Some more concepts I did for the Jusant

Now we're talking! Aalto established his first practice in Jyväskylä in 1923; his wedding to Aino Mandelin the following year became the occasion for a Grand Tour of Italy. Exposure to the monuments of antiquity and the Renaissance seems to have been the tipping-point event to push young Aalto into the arms of Nordic Classicism, one of several 20th-century classicist free-styles that, stylistically, paralleled the kind of investigations undertaken by Lutyens or Plečnik. Symbolically, it was probably a bit different; as Richard Weston points out, in Finland, classicism "could be seen to be building upon well-established, domestic classical traditions, while at the same time re-connecting architecture with the mainstream of European culture." It was specific to Finland, but also an international lingua franca that allowed for an open-spirited exchange of ideas. Much of this work was downplayed by Aalto later, and Modernists historians by and large had little use for it. Thus, one of postmodernism's great projects was the spadework of unearthing all this lost 20th-century classicism. Before the bottom fell out of the whole enterprise, a lot of really quirky and interesting - indeed, nearly Mannerist - work got accomplished. The Jyväskylä Workers' Club, projected when Aalto was merely twenty-six, demonstrates clearly the influence of the Italian journey. This is not a modernist box on piloti, but the Doge's Palace of Venice, a box on columns. (Leave it to Paul Rudolph to close the circle by specifically reimagining the Doge's Palace as a modern building - see the writings of Timothy Rohan for more on this.) The facades present mild Mannerist studies in the contrast between general blankness and moments of concentrated detail. There are also some asymmetries here, hard to perceive in this photo, which emerge in part out of the asymmetrical plan, which puts the main entrance down on the far left end of the elevation. This in turn throws off the rhythm of the shopfront columniation, which is curiously indifferent to the big central window which steadfastly insists on a symmetrical arrangement to the whole thing. It's not exactly Michelangelo but it's not uninteresting. I also like the use of the drainspouts to call out the tripartite division in the plan and, again, enforce some kind of discipline on the facade. (They don't feature in the elevations but they're present in old-timey photos, so I think we can safely say they are Aalto's doing.) The interior (which we didn't see) is pretty great too; see Christof Wittig's image.

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Geraldine Viswanathan