Architecture and Design
earth is a garden?’, and this back-to-basics
An aircraft-carrier bird-table beside theTemple
Pool, Little Sparta. From Nature Over Again:The
Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay byJohn Dixon
Hunt.
A particularly interesting contrast to
Little Sparta, which Hunt discusses in
some detail, is the garden at Fleur de l’Air
in Provence. This gave Finlay the opportu-
nity to work within a large and long-
established architectural and horticultural
framework. It was a contrast in another
way too, for Finlay oversaw the progress of
the project from a distance rather than on
site. The finished work was communicated
to the public as a publication, Fleur de l’Air: A
Garden in Provence (Wild Hawthorn Press,
2004) in which John Dixon Hunt wrote that
Finlay had created ‘a theatre or collection
of events and concepts . . . in many ways it
is the same kind of gathering that one
might expect to discover in a book’.
One theme that Hunt discusses is the
problem of who sees what in any garden.
Should the creator of the garden expect
visitors to educate themselves enough to
understand all the meanings? Or should
the creator be content to accept that many
people who visit a garden will be ignorant
of its meanings, and uninterested in
learning more? Hunt quotes Finlay’s anger
at the publication of Follies: A National Trust
Guide (Jonathan Cape, London, 1986),
whose authors Gwyn Headley and Wim
Meulenkamp wrote so disparagingly of
Little Sparta that ‘the insistent name-
dropping of pastoral painters and garden
theorists tends to get on one’s nerves’.
Hunt feels that despite such attitudes, a
certain amount of interpretation must be
60 The Art Book volume 17 issue 1 february 2010 r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah
left to the visitor (or reader, if in a book):
‘Where there is no prescribed route in a
garden, any opportunity for narrative or
logical sequence of events is eliminated.
The implication is that garden design
should eschew any overall story or narra-
tive . . .’. This is a pretty major statement,
and not one that all admirers of Finlay’s
work would be happy to accept. Hunt is
aware of this, noting that ‘I find myself
(unusually) in disagreement with Stephen
Bann – one of Finlay’s most accomplished
commentators . . .’. For Hunt this point is
important:
Landscapes are not in themselves texts . . .What
landscapes can do at their best, however, is
suggest single, even resonant, ideas or con-
cepts, including images, that may already have
an extended and discursive life elsewhere but
which cannot rely upon that in a garden.
Hunt, like Finlay, forces the reader to
concentrate on individual words, their
senses and their uses, in understanding
Finlay’s work. Also, Hunt emphasises the
differences between a garden and an
artwork in a gallery – the former is never
finished. As Finlay said in one of his
detached sentences: ‘Embark on a garden
with a vision but never with a plan’.
Hunt has already raised many of these
issues in two other recent publications,
Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden
Theory (Thames & Hudson, 2000) and The
Afterlife of Gardens (Reaktion, 2004). Both
these books are as much about the
philosophy of gardens as they are accounts
of their practical realisation. For example,
in Greater Perfections, Hunt asks, ‘What on
questioning is very invigorating. One
could criticise Hunt’s repetition of themes
in this series of publications, though to be
fair only this book focuses on one
individual’s work. It is also more of a
communication with the reader than the
previous two publications, both in content
and presentation, and illustrated with
numerous well-chosen colour images in-
stead of the previous black and white.
There are copious footnotes, but no index,
indicative of a book intended for real
reading rather than for reference.
Finlay’s quirky and often difficult
personality, together with his identity as
artist-as-garden-creator, made him some-
thing of a one-man institution in his
lifetime. Hunt brings to his task the
erudition of his own lifetime’s musings
on the philosophy of gardens, making him
a world authority on the subject and
something of an institution himself.
Wikipedia carries entries on both of them:
Finlay is described as a poet, writer, artist
and gardener; Hunt is described (perhaps
by himself ) as a landscape philosopher.
patricia andrew
Art historian, Edinburgh
ALVAR AALTO: ARCHITECTURE,
MODERNITY, AND GEOPOLITICS
eeva-lisa pelkonen
Yale University Press $45.00 d27.50
228pp 130 mono illus
isbn 978-0-300-11428-7
A
lvar Aalto (1898–1976), Finland’s
leading modern architect, is known
for his design rather than for
statements or writings. His work of the
1930s, exemplified by his Vipurii library,
clearly embodied the characteristics of the
International Style, and he never aban-
doned modernist principles. Nevertheless,
his design is inextricably linked with the
spirit of his native land and often dis-
cussed in a regionalist context. He always
remained an individual, setting his own
course and embodying increasing com-
plexity in his buildings. His theoretical
underpinnings have not, however, been
fully explored. Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen’s lucid
new book helps to fill that gap. It is
devoted specifically to the architect’s
literary sources, his own writings, political
involvement and lively international en-
gagement. She carefully documents the
transition from his role in Finnish nation-

Aino and AlvarAalto, Finnish Pavilion in the New
YorkWorld’s Fair, main display wall, 1939. Ezra
Stoller, r ESTO. From Alvar Aalto: Architecture,
Modernity, and Geopolitics by Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen.
alism and architecture rooted in Nordic
tradition to his embracing of the modern
world and the development of a rich
symbolic language.
Pelkonen attributes Aalto’s openness
to new ideas to his bilingual, liberal
family, who despised nationalist extre-
mism. She observes his constant search
for new places and new people and his
negotiation with changing political situa-
tions. She explains the context in which he
lived: Finland’s independence from Rus-
sia, in 1917 while he was a student; its
division into Finnish and Swedish speak-
ing regions; his move in 1927 from the
small, traditional Finnish-speaking town
of Jyväskylä, where he opened his first
office, to the more modern city of Turku
with its predominantly Swedish culture.
While Frank Lloyd Wright and Le
Corbusier both lacked formal architectural
education, Aalto attended a conventional
school of architecture and came under the
sway of several outstanding teachers and
architects. He read widely and responded
in essays and articles. Compared with
Wright’s and Le Corbusier’s angry and
scathing condemnation of the conven-
tional architecture of his time, we find
Aalto reacting critically, in a balanced way,
to the ideas and buildings of the more
progressive architects of his own country
and neighbouring Germany. He was
r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah volume 17 issue 1 february 2010 The Art Book 61
inspired by Nietzsche’s con-
cept of European unity in
Beyond Good and Evil, and
by Richard Coudenhove-
Kalergi’s condemnation of
national separatism in Pan
Europa (1924) as well as the
ideas of the cosmopolitan
Clarté organisation founded
by Henri Barbusse. As Eur-
ope rose again from the
ashes of the First World
War, Aalto cast his net wide.
Besides following the birth
of the Modern Movement
in France and Germany, he
experienced exciting work
in Riga, Latvia, marvelled
at the greater transparency
achieved with large ex-
panses of glass in Sweden,
and was intrigued by Con-
structivism in Russia.
To Aalto, internationalism was not so
much an issue of style as of cooperation in
a broad arena for the solution of societal
problems and the enrichment of architec-
ture. He travelled widely and forged friend-
ships with artists, architects and thinkers,
including Siegfried Giedion, J J P Oud,
Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy,
André Lurçat and many others, but he
tended to reject the utopian determinism
associated with Le Corbusier. While Pelk-
onen describes him as ‘malleable’, she
shows how he made strategic decisions
that opened up opportunities. She states:
‘Aalto embodied three key ideas of mod-
ernity: change, progress and dynamism’.
In a chapter entitled ‘Geopolitics of
fame’, she deals with his inclusion in the
groundbreaking ‘Modern Architecture: In-
ternational Exhibition’ at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. She follows with
an intriguing section on the political back-
ground to Aalto’s retrospective at MoMA in
1938. Preceded by Le Corbusier in 1936, he
was only the second architect with a solo
show there. The author traces his selection
for this honour to the success in 1937 of his
exhibit in Paris at the ‘Exposition des Arts et
Techniques Appliqués à la Vie Moderne’. By
this time, France, Italy and Germany had
officially turned away from modernism and
contributed neoclassical or downright Fas-
cist designs. The result was that interna-
tional critics recognised countries such as
Finland, Czechoslovakia and Sweden,
which had previously been on the fringes.
The museum, under the perceptive direc-
Architecture and Design
tion of Alfred Barr and the curator John
Andrews, ‘was endorsing the idea of
localized, nationally distinctive trends in
modernism’; ‘Aalto was celebrated as an
arbiter of post-International Style architec-
ture’. After the retrospective Aalto won the
competition for the Finnish Pavilion at the
1939 New York World’s Fair. ‘As if to fulfill
MoMA’s prediction that architecture was
shifting from the geometric to the organic’,
Aalto ‘designed the pavilion with a domin-
ant, tilted curvilinear multi-media wall’.
Pelkonen, suggesting a shift in Aalto’s
approach, explains that ‘whereas the acous-
tic ceiling of the Vipurii library built on a
tension between form and function, the
New York wall played on the multilayered
symbolic meanings embedded in form’.
In the final chapter, after pointing out
that Aalto was one of the few modern
architects included in Robert Venturi’s
book Complexity and Contradiction in Archi-
tecture (MoMA, 1984), Pelkonen examines
Leonardo Mosso’s assertion that ‘the main
problem of Modern Architecture was the
emphasis on form and style at the expense
of a more complex understanding of
architecture’s impact on human life and
culture’. Aalto’s approach, she concludes,
involving intuition as much as rational
processes, accepted the complexity and
open-endedness of society and human
perceptions. Finlandia House (1975), Aal-
to’s last building, she writes, ‘can be
understood as an open-ended field of
meaning and a perfect emblem of Fin-
land’s newly gained geopolitical status’.
henry matthews
Washington State University
ARCHITECTURAL THEORY VOL. II:
AN ANTHOLOGY FROM 1871 TO 2005
harry francis mallgrave and
christina contandriopoulos
(eds)
Blackwell Publishing 2008 d65.00 $119.95 (H)
d29.99 $54.95 (P)
656 pp. Unillustrated
isbn 978-1-4051-0259-9 (h) 978-1-4051-0260-5 (p)
T
he second volume of Architectural
Theory surveys the development of
architectural theory from the time of
the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 to texts
published in the twenty-first century. The
textual content continues until 2008 but it
focuses on architectural theory up until
2005. The anthology follows on from
Volume I: An Anthology from Vitruvius to