1982: AS A YOUNG ARCHITECT, I HAD wrestled my way from Turkey to Finland, at the soggy end of a hitchhiker’s version of the Grand Tour, involving low-budget lodgings, sleeping on beaches, thumbing lifts and cheap food. All wonderful. Aalto’s Church of the Three Crosses at Imatra was a high point: a luminous joy, offering more natural illumination inside than the grey, overcast gloom outside.
For years, I had dreamt of returning and so the chance for Miriam van Wezel and me to join an Australian Studies Abroad tour led by Stephen and Naomi Crafti was irresistible. In 2020, though, Covid had different ideas. Now, in 2022, the tour lives: fourteen days of intense programme, incorporating more than just Aalto. Design, art, contemporary architecture, interesting company and good food were all rolled into an intensive and pleasurable fortnight.
Much has happened in Finland since Aino and Alvar Aalto created what seemed to be a single-handed version of the country’s design ethos, when they designed the Finnish Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and celebrated landscape, furniture, lights and glassware. Architecture, furniture, fabrics, ceramics and products by younger designers have subsequently developed in different directions but, somehow, still offer the world a vision of continuing Scandinavian integrity that looks wholesome in relation to other international directions.
Forty years ago, I would contemplate Aalto’s plans and wrestle with the eccentricities only to conclude: “I’ve got so much to learn”. Seemingly, this is still the case. I would marvel in the way he would set up a rhythm, then adjust it slightly, then break out with
