Could-Have-Been Modernism
A forgotten Alvar Aalto design. Plus, brutalist poetry and Home Depot’s tiny house
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Could-Have-Been Modernism: Aalto in Brooklyn
After a fire damaged a small Sunset Park church in 1947, the congregation asked Alvar Aalto to lead the redesign. The world-famous architect agreed, and then the drawings disappeared.
by Sofia Singler and Kirk Gastinger
Of the over 500 projects designed by Studio Alvar Aalto, some 200 were carried out. The rest were left unrealized but documented, amounting to an immense corpus of could-have-been modernism. Yet there are a handful that occupy a ghostly presence in the architect’s portfolio, their documentation presumed lost to time.
Among the schemes condemned to obscurity is a facade that Aalto designed for a church in a Finnish enclave of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Aalto’s biographer Göran Schildt dated the scheme to his “American years” but offered little else. In Aalto and America, the authoritative 2012 publication on Aalto’s relationship to the United States, the Brooklyn kirkko does not even warrant a footnote. Why did the design go unrealized, and how does it fit within Aalto’s wider work?
Concrete Poetry
It is the poet, of all people, who exposes the narratives that architects, critics, and institutions use to justify destruction.
by Nolan Boomer
Is there a language of demolition? In Discipline Park, poet Toby Altman recovers multiple from the wreckage of Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, torn down in 2014. Within this context, institutions use a slick lingo that rationalizes erasure with promises of economic gain. The social sphere instead speaks in a mournful register, a wound passed “from eye to eye.” The elegies are abundant, but soon enough, the narration rolls to a stop. Unless someone picks it back up.
Altman cultivates a personal connection with Prentice, the place of his birth. He considers its architectural arrangement: a quatrefoil-shaped tower that appeared to float above a square base of services. The building was owned and operated by Northwestern University, where Altman would go on to teach decades later. But the closer he gets to it, the larger and more diffuse “the institution” becomes. It is the invisible hand that withholds nourishment, the administrator who sends unhinged fundraising emails, the wrecking ball itself.
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High-quality prints and products of seminal buildings from Adam Nathaniel Furman with specific collections for Brutalism, Postmodernism, New York, London, LA, and Chicago.
Mini Me
BYO: concrete pad, plumbing, electricity, interior finishes, permits, land, labor, tears.
by Mimi Zeiger
A tiny house expert reviews Home Depot’s new tiny house.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our editor is Samuel Medina, our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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