The buildings and designs of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto have been well researched, yet there are still gaps in our understanding. The new volume Aalto and Nature, published by Birkhäuser, explores the sources of inspiration for the approach to nature and landscape – in a very conventional manner.
Sandra Hofmeister
Aatlo and Nature, Tom Simons, Rainer Knapas (edd.), 184 pages, 20 x 28,5 cm, hardcover, Birkhäuser, Basel 2026 → order now
Son of the forest
Was the young Alvar Aalto a son of the forest? When did he first encounter the Mediterranean landscape, and when the Islamic garden? To what extent did this influence his designs? All these questions are addressed in Aalto and Nature through essays by various authors. The texts focus on phases in the architect’s life (1898–1976), his travels and the role of nature in the exhibitions of Studio Aalto. In addition to biographical details, numerous historical sources provide insights: excerpts from the herbarium that Alvar Aalto compiled in the summer of 1911 – when he was 13 years old – , drawings created during Alvar and Aino Aalto’s honeymoon in Italy in 1924, and Aalto’s photographs of mosques in Iraq and Iran from the 1950s. The classic range of sources of inspiration is wide-ranging in this volume, edited by Tom Simons and Rainer Knapas: books and paintings, travels and sketches, role models such as Gunnar Asplund or Le Corbusier, and the gardens of the English Arts and Crafts movement – all of these influenced Aalto.
© Elina Brotherus
At the sanatorium
The book also describe individual projects from a landscape architecture perspective, such as Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, the Maison Louis Carré on the outskirts of Paris, and, of course, the sanatorium nestled amongst the pine forests of Paimio in south-west Finland. Here, Studio Aalto designed paths that wind through the forest, intended to aid the recovery of patients suffering from tuberculosis. Nature as a benevolent healer is a myth that, in the case of TB, was to prove a fallacy. The fact that Aino Aalto was also involved in the design of the Paimio Sanatorium is of no importance to the authors of Aalto and Nature. Indeed, the architect—initially Alvar’s assistant, his wife from 1924 onwards, and until her untimely death a prolific designer and collaborator at Studio Aalto—is portrayed in this book as little more than a travelling companion. Nor is his second wife, Elissa Aalto—who successfully ran their joint architectural practice for almost two decades after her husband’s death in 1976, taken seriously enough. The editors are concerned with the male master Alvar Aalto and, ultimately, with his genius.
© Elina Brotherus
Sketches and memories
Despite this conventional approach that has already been corrected in the research field, Alvar Aalto’s sketches are a delight: San Gimignano, Assisi, cypress trees in Morocco, the Lion Gate of ancient Mycenae. Vilhelm Helander explains the architect’s travels and those of his companions as a backdrop for ideas and designs that engaged with them, yet have no direct connection. The fact that nature and our understanding of it might be a construct that is culturally conditioned and therefore subject to change and open to a critical view – much like, incidentally, the significance of the wives of famous architects – is irrelevant to the essay by the recently deceased architectural historian.
© Elina Brotherus
Photographs by Elina Brotherus
Elina Brotherus’s photo essays provide a welcome break from the text in this book: Finnish landscapes, nature within Aalto’s architecture, and the temples at Selinunte and Agrigento in Sicily. With figures seen from behind, as in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, and detailed observations such as the view of the winter landscape through the windows of the Paimio Sanatorium, the Finnish photographer’s images make it clear that this is not about nature itself, but about its perception. Architecture, too, can guide the reception of landscapes; it stages nature and constructs its image.
© Elina Brotherus
Epilogue
In the epilogue to this volume, Rainer Knapas sums up his fundamental approach as editor: “… behind architecture and art lies nature. The artist’s task is, like Aalto’s, to unite art and nature into a synthesis – into landscape architecture.” It would be nice if the relationship between nature and architecture were that simple, if nature were always there, unchanging like a primal force, and if landscape architecture united building with it.
Aalto and Nature.
With Photographs by Elina Brotherus,
Tom Simons, Rainer Knapas (eds.)
Hardcover, 184 pages
20 x 28,5 cm, English
Birkhäuser, Basel 2026.
ISBN 978-3-0356-2884-5
