architecture for intersections that litigious and lovely confab
Gio Ponti: My dear Alvar, our paths never crossed when we were alive. Lisa, my daughter, came to Helsinki in 1950 armed with her Hasselblad to interview the designer Tapio Wirkkala, another Finn who had connections with Italy. Her real purpose: she wanted to meet you, even if she knew that you were a lone wolf. They came to your immense studio, where city urban planning was underway. You weren’t there and they were met by your assistant who stuttered in almost incomprehensible English. Wirkkala apparently laughingly said I bet Alvar did this on purpose so that people get fed up and leave.
Alvar Aalto: Let’s try to be less Milanese. We should be friendlier between colleagues. What are you trying to say with this anecdote? There are so many about me and not all of them flattering. I am said to have been a drinker, whiskey mainly. As if that were a secret. I enjoyed life to the fullest. I loved, suffered, drank — especially since Aino, my partner in life and work, died prematurely in 1949. The truth about me in Italy was known only to my old friend Paolo Venini, whom I met at the time of Villa Mairea, 1938, and his son-in-law Ludovico Diaz de Santillana, who in the Fifties was also my assistant. I am too human and passionate, a simple guy who liked to laugh. I had great faith in human beings. I am anchored to the earth: my strong build says it all; I looked like a Scandinavian lumberjack. We share an innate love of Italy.
GP: Italy, Tuscany, the equilibrium between geometric landscape and captained by the BBPR and, even worse, I had a wife from an aristocratic family. I would remind you that you built a museum dedicated to yourself, Alvar, in Jyväskilä, where you opened your first studio. Difficult to define and ascribe a current to your style code. Bruno Zevi considered you to be the greatest maestro of the organic school in Europe, Gideon, your biographer and cohort, sees you more like an exponent of the neo-gothic line. I came back into fashion only after my death, becoming too popular even. I had always been of moderate temperament. Let’s talk about the dormitories in Baker House that the MIT commissioned you with, in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1946. Do you honestly think I never realized how much you borrowed from my residential architecture, reusing so many references, just making them a little more sinuous? Whether you admit it or not, we share certain affinities.
