today and this is why I want to give painting back its lost universality and anonymity, because the more anonymous painting is, the more real it is’.19 In his work and teaching, the dignified Finnish designer, Kaj Franck, also sought anonymity; in his view the designer's persona should not dominate the experience of the object. In my view, the same criterium applies fully to architecture; profound architecture arises from facts, causalities and experiences of life, not from personal artistic inventions. As Alvaro Siza, one of the greatest architects of our time argues: ‘Architects do not invent anything, they just transform conditions’. In a television interview in 1972, Alvar Aalto made an unexpected confession: ‘I don't think there's so much difference between reason and intuition. Intuition can sometimes be extremely rational. […] It is the practical objectives of constructions that give me my intuitive point of departure, and realism is my guiding star. […] Realism usually provides the strongest stimulus to my imagination’.20
In my own work, I have always wanted to pull myself away from the work when it is finished. The work needs to express the beauty of the world and human existence, not any idiosyncratic ideas of mine. This call for anonymity does not imply lack of emotion and feeling. Meaningful design re‐mythicizes, re‐animates and re‐eroticizes our relationship with the world. I wish my designs to be sensuous and emotive, but not to express my emotions.
Architectural Courtesy
→ verbs vs nouns
Artistic Generosity, Humility and Expression: Reality Sense and Idealization in Architecture (2007)
In addition to an ‘aesthetic withdrawal’ and ‘politeness’, I have spoken of an ‘architectural courtesy’ referring to the way a sensuous building offers gentle and subconscious gestures for the pleasure of the occupant: a door‐handle offers itself courteously to the approaching hand, the first step of a stairway appears exactly at the moment you wish to proceed upstairs, and the window is exactly where you wish to look out. The building is in full resonance with your body, movements and desires.
Architecture and Being
→ being in the world; senses
Artistic Generosity, Humility and Expression: Reality Sense and Idealization in Architecture (2007)
I could tell of countless spaces and places that I have encapsulated in my memory and that have altered my very being. I am convinced that every one of you can recall such transformative experiences. This is the power of architecture; it changes us, and it changes us for the better by opening and emancipating our view of the world.
Skilfully designed buildings are usually expected to direct and channel the occupant's experiences, feelings and thoughts. In my view, this attitude is fundamentally wrong; architecture offers an open field of possibilities, and it stimulates and emancipates perceptions, associations, feelings and thoughts. A meaningful building does not argue or propose anything; it inspires us to see, sense and think ourselves. A great architectural work sharpens our senses, opens our perceptions and makes us receptive to the realities of the world. The reality of the work also inspires us to dream. It helps us to see a fine view of the garden, feel the silent persistence of a tree, or the presence of the other, but it does not indoctrinate or bind us.
Selfhood, Memory and Imagination: Landscapes of Remembrance and Dream (2007)
In addition to practical purposes, architectural structures have a significant existential and mental task; they domesticate space for human occupation by turning anonymous, uniform and limitless space into distinct places of human significance, and, equally importantly, they make endless time tolerable by giving duration its human measure. As Karsten Harries, the philosopher, argues: ‘Architecture helps to replace meaningless reality with a theatrically, or rather architecturally, transformed reality, which draws us in and, as we surrender to it, grants us an illusion of meaning. […] We cannot live with chaos. Chaos must be transformed into cosmos’21. ‘Architecture is not only about domesticating space. It is also a deep defence against the terror of time’, he states in another context.22
Altogether, environments and buildings do not only serve practical and utilitarian purposes, they also structure our understanding of the world. ‘The house is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos’, as Gaston Bachelard states.23 The abstract and undefinable notion of cosmos is always present and represented in our immediate landscape. Every landscape and every building are a condensed world, a microcosmic representation.
Architecture and Biology
→animal architecture; biophilic beauty; tradition
Architecture as Experience: Existential Meaning in Architecture (2018)
Profound architects have always intuitively understood that buildings structure, re‐orient and attune our mental realities. They have also been capable of imagining the experiential and emotive reactions of the other. The fact that artists have intuited mental and neural phenomena, often decades before psychology or neuroscience has identified them, is the subject matter of Jonah Lehrer's thought‐provoking book Proust Was a Neuroscientist.24 In his pioneering book Survival through Design (1954), Richard Neutra acknowledges the biological and neurological realities, and makes a suggestion that is surprising for its time: ‘Our time is characterized by a systematic rise of the biological sciences and is turning away from oversimplified and mechanistic views of the 18th and 19th centuries, without belittling in any way the temporary good such views may have once delivered. An important result of this new way of regarding this business of living may be to bare and raise appropriate working principles and criteria for design’.25 Later he even professed: ‘Today design may exert a far‐reaching influence on the nervous make‐up of generations’.26 Thanks to electronic instruments such as the fMRI scanner, today we know that this is the case. Also, Alvar Aalto intuited the biological ground of architecture in his statement: ‘I would like to add my personal, emotional view, that architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology’.27 The direct impact of settings on the human nervous system and brain has been proven by research in today's neuroscience. ‘While the brain controls our behaviour and genes control the blueprint for the design and structure of the brain, the environment can modulate the function of the genes and, ultimately, the structure of the brain. Changes in the environments change the brain, and therefore they change our behaviour. In planning the environments in which we live, architectural design changes our brain and our behavior’.28 This statement by Fred Gage, neuroscientist, leads to the most crucial realization: when designing physical reality, we are, in fact, also designing experiential and mental realities, and external structures condition and alter internal structures. We architects unknowingly operate with neurons and neural connections. This realization heightens the human responsibility in the architect's work. I, myself, used to see buildings as aestheticized objects, but for three decades now, architectural images have been primarily mental images, or experiences of the human condition and mind. I have also gradually come to understand the significance of the designer's empathic capacity, the gift to simulate and empathize with the experience of ‘the little man’, to use Alvar Aalto's notion.29
Empathic Imagination: Embodied and Emotive Simulation in Architecture (2016)
The Paimio Sanatorium, designed in 1929–1933 by Alvar Aalto, is one of the landmarks of Functionalist architecture, but it is also an example of the architect's empathic attitude and skill. This is what Aalto writes about his design process: ‘I was ill at the time I received the commission, and was able
