Still Fresh after 50 Years

By KURT ANDERSEN

In New York City, the winning virtues of Finland's Alvar Aalto

The architect Alvar Aalto, bless him, was always slightly out of it. He never lingered at the hothouse of Germany's Bauhaus; instead he spent the '20s in provincial Finland, designing for towns. His buildings are modern all right, sleek and sensible and just a bit Martian, but Aalto never took the final vows of modernism. Strict symmetry and monoliths left him cold. Rather, an Aalto building is apt to swell or zigzag confoundingly, to have lines and textures that seem more botanical and geological than geometrical. Ahead of his time, he declined to enforce the brittlest dogmas of the new. Thirty years before the phrase was coined, Aalto was a postmodernist, the first.

He died in 1976 just as the tides started running his way. Unlike today's cutting-edge architects, however, who tend to turn wildly glib and goofy when they design furniture, Aalto took his chairs and stools seriously. An exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, "Alvar Aalto: Furniture and Glass," shows his winning virtues as a designer writ small. The best pieces are bareboned but sensuous, simultaneously playful and serene. Aalto designed objects that were likable. The furniture at MOMA is so quiet and good-natured, in fact, that the show has an almost bashful air.

Aalto was crazy about wood. His enthusiasm grew out of a national aesthetic. Finns take an intense, quasi-mystical pleasure in their forested countryside, and timber is the country's economic mainstay. The hard, featureless blond birch that Aalto favored had been standard material for Finnish domestic objects. But in the polemical years around 1930, his abandonment of modern, mass-produced tubular steel was a retograde act. Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had based their famous chairs and couches on state-of-the-art tubing. Aalto became convinced that tubular steel was "not satisfactory from the human point of view." Indeed, an extreme, sometimes quixotic regard for the human factor was what separated Aalto from his more renowned contemporaries.

Most of his furniture, designed during the Depression, was intended for particular buildings. A chair made for the Finnish civil guard headquarters is blunt and homely, but utility was the point: half a dozen or more could be stacked up for storage. A stacking armchair designed in 1929, its rear legs, back rail and arms a single piece of bent wood, is swanker, a kind of streamlined Thonet. Yet despite the curvature, it is still a plain old chair, a clunky seat stuck onto four legs--a goat just beginning, it appears, to turn into a gazelle.

Aalto's first great work of architecture, a tuberculosis hospital built near Paimio, Finland, during the late '20s and early '30s, accounted for his most original and visually powerful piece of furniture. The main wing of the sanitorium resembles an airy ocean liner, and the Paimio Loungechair could pass for a rarefied deck chair.

Each arm and leg is a continuous piece of birch, slender treads bent into a pair of supple, bulging rectangles--no angular severity for Aalto. The continuous seat and back, like a toboggan doing gymnastics, is a sheet of birch plywood bent 110DEG in the middle and rolled at each end. It is a perfect conceit of a chair, at once lean and voluptuous. It is also reasonably accommodating to human beings: the scrolls are functional flourishes, each a great wooden spring. In this, more than in any other piece, Aalto's devotion to wood is its saving grace, for even lacquered red, the birch makes the chair seem domestic and familiar. A Paimio Loungechair executed in metal would have been gorgeous but mean, dangerous looking.

Aalto's furniture was never again so dashing and hard-edged. He spent the '30s making cantilevered chairs, each a reworking of an idea that the Bauhaus stars Breuer and Mart Stam had established using tubular steel in the '20s. The cantilever is springy, like an athlete's crouch. Indeed, Aalto's cantilevered chairs have a cheerfully anthropomorphic profile. His most splendid variations on the theme also seem the most characteristically Scandinavian: after he had tried seats and backs of plain plywood and boxy upholstery, Aalto designed birch frames crisscrossed with black linen webbing. The effect is at once urbane and countrified, not unlike the designer himself.

Technique intrigued him deeply. To many, plywood seems a contemptible crossbreed, neither natural nor synthetic, but to Aalto it was a perfect hybrid of ancient material and industrial technology. Breuer eventually returned to plywood; after the war, Charles Eames pressed it into subtle topographies that had been beyond Aalto's means. But no one ever paid the material more respect than Aalto. He built up plywood layers one by one, twisted and glued them meticulously, experimented. He coaxed plywood first into a simple L-leg (1932) to make his wonderful three-legged stacking stool, then split the L into a right-angled Y for table legs (1946), then sliced and bundled his Ys together into fan legs (1954) that look fluid, practically erotic.

The MOMA show includes some of the glassware designed by Aalto and his first wife Aino. The most atypical piece, the austere "Flower of Riihimaki," is the most beautiful. More often when working in glass, Aalto let his fondness for nature run riot. Vases were a specialty. The free-form circumferences, blobby and bulbous like doodles by Arp or Mird, suggest lakes or amoebas or arboreal cross sections. Even the casting process | was ripped from nature. On display at the MOMA show is a wooden mold used to make Aalto's 1936 Savoy vase: the length of dugout tree trunk is equipment that a Hobbit industrialist would use. But Aalto was no whole-earth nostalgist. His 1947 snack tray, molded of thick white plastic with troughs for food, is sci-fi urban, and surely the most formal TV-dinner platter ever made.

This winter the exhibit starts museum hopping--to Evanston, 111., Akron, Montreal, Cambridge, Mass., and Norfolk, Va. A further stop in Tokyo, tentatively planned for the fall of 1986, would be particularly suggestive. Much of Aalto's work has the grace and deferential austerity of Japanese interiors. His sliding doors are essentially shoji screens. The Finnish principle of harmony or balance, sointu, seems very like the notion of shibusa that infuses Japanese design.

Aalto's influence on European and American designers is considerable. Scandinavians, of course, have been Aalto cultists all along. In the '70s some Italian high design began to have Aalto echoes. The biggest pop stars in furniture, however, are off in a different direction entirely. In one of his rare fiats, Aalto declared a kind of neo-Shaker approach, in favor of "simple, good, undecorated things... that are in harmony with the human being" as opposed to "unusable status furniture, factory baroque." If today's postmodernists, eager for inspiration, are picking over his work, they might do well to heed that wholesome doctrine. Between Bauhaus solemnity and fey joke furniture, Aalto showed that there is a practical middle path. --By Kurt Andersen