a softer, gentler modernism: on alvar & aino aalto

“emotional architecture”—a concept which also lends the title to this exhibition. According to Barragán, “It is very important for humankind that architecture should move by its beauty; if there are many equally valid technical solutions to a problem, the one which offers the user a message of beauty and emotion, that one is architecture.”

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vernacular design, which I would define as functional design for ordinary people rooted in a local economy and culture.

It was then I realised architecture is not about creating structures that are aesthetically pleasing or merely functional: it’s about designing spaces that evoke emotion and resonate with the human spirit. The Farnsworth House may have been a triumph of modernist design, but it lacked the warmth and humanity architecture should embody.

The architecture of a civilization is always in communion with its technology. Its effects are deeper than just the immediate appearance of buildings: the process of technology colors everything about how a culture interacts with the world. In the early 20th century, the mathematical rationalism of inventors and engineers intermixed with the wealth... See more

But when architecture falls out of sync with the conditions we live in, home begins to feel more and more precarious. The reason we dislike contemporary architecture is because it fails to achieve this essential purpose, to, as the architect Antonio Sant’Elia put it, “freely and audaciously harmonize man with his environment”.

What Le Corbusier understood about architecture is that it must always confront the present. The need for shelter is deeply ingrained in us, that sense of “being at home” that we can always intuit when we feel safe in the place we’re residing. But when architecture falls out of sync with the conditions we live in, home begins to feel more and more ... See more