Landscape and the little man: Aalto, the institution and the individual

The architecture of Alvar Aalto had numerous formative interests, including an awareness of the forms and poetics of landscape, and a regard for the “little man,” the individual Finn living in a modernised industrialised welfare state. The role of the individual is the subject of an essay in the recent New Nordic catalogue where historian Lars Trägårdh identifies a Nordic “statist individualism,” in which “the central axis around which the Nordic social contract is formed is the alliance between state and individual.” Trägårdh’s findings recall Aalto’s commitment to his universal user: “a love for the little man,” and a perceived need for “a kind of guardian when our era’s mechanised life style threatens to strangle the individual and the organically harmonious life.” Aalto also proclaimed that “Nature is, of course, freedom’s symbol,” implying personal and political liberties associated with nature and landscape. The New Nordic articles signal a need for a contemporary conversation about architecture’s social and environmental roles, both in and beyond the socially progressive Nordic democracies. Aalto’s work endures in its everyday uses, and as a critical and historical precedent for reflection on architecture as a socially and environmentally responsive art, within and beyond the Nordic countries. This paper examines the role of landscape in Aalto’s architectural strategies as they mediate between the institution and the individual. Based on experience of Aalto’s Jyväskylä University and Säynatsälo Town Hall projects, and informed by a formal analysis, following and adapting Eisenman’s method, of the Jyväskylä main building and festival hall, this paper discloses and investigates landscape, architectural and detail design strategies in Aalto’s work in conjunction with recent thinking on individual and community in the Nordic states. It considers the value of Aalto’s legacy, in architecture made between the landscape and the “little man”.