This SAHGB - IHR seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and in person at the Institute of Historical Research, Pollard N301 (3rd Floor, North Block of Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU).
Tile image: Church of the Three Crosses. Altar seen from organ loft. Photograph by Alvar Aalto, 1958. © Alvar Aalto Foundation.
ABSTRACT
The seminar will discuss Sofia Singler’s recent book, The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (Lund Humphries, 2023). It offers the first critical account of Studio Aalto’s religious modern architecture. Aalto’s ecclesiastical oeuvre is viewed as an evocative subgenre of the practice's portfolio, but its relationship to religion has eluded enquiry. The book challenges the assumed autonomy of Studio Aalto’s ecclesiastical oeuvre from religion. Analysing designs for churches, parish centres, funerary chapels and cemeteries in Finland, Denmark, Germany and Italy, the book shows that Aalto’s engagement with religion transcended artistic opportunism. The book addresses Aalto’s sacred oeuvre in its entirety, yet pays particular attention to the Church of the Three Crosses, broadly considered the apotheosis of Aalto’s sacred career. Through a detailed analysis of the religious actors and factors that shaped the design and construction of Aalto’s sacred works—from local parish building committees to bishops, and from liturgical reform movements to post-war debates on sacred art—this book shows that religious influences were neither extrinsic nor peripheral to Aalto’s modernism, but intrinsic and intimately related to it. The study of previously uncovered primary archival materials establishes that Aalto’s engagement with the Church was a consciously and productively symbiotic partnership which drew from shared interests and values, yet which also encompassed compromise and conflict. The resultant buildings neither glorify nor deny institutional religion — instead, this book argues, they challenge rigid dogmatism in religion as much as in modern architecture.
Studio Aalto, Church of the Three Crosses, Imatra, 1955–58. Sketch, plan, n.d. © Alvar Aalto Foundation.
Registration:
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BIO
Sofia Singler is Assistant Professor of Architecture and a Fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge. She grew up in Finland, later training at Cambridge and at the Yale School of Architecture, and working as an architect in the United States of America. Her main areas of interest are the post-construction ‘afterlives’ of buildings designed by Alvar Aalto, and contested notions of contemporaneity in Sámi public buildings.
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1. Helsinki
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