A Room of His Own

Skyscrapered Manhattan, taken as a whole, is one of man's most fascinating architectural conglomerations. But when it comes to singling out individual masterworks by the greats of modern architecture, the pickings are slim. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe get only one building each (the Guggenheim Museum and the Seagram Building); Marcel Breuer's first structure (the new Whitney Museum) is only now going up; and Pier Luigi Nervi is relegated to a bus station at the north end of the island. Last week Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto, one of the acknowledged deans of modern design, managed to get his foot in the door. It was for a room, some 4,350 sq. ft. of conference space, atop the new Institute of International Education. The view overlooking the United Nations gardens and the East River is good. The view inside is even better.

Spaghetti Reeds. There might have been no room at all for Aalto but for the enthusiasm of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., a Pittsburgh department-store magnate's son, who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and talked his father into building Wright's famous over-the-waterfall house at Bear Run, Pa. Kaufmann, who has an equal enthusiasm for Aalto, offered the Finn a commission to create a reception and conference room of his own for the I.I.E.

Working with a mock-up in Finland, Aalto passed on everything, down to the individual blue ceramic tiles that line the lobby, specially designed the laminated Finnish birch furniture and the reedlike gold-dipped light fixtures and lamps. Following his principle that a straight line is the shortest distance to boredom, Aalto made walls undulate outward to make the whole room a stage for the view, and paneled them like a painter with pale American ash. "Wood," says he, "is close to human experience." Showing off Aalto's virtuosity with wood, these slender columns are made of tiny wooden dowels glued together like bundles of uncooked spaghetti. Another of Aalto's joys is a forest grove of hockey-stick shaped wooden forms that stand alone in an alcove as abstract decor.

Forest Fire. Installing the room into the rectilinear concrete frame building was something else again. To let the ceilings rise to the full 22 feet Aalto had envisioned, heavy service machinery had to be shuffled out from the overhead floor. Aalto had planned a wall of his abstract trees, but the New York fire department feared a forest fire and ruled it out. But Aalto professed himself to be not at all disturbed, for the final result is a room that is sophisticated without sacrificing obvious handcraftmanship. Everything is pure high-altitude Aalto. Everything, that is, but the nubby brown carpet. Here another architect had been asked for an opinion. Her name? Mrs. Aalto.

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