Through the Glass of the Eyes
- Vol.36(5), May
- New Delhi Burda Media India Private Limited 2019
- 24-27p.
Aalto’s long time friend professor Nils Erik Wickberg (1909-2002) wrote in his book ‘Thoughts on Architecture’ in 1946, “If Le Corbusier is Voltaire of Modern Architecture, Aalto is Rousseau.”
I am a Finnish photographer, who has photographed the architecture of Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) for over 20 years. Earlier, I considered the architecture of Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965) as a direct contrast to Aalto’s architecture, mainly because of its scale and palette of materials. In May 2014, I had a grant to stay a month at the Paris Art Center, the Cité Internationale des Arts. At that time, I acquainted more about Corbusier’s works in and around Paris. The trip made me look at them with new eyes, maybe in my case it was new eyeglasses that I had bought just before the trip (picture 1). I saw in the buildings some similarities to the work I did with Alvar Aalto, so I became interested in the subject. In the following years I made several trips to Corbusier buildings to Central Europe and at the turn of the year 2017-2108 to India.
I had created a particular style and approach in photographing Aalto’s buildings, and I continued to work on Corbusier’s buildings to make it easier to compare images. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) has stated that “architecture is frozen music”. I have tried to interpret this frozen music, by approaching buildings in different ways. Sometimes the architecture peeks in the middle of nature as if it was a wild animal in the jungle (picture 6) or I would take a picture of the deer descending to the edge of the pond (picture 8). Occasionally, architecture can be described orderly or monumentally (picture 5 or 11) or approached heroically from below. (picture 2 or 9)