Lewerentz's Churches

Some architects have a shtick; Gehry's facades twist and contort, Asplund favored the cylinder-and-box and Calatrava shows an affinity for parabolic curves. To be fair, the word "shitck" is unfair - these and other architects attach themselves to a concept not out of a lack of creativity but out of a drive to develop a single concept. The concept rarely manifests itself and resolves itself in a single building and, indeed, wouldn't that be a confirmation of the idea's limitations?

An idea's development over several buildings merits study in that way. We tend to study building by building and ignore the architect as the generator and developer of the single idea and how that idea connects several buildings. This is harder to do with contemporary architects, specifically the big name firms, since multiple projects are tackled simultaneously with several different project architects to the point where the firm's namesake is largely uninvolved in the process after the initial concept phase. This makes a single concept difficult to trace over more than a single building.

So, when we look at the work of a mid-century architect, such as Sigurd Lewerentz, who had a small firm and did much of the designing himself, we see how he works out a certain idea in his pair of churches, St. Mark's in Bjorkhagen, Sweden and St. Peter's in Klippan, Sweden.  St. Mark's was completed in 1963 and St. Peter's followed soon after in 1966.  Both churches feature brick ubiquitously, a trend common at the time and made internationally famous by Alvar Aalto. 

St. Mark's congregational space

St. Peter's congregational space

Lewerentz bathes his churches in brick - every surface is faced in brick which, if it weren't for gravity, might be quite disorienting. A space which features brick on every surface demonstrates some off acoustic properties. When speaking in a soft voice, the sound falls dead, causing the speaker to raise their voice. Of course, if you speak loudly enough, the brick picks up the sound and throws in around the space. I believe that Lewerentz used brick to create intimacy within his churches.

St. Mark's is a deceptively tall space. The coolness of the brick and general absence of light give the impression of a cave, but the reverberation of sound betrays the high ceiling. St. Peter's ceiling is noticeably lower, leading me to believe that Lewerentz intended this church to achieve the intimacy that St. Mark's does not fully realize.

The difference of the ceiling between the two buildings evidences a refining process similar to that of the brick. At St. Mark's Lewerentz used a profile of large and small arches arranged end-to-end. The profile shifts over at the other end of the ceiling, creating multiple vaults that alternately taper and widen along the entire ceiling. Brick is also used here as a facer, with the only visible structure being the face of steel eye-beams showing through at the nodes of each arch. 

Ceiling vault in St. Mark's

At St. Peter's Lewerentz pushes the ceiling one step further by placing the shifted profile in the middle, so that the ceiling is symmetrical about the center line.  The discreetness of the height change in the middle hides the true nature of the kink itself, but by studying the taper and looking at either end of the ceiling, one can derive the geometry of the entire arrangement.

Ceiling vault in St. Peter's

 Lewerentz also makes a conscious depart from St. Mark's by included a giant reminder of the structure that holds up the entire ceiling.

The ceiling center and eye beam tree at St. Peter's

This eye-beam assemblage aroused debate among the group as to whether or not Lewerentz included the structure intentionally, or out of necessity. The argument favoring necessity looks to St Mark's, where the structure was very carefully hidden, leading one to believe that unresolvable issues with the ceiling at St. Peter's required Lewerentz to include the huge eye beam tree. Conversely, I believe that the ceiling vault was too important to Lewerentz for him to do something as careless as slapping a bunch of eye beams under it without very deliberate intention. Although the main congregational space in St. Mark's is more rectangular than St. Peter's, their square footage is roughly similar, so I find it difficult to believe that Lewerentz needed the eye beams to hold up his ceiling, therefore, I find the move to be deliberate.

This debate could not have occurred with such clarity of argument without a St. Mark's to derive evidence from. Our visit to and understanding of St. Mark's allowed us to greater appreciate and absorb the mysteries and complexities of St. Peter's. That we visited them in the order in which they were made was a bonus.

Authenticity of Representation

Midway through our mini-trek into the Fjords, we stopped at the Kaupanger stave church, which dates from the 12th century. This is the largest stave church in the county of Sogn og Fjordane, which also includes the famous Briksdalsbreen arm of the Jostedalsbreen glacier.

While perusing the small gift shop, I discovered a set of postcards of watercolor drawings by architect and painter Franz Wilhelm Schiertz. Schiertz's command of watercolors lends itself to beautiful landscapes - his palette is decisive and he blends the colors smoothly. Pablo observed that the quality of the pencil lines (quick and light but precise) evidenced the use of a mechanical drawing aid, such as a camera lucida.

camera lucida (photo credits to vam.ac.uk)

The Schiertz paintings are all circa 1840, when mechanically-aided drawings were so prevalent that they created a style of drawing in which the artist sought to emulate the line quality and composition afforded by a camera lucida. One of the drawings depicts the stave church at Borgund against a mountain backdrop.

Borgund Stave Church by Hanz Wilhelm Schiertz (c. 1840)

The next day, when we indeed went to Borgund to view the stave church, Pablo and I traipsed around the church with the intent of recreating the scene as Schiertz drew it. Fences hindered our progress, but from the angle nearest to the original, we could see that something was fishy.

As close as I could approximate the view in the Franz Wilhelm Schiertz painting

Although the church sat in the landscape below as it had in the painting (the tower to the right of the church in the painting is behind the tree in the photo), the mountains behind were entirely different. The mountains as they actually appeared did not even closely resemble the formations in the painting. The mountain that slopes up to the right in the painting slopes down to the left in the photo. There can only be one conclusion: Schiertz made falsified the view. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but Pablo exhausted every possible angle to the problem, supposing that Schiertz used a mirror to reflect the mountains behind him, but since the painted mountains weren't even a conceivably accurate mirror of the actual formations, he eventually had to concede that the mountains in the painting were a fake.

I know that painters make things up all the time, or at the very least stretch the truth to fit within their desires, but never before have I been confronted with the contradiction. Rather, I've never been able to verify the physical truth of a painting. Does it matter that the artist altered reality for the sake of composition? How else can a man move mountains, if not with his hands? Does my understanding of the building change significantly between one or the other? The painting is already inaccurate since Schiertz is taking creative liberties with his watercoloring. Is a photo more real than a painting? Pablo would say that the painting in its falsity deceives the viewer as to the church's scale, siting and orientation. Schiertz does a further injustice to the vikings who, presumably, carefully positioned the church with respect to the surrounding landscape. I find it interesting that Schiertz found the situation as it stood to be incorrect, at least for the purposes of his painting. I trust the painter more than the reality, because while the reality is what's there, the painting opens me up to what could be there.

Student Work Abroad

Several days ago, we visited the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark. Jørn Utzon, by whom the center was designed and for whom the center is named, is most famous for designing the Sydney Opera House.

Sydney Opera House (photo credits: clarkvision.com)

This is his Center, as seen from the Bredning River.

Jørn Utzon Center (photo credits to the Utzon Center website)

Among the exhibits shown at the center, was the final projects of the graduating Aalborg University Architecture and Design majors. The program at AAU is also a five-year program, and the diversity and depth of issues tackled by the students in their final projects resembled that of the CMU fifth year thesis program.

The general consensus of our group of students was, that the work we saw on the walls looked like student work. It was easy enough for us to make that decision, but less so to determine what aspects of the work clued us in to its being designed by students.

This is a project that I felt particularly emblematic of the "student" type of final work.

Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg

Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg

The composition of the poster on the left is common to the work shown at CMU. From the conceptual elevations at the top to the renderings at the bottom, the entire board looks student-produced. Even the line separating the course number from the project name, I've seen in many projects at CMU, and seems to be a device employed exclusively by architecture students.

The accompanying model evidences a more resourceful student; I particularly appreciated the use of dried plaster mesh for the facade.

While the presentations boards did not strike me as particularly remarkable (although I appreciated that they were all in English), the consistently high level of quality shown in the models surprised me. As my year has progressed through the architectural curriculum, I've seen the emphasis in final materials shift away from the final model and more to the digital material. It's a twofold problem: students stop making models and professors stop requiring them especially as the digital model seems to be rendering the physical model obsolete.

I still see an important relevance to the physical model which was confirmed for me by the project at the AAU student projects. Physical models force the architect to consider materials in the way that a digital model does not. Digitally, it's dangerously easy to create a wall out of, literally, nothing. By building a physical model, the architect must consider how the building physically stands up and gets put together. It's much easier to identify design flaws with regards to construction in a physical model, and many students who omit them do so because that have not worked out these conditions. Students who work out these issues in their models successfully rise high above the rest.

SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen

SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen

I get very little exposure to student work outside of CMU, but when I do, I'm surprised at the similarities. If the similarities do not occur because students are sharing information, is it a natural inclination within the student? Or does language and technique get handed down by the professor, which would imply the professors are all gathering their information from a similar pool? Either some group of people at some higher level are sharing information and disseminating it to the architectural community, or, by random chance we're all tapped into a similar mode of thinking that expresses itself in our projects.

Constructed Fantasy - Tivoli Garden

The amusement park is where architecture and tourism collide. Outside the realm of architectural tourism, where a student or practitioner of architecture makes a pilgrimage to a building or group of buildings, the amusement park is an environment constructed entirely for the enjoyment of the average person. One needn't be an architect to enjoy the buildings and, indeed, the park would never make any money if that were a requirement. As an aspiring architect, and a meta-tourist, I find the concept of building an alternate reality fascinating.

The amusement park is a purely touristic phenomenon. It's an entire landscape built purely for the enjoyment and spectacle of a visitor who may only spend as many as four hours. The park has a very specific goal and purpose: to immerse the visitor in fun. This is why theme parks tend to be in rural areas or, in the cases of parks in dense cities, to be entirely walled in. This is partly to control who enters, but it serves a more profound purpose: to hide the outside world.

Tivoli Gardens is one of the earliest examples of the amusement park as we know it. The original park buildings date to 1843. While it predates the first World's Fair by eight years, Tivoli shares the interest in exotic foreignness that pervaded European culture in the second half of the 19th century. With particular emphasis on the orient, Tivoli creates a magical paradise which immerses the visitor in foreign images and architecture to transport them to another place.

The park meets the city around it in a combination of wall and storefront. Some walls are simply nine-foot tall slabs of concrete and others are metal rail which allows the passerby a peek into a fantasy land.

Among the oldest buildings is the Pantomime Theatre, which opened in 1874. The Theatre, designed by the Dane Vilhelm Dahlerup, is a classic European interpretation of traditional East Asian architecture.

A fine detail in this theatre. which enhances the general exotic atmosphere is the unique stage curtain. The peacock's wings unfold to reveal the players on stage and the peacock itself, along with its wings, sink beneath the stage.



Most notably, Tivoli's design and atmosphere influenced Walt Disney's planning of his own theme park. In many cases, Tivoli feels like an older version of Disneyland. The park is broken down into a few different, unique areas. The transitions are a little sloppy but the architecture lets you know when you've reached another area by evoking a different world region, as in the case of Nimb, the Middle Eastern palace (with a dollop of Russian on top?)

Unique to Tivoli, or rather, not common in America, is the variety of people who enjoy the park. Beyond the young family, which is a staple of all amusement parks, I saw a surprising number of elderly and older people. These people were obviously locals and, unlike the busloads of tourists, visited Tivoli much as they would any public park. I saw a pair of elderly women sitting on a shaded bench just on the edge of a major point of intersection in several of the park's paths. They talked merrily and laughed easily, evidently two old friends who may have been engaging in a weekly routine of spending a warm summer's afternoon at Tivoli.

This piqued my interest, as their purpose for being at Tivoli was far removed from my expectations of my own experience, which were to see as much as I possibly could and photograph everything. The diversity of experiences and visitors that I saw at Tivoli, such as the middle-aged couples who came to spend an evening at one of to park's world-class restaurants, caused me to question my expectations of the "theme park" experience. The park can be a delight to both young and old.

Foreign Comprehension

A staple of the traveling abroad experience tends to be the experience of fumbling through an unfamiliar language. We have the fortune of traveling in countries whose inhabitants all speak some English (although some only well enough to exhubertanly say 'Good price!'). Despite this convenience, no matter where we go we are confronted with foreign text. Even in Copenhagen, which is the city closest to mainland Europe and thus the city I thought would be the most English-friendly, presents the same amount of its written material in Danish. My few encounters with English have been on restaurant menus, and these are not always reliably bi-lingual. What I find most curious are signs that only provide translations for the parts that the person who made the sign determined not understandable.

Legend for map of City Hall, Stockholm

Laughter ensues when the writer has over-translated a sign. What happens when the writer chooses wrong, and leaves untranslated vital information?

Often, the comprehension effort becomes a linguistic exercise as we learn that 'street' in English is 'gade' in Danish, 'katu' in Finnish and 'gata' in Swedish. When a word is too far beyond comprehension, we look for clues as to its meaning, although even the contents of a store cannot always translate the name above its entrance.

A candy shop in Tivoli, Copenhagen

The row of lollipops in the store clearly indicate it is a candy shop, but I'm suspicious as to the literal translation of 'Bolchekogeriet'. According to the nice young employee, the name does in fact translate to 'Hard Candy Shop' with a particular emphasis on the candy being made in the shop.

If muddling through is not an option, and if an image has been provided, content can be gleaned accordingly. This places a large burden on the image to convey the entire meaning to me, the helpless alien. There is an inverse relationship between words and their reader and and image and its viewer. When I read a sign in a shop window or a poster explaining some event, I feel a burden to understand the meaning of the words (by reading them 'correctly'). Conversely, I consider the image in the shop window to be responsible for containing the proper information and conveying it in a manner understandable by me.

Maps provide a neat integration of image and text, by conveying one's location within a building or urban context, the location of points of interest and the meaning of those points. Through one's understanding of the map as an image conveying location, and the function of a particular place, one can derive the meaning of the words associated with a point.

St. Peter's Cathedral in Malmö, Sweden

 Consider the location A, labeled 'Ingång'. The letter A on the map is located just outside what looks like the physical boundary of the church. Combined with my basic knowledge of church design, and the shape of the building, I can derive the meaning of 'Ingång' to be 'Entrance'. Armed with this new understanding, I can apply it to future situations in which I may need to know where an entrance is, or ask a non-English speaking (in this case Swedish) person where to enter a building.

It may be frustrating to be unable to read all the words, but the city is an environment dripping with context, and one need not look far to understand its meaning.

The Right Drawing for the Right Building

I've done a lot of drawing so far, much more frequently than I've done at school as I tend to lean more heavily on computer modeling and trace paper. As I visit more buildings and draw them, I tend to classify the buildings based on their dates of construction. Subsequently, the drawings I make get grouped in with those time periods. As I look back through my sketchbook after my midsemester evaluation today, I've noticed that certain types of buildings, built in certain time periods, lend themselves to a particular manner of drawing.

Medieval churches lend themselves to isometric drawing due to their regular and predictable arch structure. I draw the reflected ceiling plan first to describe the geometry of the ceiling, then shift the drawing about forty degrees clockwise and construct the arches three-dimensionally from their corresponding positions in plan. The drawing below is a detail of the main nave arch and the smaller side arches, done at Lund Cathedral in Sweden.

Neoclassical buildings, especially those built in the nineteenth century, lend themselves nicely to sections. The perfect symmetry makes it easy to find a good place to cut through, to record the most interesting and telling information. Cutting a section through the wall of a neoclassical building will also reveal the intricate molding and ornament on the walls, both interior and exterior, and convey their depth in a way that an elevation can't do. The example below is of the main building of the University of Lund. The section is taken just through the lobby, but shows some of the elaborate detailing on the facade (to the right) and captures the proportions which are so important to neoclassical architecture. The cut is taken through the double-height space to convey the grandeur of the balcony and skylight above.

And then, we approach contemporary architecture. It's difficult to apply a blanket judgment as to the most appropriate way to represent contemporary buildings, but generally a three-dimensional drawing is most informative. The drawing below is a semi-constructed isometric of an interior detail of Libeskind's Danish Jewish Museum. The wood panel interior meets the brick of the existing building in this no-longer-functioning doorway. It's impossible to represent in plan or section, and I don't know where I would make the cut. I drew on paper what I wouldn't actually be able to see in real life, to better understand three-dimensionally how the new interacts with the old.

Or take Calatrava's Twisting Torso in Malmö, Sweden, which took a bit of plan, but a lot of isometric, to draw understandably.

The examples above lead to a conversation I'd like to continue to explore about how the drawing can act as the building's representative. The selection of the appropriate drawing method is as important as the quality of the drawing itself. As one who draws, I must also make choices about what information to include or exclude, before even thinking about how to convey it accurately. We're seeing enough variety of buildings now that we're in Denmark for me to practice multiple modes a drawing, so you'll be seeing more variety in the future.

Covert Spaces

We've seen a few buildings by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) in the past week, and the more I see, the more I wonder why I didn't know much about him before. Asplund's work is thoroughly intriguing. He pays equal attention to the dramatic heart-racing moments, such as the grand rotunda of the Public Library, and to the quieter, subtle moments, like the stair that follows the curve of the courtroom of the Lister County Courthouse. Asplund uses big, open expanses to excite the user by exaggerating one's sense of scale. This inspires awe in the dwarfed person who cannot help but feel reverence for the space, it's designer and owner. Everyone likes a big, grand space they can lose themselves in, but I find pleasure in the irregular spaces created by combining the large forms in which the dramatic rooms are housed.

Even spaces that cannot or are not meant to be occupied receive attention. The main stair of the Karlshamn Secondary School winds around an open shaft. A series of arches puncture the shaft to let light from the windows on the exterior wall send light where it would not go otherwise. The arches also provide views to other floors and other parts of the stair. By voiding the "center" of the stairwell, Asplund reveals more about the structure, which is pretty much entirely made of vaults. Also, you get a sense of interior wall thickness that you ordinarily would only get from a window.

One of the most important things I've learned so far is how to be critical of an architect's decisions to reveal or conceal the structure of his (oh let's be honest, we're not going to be seeing any female architects on this trip) building. Structure in architecture is like a routine performed by a magician. The better the magician, the better the routine, and the best magicians aren't the ones who don't reveal their secret, but who actually let you see how they perform the trick - if you're clever enough to catch it.

Let's get one thing straight: it isn't enough to simply show the structure in a building. And most people don't know what they're looking at, through no fault of their own. But a smartly articulated structural system can be appreciated by just about anybody. Part of an architect's responsibility is to understand and respond to the fact that the majority of the people using their building are not architects. I purposefully use the word "respond" because the architect has the choice to ignore or incorporate the public. When someone says about your building, "How did they do that?" you know you're on the right track. It's important to keep people intrigued and questioning and coming back for more.

Northern Lights

Light is inextricably bound with architecture. Whether it is blocked out or let in, an architect worth anything cannot afford to ignore light. In hot climates, the blockage of light through shading is tantamount to people's comfort. In Scandinavia, however, light is something precious and the architecture worth looking at sculpts and cradles light much as one would a priceless stone. When more than half the year is spent in darkness, light becomes a scarce commodity.

At Asplund's Stadsbiblioteket (Public Library), daylight is a key feature of the main rotunda space. Asplund floods the rotunda with daylight from clerestory windows just above the edge of the frame in the photo below, which washes the white walls above in a cheery glow. The light quality coupled with the sheer volume of the space makes a dramatic contrast with the dark stone and narrowness of the entry. We were fortunate enough to be in the library on a bright, sunny day, to see the room in all its glory. (Even if there were quite a few nasty electric lights turned on.)

I've already shown you how Aalto uses light in his buildings. I'll resurrect two examples.  The first, his home outside Helsinki and specifically, this moment where his desk, situated under a corner window, captures the sunlight streaming in the window.

The windows are high and wide enough to bathe the entire desk in warm sunlight. Even though the desk is in a fairly large room, the different between what is in light and what is in shadow simulates privacy for the architect at work.

Aalto's Nordic House handles light well, especially in the library. The combination of clerestory windows on either side, and the skylight above lets in light from all angles and takes advantage of multiple times of day.

Light does interesting things outside of buildings, too. Stockholm, as an urban city, contained many instances which manipulated light in an intriguing way. On Gamla Stan (Old Town) where our hostel was located, narrow alleys between the densely packed buildings channeled daylight and created shafts of light across the street.

Even though this image is stitched, you can still clearly see the beam of light that comes from the setting sun shining through the buildings. The strength of the light seems almost artificial, but it's entirely natural.

I hope to show more examples of daylighting and architecture, since I've surely talked everyone's ear off about electric lighting.

One Man's Trash is... probably still trash

Do you remember when I mentioned this bit of interesting outside a mall in Helsinki?

I wasn't sure if this was a piece of art or a garbage dump or a thrift swap. Its proximity to other art lent a deliberateness to the heap that lends itself to some avant-garde artist. But the haphazardness and the few people actually rifling through the assortment left me questioning. 

A few days ago we went to visit the Stadsbiblioteket (Public Library) by Asplund and a curious thing caught my eye. The rain and wind blew some leaves (or flower petals?) around and clumped around this unfortunate bicycle:

Rather than immediately dismiss the bicycle as trash and unusable, I thought the way the leaves threatened to swallow the bike whole to be beautiful in its drama.

Who's to say what's art and what isn't? This question isn't original, I know, but I haven't been able to satisfactorily answer it for myself. The answer is more like a constant pursuit of discovery, about what others deem "art" and reconciling that with my own tastes and preferences.

The Modern Art Museum in Stockholm had a feature exhibit of paintings by Ed Ruscha. He's not a name I was familiar with before the exhibit, but here's an example of his work. He does other things, but the largest body of his work is a phrase or sentence on top of a landscape or splotches of color:

I tried to understand it, and the others like it. I tried to switch words or letters around, looking for any hidden patterns in the letters and their positions in relation to each other and the image behind them. The search was fruitless and I wound up frustrated, not at myself but at the works on the wall. They were not art to me. To me, they were merely paint on a canvas, and that does not guarantee art.

The bicycle in the wet leaves above was more moving and stirred my senses to a much greater degree. Resisting the urge to encase it in a plexi-glass box, I had to admire it for what it was: a spontaneous accumulation of wet leaves and a lonely bicycle. I like it better that way: unassuming speaks to me more than a frame.

Let's Talk Royalty and... IKEA?

It's an exciting time to be in Stockholm, not only because it's summer and the weather is amazing, but because a once(ish)- in a lifetime even is taking place this Saturday. The royal family's oldest child, the Princess Victoria, is getting married! In three days, she will marry Daniel, a man whom the media has dubbed the "man of the people". He comes from a rural fishing family, and was the princess's personal fitness trainer. Their relationship has spanned seven years, and Saturday they will tie the knot!  For two weeks up until the ceremony, the royal family (and their many staff) have organized a citywide celebration with musical artists, cultural exhibitions and touristy stuff. Our hostel is literally right around the corner from the palace, on the island of Gamla Stan (lit. "Old Town") so we are smack in the middle of Love Stockholm 2010!

As a distinctly Swedish brand, IKEA was invited to set up a pavilion for the bash on Gamla Stan, almost directly across the street from our hostel. IKEA built a small mock palace and furnished it entirely with furniture and objects from their collection. Part advertisement, part fairly tale, with very little reality, the exhibit was pretty ridiculous.

The first room you enter is the library/study and is the first presentation of Swedish culture. The skis on the wall allude to Sweden's climate and geography, the shelves upon shelves of books celebrate Swedish literature.

If you look up behind me where I took the above photo, this large print of the royal family around the turn of the twentieth century looms above:

A special challenge to you all: can you identify the painting that the family is sitting in front of? The dog in the top right corner is the only clue, and I know I've seen the painting before but perhaps some of you with more nimble minds can help me.

The banquet room is pictured above, along with a pair of what seems to be reporters or talk show hosts being filmed talking about the IKEA palace. They seemed to be very interested in the flatware at the table, so they might have been representing a culinary or cooking design show. They spoke Swedish, so this is all conjecture.

The palace, as we moved through it, showed a strange mix of detail and simplicity. In some rooms, such as the banquet room, the walls were just white with some raw marker drawings of shields and molding. The table is richly decorated with dozens of flowers. In other rooms, such as the kitchen (shown below), the designers pay more attention to architectural integrity.

Look at those beautiful (fake) columns! (I wish it wasn't so hard to convey sarcasm through written word...)

I couldn't help wondering... what was I supposed to feel about the exhibit?  How was I supposed to see? As an American tourist, catching a glimpse of Swedish culture?  As a commoner in awe of the privileges of royal life? Or maybe IKEA wanted to create a place of escape by appealing to my sense of fantasy.

The recreation of the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea seemed to do this quite blatantly. Perhaps that's what was so unsettling about the entire exhibit: it was incomplete. It tried to take multiple routes and appeal to the so many different audiences that the result was disjointed and haphazard. I felt like I was being talked down to, and the receipts posted at the end of each room (to show how cheap all of the IKEA swag used in the room was) came off as really tacky. Overall, the exhibit quite literally cheapened the experience of the royal wedding and could have been more thoughtful and not so sloppy.

Another Note from the Author

Hopefully none of you have noticed, but I have to be honest. I'm VERY behind in my blogging. I've tried to record every day as it happened but, this is not an efficient use of my time. It's nice to have everything laid out all organized-like, but let's be honest: life isn't like that.

So I'm going to proceed in a different way, and instead record what happens as a series of vignettes. No more complete days, and things will be out of order. I'll provide dates and locations for your reference, but don't expect a logical sequence. I think this will make reading more interesting for all of you lovely people, and it will certainly make my life easier.

Thanks for bearing with me and I hope you all enjoy the new format!

Visit the CMU Scandinavia Blog!

I'd like to make a quick plug for the general CMU Scandinavia 2010 blog. You can find it at scandinavia2010.wordpress.com and it's used by everyone on the trip. There's a bunch of interesting posts by the other students there now. Leto and Dan have been using a device called a Gigapan, which takes giant panoramic pictures. Check out the posts!

Day 11 - Aalto, Aalto and, oh more Aalto

So much Aalto today! Today we only saw Aalto buildings. We saw Aalto's main house, his studio, and the Pensions Institute.

First we rode a cable car/train thing out to the house/studio area. Aalto's house has since been made into a museum and is very fiercely protected. We had to remove our shoes in the secretary's room. I didn't mind this at all, because I could feel the textures of the floors and it felt like I was walking around my own home. It was a more authentic experience.

The rooms in the house are fairly petite, but this is not because of any available funds but a combination of the time period, Finnish culture and architectural trend. The most interesting part of the room arrangement was their vertical relationships. Some rooms were reachable by a half-flight of stairs or sunken slightly below. Few rooms (on the first floor at least) were the same floor height as their adjacent rooms.

As you can see in the section above, there are at least four different levels of floor in the house. If the lowest part of the section is the dining room and den, then the next highest floor is the small studio (originally Aalto worked from his home before his office expanded). The door on the left side is up a few more stairs and leads to Aalto's private study. From there a stair leads to the second floor, where the rooms are all of a uniform height (with one or two exceptions of a step or two).

Here is an image of the small studio room taken from the door to the study:

The following image is of Aalto's own desk below a corner window looking out over a little tree. I could draft for hours at a desk like this.

It wouldn't be an Aalto building if there weren't some light fixtures. This one really had me perplexed, and I'm not sure exactly what the form is supposed to be doing.

Obviously it's focusing the light, but why the M-shaped form? What's the focusing the light towards? (It wasn't evident in the room). I welcome suggestions if you have them.

This lamp was made by a special friend of Aalto's. He had some influence on Aalto's future light designs, and Aalto's preference for his work helped the artist gain notoriety.

Also note the table cloth, which is another signature Aalto design and comes in other colors. We found the fabric for sale at the Aalto Museum... for 20 Euro a meter!!

A short walk down the road took us to Aalto's studio. Today it houses the Alvar Aalto Foundation which preserves and promotes Aalto's work. Although the studio was one connected building, two spaces stood out as definitive. First, the drafting room itself, a fairly well-lit, open-spanning space.

Second, Aalto's personal office and meeting room and the grandest space in the building:

That rug in the middle of the floor was irresistibly comfortable and I wanted badly to lie down and fall asleep on it.

I worked out the space in axon to better understand the relationship of the curving wall to the sloping ceiling.

The slope is so gentle, over such a distance that it's hard to tell in the drawing that there is even any sort of angle. This is the first axon I've done so far where I was satisfied with the angle I chose, especially for the way I was able to show the landing in the left corner and the little balcony on the upper floor.

Once we finished absorbing the studio, we hopped the train again to Helsinki and the Pensions Institute, also by Aalto. Here, Aalto's affinity for the semi-cylindrical tile I mentioned before comes out in full force. We barely stepped in the door before we were flooded in a sea of blue and white tile.

Just around the corner, though, I saw something I've never seen before, but everyone should: a paternoster! A paternoster is an open-lift elevator that is constantly moving so that one side is always traveling up and one side is always traveling down. A passenger just steps into the box and rides as far as their destination and steps out again. Here's the paternoster mid-level (I never saw it stopped, but, it's a photograph you know)

The Pensions Institute is a large building where something like 600 Finns work. For that reason, and it being a government building, we had a guide to navigate us, whose name was Petra. She was hands-down the best guide we've had so far, with a sense of humor and very easy-going. Certain areas and things were absolutely off-limits, but she did let one person (Dan) ride the Paternoster.

We visited the library on the tour, a curious area divided into two spaces: a lounge and the greater library itself, connected series of stairs and steps. I quickly sketched a section of how I perceived the different levels to relate to one another.

Note to Self: redraw this section!  What you can tell is that there are clearly two rooms, each with two levels. In the room on the right, the levels are full room height, whereas on the left, a few steps lead down to one level that (you can't tell exactly) circles an even lower area, reached by the second, and larger stair. If you remember the Nordic House library, something similar to the Pension library's left room happens. A lower set of stacks sits below and is ringed by a path and more stacks. The lower set is open to the upper so someone can look over the railing at the books and people below.

The light coming from the ceiling is daylight streaming in through light wells. The blue light is due to shadow from overhanging trees.

I was surprised by the playfulness in the cafeteria. There was the clay tile, of course, but the ceiling module, an upside-down square dish, made for an interesting surface that appeared to ripple and move (although of course it was fixed). The light fixtures are a simplified version of Aalto's patented "beehive" lamp.

That's Petra, our tour guide, on the right. The wall to the left, just out of the frame, is almost entirely glass and looks out on a grass courtyard.

I found this water dispenser particularly beautiful, if only for the blue translucent lever.  Looking at the photo now, I'm not sure what made me so interested in it, but I remember being drawn to its form and the blue lever.

 You thought I would forget about lighting? Heck no!  Howsabout this nifty lamp?

Or this three-lamp fixture?

So many lights, so little time.

We concluded the tour in the main hall, which is daylit from above with giant triangular skylights.

 
Why can't we do this more in America?  Why is it so hard to design for daylight? Aalto designed loads of great electric lamps, but he didn't ignore the need for daylight. Instead, he celebrated natural light as an integral part of the building's performance. When possible, I believe buildings should be naturally lit. Electric lighting has its place, of course, and should be treated with care and consideration. Each has its place and balance is key. We've come too rely too heavily electric lighting as the quick fix or the equalizer, but enough studies show that humans, biologically, need to be aware of the sun's position in the sky for their bodies to function. Fundamentally it's a chemical process, but the physical effects are equally significant. Aalto worked in a unique time when electricity was newly and cheaply accessible to all and postwar production was at an all-time high, allowing him to design mass-producible light fixtures. At the same time, thousands of years of daylight sensibility had not yet faded and so Aalto's buildings have a great balance of electric and day light.

That wraps things up for today. I'm slowly closing the gap between the actual day it is for me and the day talked about in the post. I've still got a lot of catching up to do.  I'll leave you with a shot of me in one of the smaller chamber rooms.