Muuratsalo

ALVAR AALTO’S SUMMER HOUSE
By Rodrigo Balarezo

“I believe there are many moments in life in which the way things are organized is too brutal, and it's for the architects to give life a moresensitive framework.” ALVAR AALTO

“Art and society are both part of the same thing, so the words in our language are not always as independent as we think.” ALVAR AALTO

On this summer house, Aaltowas in a stage in his life in which he felt ready to commit to play. He stated the importance of play in the following terms “We must continue to believe in the crucial significance of play whenbuilding a society for human beings, those grown-up children… thus we must combine serious laboratory work with the mentality of play, or vice versa” he states the seriousness of play by quoting from a closefriend: “only when the constructive parts of a building, the forms derived from them logically, and our empirical knowledge is colored with what we might seriously call the art of play, only then arewe on the right path.” In Muraatsalo three experiments were performed. First, He experimented with a house without foundations with piers resting on rocks. Second, He applied no unifying scale orstructure. For example, the plan of the house doesn’t allow for a direct interpretation of its geometry pertaining to a constructive or a deconstructive sequence. Third, He experimented on the use ofdifferent textures zexplains “ [the} walls of the courtyard [are] divided into fifty different fields, permitting

experiments with the effectiveness of various kinds of ceramic materials, brick,mortar, different brick sizes and different types of surface.… to the aesthetic effects and durability of ornamental plants and mosses.” In addition, he says that the house would investigate how totranslate the character of the northern environment into architectural details. On this context, the building of a separate studio with no connection to the heating of the rest of the house would allow...