ‘forest geometry’ as opposed to the ‘geometry of town’ that guides European thinking.”49 This is congruent with Aalto’s repeated claims that a properly progressive modernism should be conceptually rooted in the nuances of nature, the symbolism of the natural world (that is, growth)50 and its materiality (wood, stone, and water).51 His model and inspiration, as his writings and designs testify, was the forest.52 To Aalto, this way of connecting elements was an organic process resulting from the changing needs and character of inhabitation—responding to nature and to need.
Though Aalto’s creative output has been described as “illogical,”53 and Sibelius’s turn to the natural world, for Adorno, was “deranged,”54 there was an undeniable urge in both men to evolve an order from the content inherent in their work—resulting, perhaps, in a congruence between the backwoods forms they found in the Finnish forest and their own deeply psychological motivation. After his personal crisis and his sojourn to the Koli hills in 1909, Sibelius seemed to begin to look further backwards, beyond Lönnrot’s Kalevala to the runes from which it had grown, to something about the way in which folksingers composed the lines in their minds as they rowed, sawed, or spun laboriously in the backwoods. The creative flexibility they demonstrated—the continual adjustment of words and runic fragments to their performing context and the circumstantial needs of the moment—particularly attracted Sibelius. He began to be interested in allowing a whole to grow from the parts, variously described as motives, germs, cells, or kernels: tiny fragments of sound that are allowed to grow, twist, mutate, and weave together into a larger whole. This process is exemplified best in his final large-scale composition, Tapiola. Scholars have debated whether Tapiola is a unity grown from a single theme, or whether indeed the core motive can be considered a theme at all. Erkki Salmenhaara, for example, has argued that “the starting point for total variation is not a theme unit but a germ motive,” and that this “core” motive develops into at least four central, interconnected basic motives, which then branch into “around thirty highly characteristic, original and inimitably Sibelian musical motives.”55 In 1915, Sibelius described his creative process as one of assemblage: as though “God the Father had thrown down mosaic pieces . . . and asked me to put them back as they were.”56 He reported collecting fragments of musical ideas from various sources (including the color of new leaves and the cry of a passing crane), but he also suggested the presence of an overarching vision, allowing “their development in my spirit to fashion the formal shape of the piece.”57 From Sibelius’s sketches, it seems as though a lengthy “trance-like” gestation was often necessary before the musical form suggested itself, a process that often coincided with deep depression.58 The divine vision of Sibelius’s “God the Father” was more often occluded than revealed. It is also significant that in his diaries Sibelius equated God with “the divine logos.” One translation of logos is “to relate,” and thus Sibelius may be associating God with the process of relating—whether in composition or in life.
In “The Trout and the Mountain Stream” (1947) Aalto similarly wrote of the importance of an incubation period in his creative process: “For a moment I forget all the maze of problems . . . I begin to draw in a manner rather like abstract art. Led only by my instincts . . . sometimes even childish compositions . . . I eventually arrive at an abstract basis for the main concept.”59 Here Aalto suggests that there must be a complete vision, one that draws together all of the fragmentary ideas; a notion, indeed, that Tawaststjerna and others have applied to Sibelius’s work on his Fifth Symphony (1915–19).60 Aalto, like Sibelius, was interested in exploring the crystallization of a whole form from its individual parts. Yet this consciously organicist approach to architecture, with its loose curves banishing all thought of parallel lines and perpendicular angles, is often thought to be at odds with the rational frame of Euclidean geometry. Aalto’s practice was more complex and exacting, and resulted in a tightly governed compositional form that sought to wed functional rectilinearity with a more freeform approach to space in which the essence of the building was accommodated and revealed. Aalto attempted to understand the inner content of the architectural space itself, and allow the overall form to grow from this. In 1925 Hugo Häring (1882–1958), a modernist on the far edges of the CIAM (from which he was then excluded), said, “We want to examine things and allow them to discover their own images. It goes against our grain to bestow a form on them from outside.”61 Häring and his colleague, Hans Scharoun (1893–1972) called this Leistungsform, an undogmatic inquiry into what buildings “wanted to be.” James Hepokoski has similarly identified the idea of ‘content-based form’ as central to Sibelius’s work.62 Indeed, Sibelius himself suggested the notion of such content-based forms by repeatedly referring to the “musical themes” or “thoughts” or “motives,” which he felt “must create the form.”63
Symphonies in Wood and Steel
The World’s Fair in New York in 1939 came at another critical moment for Finland. When the Finnish Pavilion opened on 4 May, the Soviet Bear was making threatening noises toward its young neighbor. Finland urgently needed to demonstrate how far the nation had traveled, in political and economic terms, since it had escaped the tsar’s clutches in 1917. At this moment, the creativity and fame of Finland’s two greatest cultural ambassadors, Aalto and Sibelius,64 were called upon to direct the world’s attention to the plight of their remote land.65 The imagery with which Aalto chose to adorn the wall of the pavilion illustrated an army of machines hauling logs from the backwoods for the pulp industry that provided Finland’s most important source of external income (see Figure 4). The symbolism was striking, as the majority of the rural Finnish population still wrestled a subsistence existence from the forest floor, and that survival knowledge astonished the world as much as the Finnish spirit of independence. Despite being grossly outnumbered in 1939, the Finns held back the invading Red Army throughout the frigid conditions of the Winter War, deep within the forests on Finland’s eastern border. Alvar Aalto was not among their number. At the outbreak of war, Aalto had run away to Sweden, but he was subsequently found and ordered back to his post; he soon pulled str
ings to orchestrate his move from the regular army into the Propaganda Office in Helsinki, and from there he traveled to the States. His brother, a regular soldier, then committed suicide. Aalto’s actions were perceived as cowardice by many, and eventually Aalto was ordered back from the States to resume his post. His personal terror was palpable, and his creative escape route out of this lifelong angst was already evident in his design for the New York pavilion.
Figure 4. Alvar Aalto, Finnish Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939.
Aalto and his wife and architectural partner, Aino, worked on the pavilion design together after winning between them the first three places in the design competition. Finland could not afford to construct a free-standing building from scratch, so the competition brief called for the design of an interior for one of a series of restrictive rectangular box-like enclosures within a large building rented from the New York Exposition Committee. The fact that a wooden wave had been chosen by the competition judges to represent Finland a year before underlined the urgency of such (expedient) conceptions of “Finnishness”—a political necessity for the nation’s existence at that time. Indeed, the title of Aalto’s winning competition entry, “Land, People, Work, Products,” became the dominant motif throughout. The creation of an “image” for the nation was crucial in attracting attention to its fragile fledgling state. It is difficult now to conceive of there being no “image” of Finland, so deep has been the impact of Finnish image making today. Yet Aalto’s capacity in 1939 to fantasize may have been pivotal in creating an “image” of Finland that the world could embrace and would at the same time draw attention to the threat of Soviet military intervention. It is interesting to note a comment from Aalto’s biographer, Göran Schildt, regarding Aalto’s “tendency to confuse his own wishes with reality,” something that had a fundamental impact upon the pavilion interior.66 Yet the forest fantasy in New York was yoked to an economic reality; the wave ceiling’s undulating curve yielded just enough to Euclidean geometry to hold off the critics, and was emotive enough to stir the hearts of American visitors at a time of national crisis. Here, at least, Aalto’s imaginative free reign simultaneously led him toward a new creative pragmatism.
The essence of Aalto’s New York design was a kind of contrapuntal thinking: the desire to undermine the containing rectangularity of the rented “box” he was given while working within its geometrically ordered space. In answer to the brief, Aalto’s introverted, top-lit solution cut an undulating line through the “box,” and projected it upward to create an imposing serpentine wall that was adorned with enormous photographic images. The wooden waving wall was inclined toward the visitor in what some felt was a threatening way, although for others the effect was embracing and reassuring. Practically, the angle was intended as an aid to viewing the walls from a low level. However, it also served to create a sense of envelopment. Archive sketches show that Aalto drew the wall as though it were sliced through the wood, as if to inhabit it. These sketches seem to show that he thought of this structure as a forested wall as much as a representation of the northern lights—and that the inclined angle of the wall further supported its embracing gesture.
Aalto’s form evolved architecturally using techniques developed from the philosophical notion of symphysis. Aalto’s yearning for “synthesis” is revealed in the earliest sketches for the undulation in the New York “box”—an “argument” central to Aalto’s compositional technique, according to Colin St. John Wilson, who suggests that it “can be epitomized by drawing two forms—an ideograph of two lines—one straight, the other serpentine . . . a complementarity between the rigorous plane of analysis and the turbulent wave-like surge of fantasy.”67 (See Figure 5.) Wilson argues that the horizontal “bar” and its formal partner (the wave) in Aalto’s design create an “an axis of difference.”68 Aalto himself described this as “the simultaneous reconciliation of opposites.”69 In practical terms, these oppositions bring the dynamic and auxiliary functions of life together in many of his buildings. Aalto’s sketches for the pavilion demonstrate that his notion of the “organic line” is never an unmitigated undulation, but is confined, in this case, by the “box” that anchors its exuberance, balancing the need for both containment and a capacity to reach out.70 He felt that this required any “organic” gesture to hold firm within a Euclidean framework. But the undulation of the wave ceiling came to signify Aalto’s humanist agenda, gesturing to the “little man,” as he expressed it. Shallower still is the notion that the “wave” was self-referential since the word aalto means “wave” in Finnish, something Aalto, with his irreverent sense of humor, was happy to play on. (Sibelius’s 1914 tone poem The Oceanides has the cognate Finnish title Aallotaret.) If we only read such totemic meanings in his compositions we miss his deeper, more challenging agenda—one that is gesturally close to Sibelius’s intense dialogue between the pedal bass (or base) in his orchestral textures and the undulating, sometimes frenetically waving strings or woodwinds above.
Figure 5. Alvar Aalto, sketch for Finnish Pavilion.
Three significant elements can be identified in Aalto’s design: a personal agenda, the wider socio-cultural context; and the formal composition. These elements are joined together by a continuum—the symbolism of a haven or refuge, in this case the forest or Tapiola. By 1939, such “forest geometries” were well established in Aalto’s oeuvre, but in New York he inaugurated the wooden wave as a multivalent force.71 It is no longer merely a design feature, but has become the primary sculptural tool for “carving” space out of the very nature of the wood—its tectonic malleability and its symbolic embrace becomes the mechanism for symphysis. Indeed, by suggesting that the pavilion had its own interior face or countenance,72 Aalto revealed his desire to explore interiority—the visitor is immersed in Aalto’s imaginary forest domain, much as listeners are immersed in the sound world of Tapiola, and as a result are invited to enter inside their own unconscious. In other words, Aalto’s wave became a means of modeling the sense of interiority and psychological enclosure or containment he associated with the Finnish forest world.
Aalto was especially interested in the ideas of the classical world. As Leo Spitzer has shown, the ancient Greeks held that “the healthy soul is ‘symphonic,’ i.e., harmonious,” and that this had a profound influence upon their notion of society. Aalto’s pavilion has been described variously as “a harmonious whole,” or like a “symphony.”73 We can better understand Aalto’s reference by digging beneath the Greek etymon sum, which is an assimilated form of sun (with), relating it through sumphonos (sounding together) to sumphusis (growing together), a more suitable coupling in architectural terms. Importantly, the principles of harmony that Aalto repeatedly invoked are based on the Heraclitian idea of “mutual adjustment,” the forging of a balance between consonance and dissonance.74 The key to this principle is the idea of harmos—the etymon of harmonia, meaning “joint”—which, for Aalto, brings an abstract philosophical notion back to the physical realm, the joining of dissimilar and disparate elements in a more concrete sense. This idea became central to Aalto’s compositional technique in New York and beyond. Indeed, it seems to become an ideal mode of thought toward which Aalto strove increasingly. To this end, he developed the notion that “architecture is thus a kind of supra-technological form of creation, and the harmonization of many disparate forms of activity is central to it.”75
This principle of the “the harmonization of many disparate forms of activity” also relies upon the Heraclitian notion of harmonia, the mechanism through which the disparate elements are joined or coupled together. Heraclitus wrote that “what is at variance is in agreement with itself: a back-turning (palintropos harmonia).” This definition of harmonia calls for a form or structure to illustrate it by comprising “mutual adjustment” and conjunction (Frag. 10), where the relationship of consonance and dissonance together illuminate different aspects of God or the divine (logos). It is important that for neither Heraclitus nor any other Greeks
did such systems function like a law or a rule, since the overarching kosmos (natural order) was the scene of a constant struggle between opposed forces. But not everyone experienced Aalto’s New York pavilion as a modernist “integrated presentation,” let alone a unified “symphony” of elements.76 The correspondent for the Architectural Review, for example, found that too much was “crammed” in, creating a “general confusion,” reminiscent more of a cacophony than a symphony.77 Indeed, it might be said that the pavilion was a demonstration of the tension within and between forms—a dialogue between radically different elements.78 The pavilion thus could be said to have created a more precarious symbolic resolution of the tension, argument, or relationship between its conflicting parts.79 Here, the building evokes a “tension of betweenness,” to borrow Colin St. John Wilson’s phrase.80
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 34