Investigate Aalto’s Biological Approach to Standardisation and How This Implicated His Design Process

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The House of Culture in Helsinki was the first time Aalto used specialist bricks to form the sharp curves needed. [18] This required considerable experimentation to construct a wall able of forming concave and convex shapes of alternating radii.[19] The brick itself was non-rectangular but fanned and its rounded corners allowed ease in facilitating construction.[20] Visually, the facades surface creates a unified yet fractal sheet of shadow and light continuously cast by its fluid curves.[21] This method of using specialist technologies, while successful and valuable in its own right, represents the editing and loss of the identification of the brick and its function which is antithetical to its nature. By forcing a material or component to do something foreign to its original purpose you compromise its integrity as a standardised component. Specialised bricks go against the purpose of standardised components as described in the 19th century brick manual Lacroux’s La brique ordinaire (1878) as it invalidates the ‘nature’ of the brick.[22] Frank Lloyd Wright publically criticized the use of specialty bricks used to construct the Monadnock Building in Chicago stating, “the flowing contours, or profile, unnatural to brick work was got by forcing the material – hundreds of special moulds for special bricks”.[23] However, a counter argument is that Aalto was trying to create a standardised component that would be universal to all types of construction regardless of desired form.

Aalto stressed the need to find the material equivalent of the living cell found in nature, “Not only the brick should have a universal form which can be used for anything, all other forms of standardisation are the same. When we have reached the stage of being able to achieve different ends with a standard unit which the soul of elasticity incorporated in the object, then we shall have paved the way between Charybdis and Scylla, between individualism and collectivism.”[24] Here when he refers to the ‘soul of elasticity’ he is speaking about the mortar joint which is the outcome of the bricklayer on location. [25]

What Aalto is pointing out here is that the choice we have is between two evils; of the concrete jungles lacking artistic context or the lesser evil of attempting to elevate the practical solution of standardisation into something mirroring the fulfilling humanist nature of quality art.

The brick masonry walls of Mies Van der Rohe, illustrated in Werner Blaser main drive, strives for communicating sheer precision and quality in his drawings translating to the build itself.[26] Aalto’s approach was entirely different in methodology as he chased the design of a flexible standardisation which mimicked the idea of the living cells of organisms allowing numerous combinations of unique forms.[27] This contrasting approach is shown in the medium he used to express his ideas of form using sketches, watercolours and oil paintings exploring colour and relief. This playful method of investigation in materials is shown in Aalto’s Muuratsalo Experimental House, lively clashes of mass and gaps filled with liquid material were a recognisable theme in his paintings. [28]Many of the bricks used in his summer house were rejects; Aalto used different types of brick pointing, joints, sizes and finishes to his collage brick courtyard walls. Due to the varying types of brick and mortar ratios used, the wall had varying compressive strengths which may produce an unpractical solution.[29] The house itself was a medium for testing various brick arrangements but also to examine how materials weather in harsh climates.[30]

The internal wall of the courtyard displayed a raw mesh of 50 different types of bricks contrasting the external walls that were white washed thus unifying the bricks with a singular lick of colour. This white washed quality creates an oxymoron, unifying the brick as well as exposing the individuality and outcome of the bricklayer’s craft onsite.[31] [32]

In this, the wall is displayed as an organic structure opposing the notion of ‘the house as a machine’ famously said by Le Corbusier[33]. The way brick has been used in his Experimental house, by weaving and creatively crafting patches of brickwork of a varying depth forms a symbiotic relationship with his paintings in texture and pallet, thus elevating the ordinary to become more than construction but an ‘art’.[34]

I believe Aalto’s most successful attempt at creating a building of quality, through utilisation of a standardised component innovatively, was his Murratsalo Summer Experiential house. It doesn’t; unlike the other two examples of projects that used specialised bricks to perform a particular niche or standardised bricks that rely on the mortar joint to produce unusual forms; go against the nature of what a brick is and its integrity. Aalto recognises the necessity of standardisation and the increasing value in technological advancement in the modern climate but instead of just accepting the seemingly inevitable, he strived to experiment in renouncing the rawness of organic nature in architecture. To reinforce this point, it is interesting that for me, his most inspiring work with standardisation in his Experimental Muuratsalo Summer House was a house designed for his own use. The freedom of being able to design without timescales, client briefs and solely through light-hearted playful techniques of trial and error give the build a lively spirt that is not as prominent in his other builds. This is not surprising and reflects the problems of the modern architectural design process, of having so many restrictions on how and what you can build that only increase as you move up in scale. Nevertheless, Aalto collectively was able to find connections with people’s humanity and nature on every scale.

Aalto’s attempt to solve the challenge faced by architects with creating quality and innovation with standardised components has been relatively successful. However, creating what he describes as being the equivalent to the living cell in nature has yet to be conceived. I find that Aalto contradicts himself between talking about finding this parallel to a living cell in nature and designing buildings like the Experimental House where it seems to embrace the use of various sizes, shapes and colours of bricks that weave together to form a façade that we as humans can directly connect along with nature.

Furthermore, how can a unit reflect its place and culture and yet be used internationally as a single cell as Aalto imagines. If you reduce anything down to its smallest form then of course you will find unity, however there is many layers of complexity involved with scale.

Aalto often talked about Flexible standardisation where a unit

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