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Humble Brick. Nor has his sensuous joy in handling his sites and materials. Aalto's complex of buildings for the technical university at Otaniemi, with its mighty play of geometric masses, is also a hymn to the humble brick. In Seinajoki, he daringly faced the town hall with curved blue tiles that soften the structure's abrupt angles and change hue from blue to gray to black, depending on the light. In his recently opened North Jutland Museum of the Arts in Aalborg, Denmark, Aalto confronted the most difficult challenge in museum design: natural lighting. Most architects avoid the issue by putting up blank walls of solid masonry or tinted glass. But Aalto allows sunlight to pour through high windows, then tames it by bouncing it off curved structural beams so that the light diffuses evenly over the interior walls. The Aalborg design reflects one of Aalto's guiding convictions: man must always stay in contact with nature.
This idea is carried even farther in Aalto's latest building, Finlandia House, Helsinki's concert and convention center, where the European security conference was held (TIME, Aug. 4). Standing alone in a bayside park, it looks like a beached iceberg—an immense, rugged structure clad in snowy white marble. On one side, the building rides gently over some rocky ledges (which in the U.S. would probably have been dynamited away); on another, it retreats in scalloped curves from nearby trees.
The subtle homage to nature's irregularity continues on the inside too: there is hardly a right angle to be found in the entire building. Indeed, the interior layout seems so complicated as to be al most recklessly baroque. Yet Aalto holds off excess by designing every light fixture, door handle and stair tread to fit the whole — and suit the user.
Surprise and Grace. Aalto's downtown architecture is as comfortable with city life as his freestanding works are with nature. There are half a dozen recent Aalto buildings in central Helsinki that seem as austere and reserved as the surrounding streetscape — until one notices the little surprises and grace notes. On one shaded facade of an Aalto-designed bookstore, for example, the architect framed every window with white marble to give the cheery illusion of more light than actually exists. His U-shaped headquarters for the Enso Gutzeit paper company steps down to a startling courtyard between its wings. But Aalto deliberately turned the building's bland flat sides to its 18th century neoclassic neighbors, matching their cor nice lines and echoing their façade patterns. Only through such respect for place, Aalto seems to say, can cities keep their harmony, continuity and zest.