The Sacred, the Profane, and Aalto in Brooklyn
After 74 years, a lost design by Alvar Aalto is found and shared for the first time.
Next Monday, we are having our last event of the year, as we launch our final issue of 2021, #25, at 1pm EST next Monday, December 20.
All of our issues are special—we like to say our best issue, our most collectible issue, is always our next issue—but this one is particularly so. An architect and a scholar found a lost Alvar Aalto design for a church renovation in Brooklyn and asked New York Review of Architecture to publish the drawings for the very first time. We worked with our printer and designer to produce two precise facsimiles of the drawings. A nice holiday gift for the subscribers.
Come hear the story of the drawings and see them on zoom next Monday with Aalto scholar Sofia Singler, architects Kirk Gastinger and Trey Trahan, and Saarinen scholar Eva Hagberg. Rsvp at nyra.nyc/rsvp.
Dr. Sofia Singler, a Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge whose specialty is in ecclesiastical architecture, Nordic modernism and Alvar Aalto, will join us from Finland and—with architect Kirk Gastinger, joining from Kansas City—will tell us about the drawings. Along the story of their origin, they will discuss what light they shed on how Aalto understood the relationship between the sacred and the profane in architecture. We have invited a contemporary designer of churches, architect Trey Trahan, and Saarinen scholar and architecture critic Eva Hagberg (who also wrote for the issue) to then join in a discussion on the topic.
Register at nyra.nyc/rsvp.
Poster design by Erik Freer of Freer Studio, art by Nathaniel Flagg.