Volume 45, Number 6 · April 9, 1998
Giant in the Woods
By Martin Filler
Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, February 19-May 19, 1998., Catalog of the exhibition edited by Peter Reed
Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 320 pp., $55.00
Finnish Modern Design: Utopian Ideals and Everyday Realities, 1930-1997 Arts, February 27-June 14, 1998.
exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marianne Aav, by Nina Stritzler-Levine
Yale University Press, 352 pp., $65.00
Alvar Aalto in His Own Words
by Göran Schildt
Rizzoli, 280 pp., $60.00
Alvar Aalto: Master Works
by Göran Schildt
Rizzoli, 240 pp., $25.00 (paper)
The Alvar Aalto Guide
by Michael Trencher
Princeton Architectural Press, 243 pp., $24.95
Among the more piquant ironies of twentieth-century architecture is that two of the greatest exponents of its most widespread manifestation—the International Style—moved away from it forty years before the rest of the world discovered the shortcomings of that boldly simplified but severely circumscribed way of building. Less than a decade after Le Corbusier codified the basic design principles of the International Style in his Five Points of a New Architecture of 1926, he abandoned the machinelike forms and sleek finishes of Purism and introduced the biomorphic contours and rough materials that he often used during his later career.
Review, 3673 words
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