Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians, Australia and New Zealand

ISSN: 1033-1867 (Print) 2164-4756 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfab20

Industrial Organisms
Sigfried Giedion and the Humanisation of Industry in Alvar Aalto’s Sunila Factory
Plant

Michael Chapman & John Roberts

To cite this article: Michael Chapman & John Roberts (2014) Industrial Organisms,
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand,
24:1, 72-91, DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2014.901137

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2014.901137

Published online: 25 Jun 2014.

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 Figure 1: Alvar Aalto, Sunila plant masterplan (1936 – 38).
Drawing by the authors.

72 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
Industrial Organisms
Sigfried Giedion and the Humanisation of Industry in
Alvar Aalto’s Sunila Factory Plant
Michael Chapman and John Roberts

Abstract
This paper explores the role of industrialisation in Alvar Aalto’s work, with a
particular emphasis on his Sunila pulp mill and associated housing and community
projects, completed, for the most part, by 1939. While it is well known that Aalto
was heavily involved in industrial projects, and this had an enduring influence on
the trajectory of his practice (both directly and indirectly), the scholarship on this
topic tends to suggest that this was secondary to his more well-documented interest
in the cultural, site-related and humanist aspects of spatial design. This paper
challenges this position, arguing that Aalto’s industrial works were not only central
to his creative oeuvre, but presented a coherent and sustained attitude towards the
urban challenges of modernisation. Aalto’s exposure to the work and ideas of
Sigfried Giedion at this critical time, as well as his increasingly international profile,
gave Aalto’s projects a resonance with broader historical issues that were having an
effect on Europe at the time. Aalto used the Finnish industrial context to promote
an expanded social and cultural context for modernism, negotiating a complex
truce between the concerns of an emerging class of bourgeois industrialists and a
migratory regional proletariat. Drawing from the model established at Sunila, the
paper investigates the political and historical role that industry played in framing
Aalto’s work and the relationship this has to the broader issues of architectural
history and modernism.

One stands finally on the top level, on the flat roof-terrace of the high brick clad
storage building, from which the material, obeying the law of gravity, is conducted
into the production process. Below radiates the organism of the factory, the large
covered flake conveyor mounts almost to the terrace and the eye passing over the
granite rocks meets the Finnish landscape: water, water, trees, and a vast expanse
of space.

– Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 2nd edn (1949)1

The decades between the culmination of the First World War and the
declaration of the Second World War were a period of rapid industrialisation
across Europe that saw the ideals of a new modernist architecture intersect with
the rational and commercialised systems of industrial planning. While this had a
tangential influence over the architecture of factories and manufacturing plants
(as well as infiltrating the design and detail of residential and public architecture),
recognisable collisions between modernist architecture and industry were rare,
and notably absent in the canonical histories of modernism, despite the clear
affiliation with industrial processes. The primary exception to this is in the
Fabrications, 2014
Vol. 24, No. 1, 72–91, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2014.901137
Ñ 2014 The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 73

architecture of Alvar Aalto, for whom industry provided an important intersection
between his dual concerns with an integrated and modified natural landscape and
a spatially complex, lived culture.
While industry, and industrial processes, were a constant backdrop to the
adventures of modernism in architecture, a major transformation occurred in the
historicising of industry within the canon of architecture in the late 1940s. This
was centred on the work of Giedion, who not only published his work
Mechanization Takes Command in 19472 (the manuscript was completed two
years earlier), but included Aalto in the 1949 revised second edition of Space,
Time and Architecture for the first time. In this edition, Giedion not only praised
the “humanism” implicit in Aalto’s work, but also stressed the synthesis between
the constructed and natural environments. This dialectical approach also
underpinned Mechanization Takes Command, which argued that rationalisation
works alongside the irrational or organic in all aspects of human experience. Of
the handful of projects selected for inclusion by Giedion in Space, Time and
Architecture, the Sunila plant is the only industrial work chosen. The process by
which logs are floated downriver as islands from the inland regions to be fed into
machines and then exported around the world was, for Giedion, not only a
diagram of the relationship between the industrial and organic process, but
equally “a Faustian prospect”.3
Finland, in the 1930s, was on a very different path of industrialisation to the
rest of Europe. The region’s complex political history – the country only
achieved independence in 1917 – created a turbulent and uncertain economic
environment, with which the forces of industry continually grappled on the path
towards early modernisation. Finland’s relative isolation, as well as the hostility
of the climatic and topographic conditions, had resulted in isolated pockets of
civilisation that were poorly connected and without an overriding identity. The
primary connection between different parts of the country was through the
complex river system where the numerous lakes and streams flow into five main
tributaries, each reaching the Baltic Sea in the west and the south.4 From the
middle of the nineteenth century, the timber industry in Finland had flourished,
fuelled by global demands for Scandinavian timber products. However, the
nature of the landscape and this isolation had placed barriers towards its
growth and resulted in a relatively disorganised and underdeveloped industrial
infrastructure. From the outset, the industry of timber grew around established
water sources at the corners of the country. Timber was supplied via the
extensive river network and industrial plants grew in coastal centres, adjacent
to large bodies of water, where the timber was processed and then packaged for
export. These centres grew rapidly from virtually nothing to vibrant and diverse
communities of local life, often supporting entire populations of transitory
workers.

74 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
 Unusual within Finland, as opposed to other industrialist European countries
further south, was the dictatorial role played by bourgeois entrepreneurs in the
economy, dating from the earliest industrial revolution and the development of
early iron mills. For historian Pekka Korvenmaa, “[t]he industrialist was the
omnipotent overlord of his possessions, which included everything from the
factory to the daily life and environment of the workers.”5 This placed great
power in the hands of wealthy industrialists, as well as unprecedented social
and urban responsibility, given both the opportunity and resources to radically
transform the nation. In the 1920s and 1930s, some of this responsibility
was transferred to emerging architects, of whom Aalto had become the most
eminent.
Industry was not a marginal concern in the architecture of Alvar Aalto.
In fact, in his account of Aalto in Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion argues
that “one of Aalto’s main activities in Finland is industrial planning, from the
factory itself to the resettlement of whole industrial areas.”6 Giedion makes
reference to Aalto’s Vuoksi River Valley development, the Toppila pulp mills at
Oulu (1933) and the Varkaus Sawmill (1947), but his primary attention is given
to the Sunila Pulp Factory, constructed from 1937 to 1939. For Giedion, the
work is a synthesis of the rational requirements of manufacture and the organic
dictates of nature, handled masterfully in the emerging but delicate forms of
Sunila, grafted upon the rocky outcrops of the island site. Prominent, in
Giedion’s description, is the role of landscape in framing this, combined with
the social structure that inhabits it.
Coincidentally, Goran Schildt, in his 1992 introduction to the publication of
Aalto’s oeuvre of architectural drawings, also drew attention to the crucial
importance of the Sunila project as a seminal and transformative work in Aalto’s
evolution. Schildt, like Giedion, notes Sunila’s significance as a model of both
industrialisation and the environment, describing its legacy largely in terms of
landscape and connection with the natural world; his recurring trope for this
strategy is the “humanisation” of industry, a word that resonates strongly within
current Aalto scholarship and opens up new trajectories, from which the
relationship between architecture and industry can be reconceptualised. Schildt
writes:
[Aalto] could hardly have come closer to the crux of the problems involved in the
humanization of industrialism than in this commission from big industry. His recipe
for offsetting the excesses of technology included flexible placement of the factory
complex in the hilly terrain [ . . . ] the location of housing units in a living forest
setting, the ingeniously varied floor plans with balconies and garden areas, the
convenient access routes, and the pleasant recreation areas. All this was unusual and
somewhat revolutionary at the time.7

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 75

 Other scholars have also pointed to the “revolutionary” role that architecture
played in managing the social relationship between worker and overlord.8
Korvenmaa, for instance, cites Le Corbusier’s passage on “Architecture or
Revolution”, which establishes a pre-emptory role for architecture in mediating
social conflict, of which he sees Aalto as a pioneer.9 Giedion’s synopsis, from
more than four decades earlier, is remarkably similar, praising Sunila for its
ability to return workers to nature (and free them from the machine).10 As is
already well known, Giedion has an affiliation with the issues of industrialis-
ation, which played a disproportionate role in his historicisation of modern
architecture in this exact period (relative to contemporary histories of the
subject), and this emphasis underpinned his understanding of human
evolution and adaptation. This was particularly pronounced at the time he
was writing about Sunila, which paralleled the completion of the manuscript
for Mechanization Takes Command, published for the first time in 1947.
However, his discussion of the Sunila plant is significant, as it develops a
conscious dialectic between the human and nature: in both instances, drawn
into a relationship through the mastery of the machine and the dexterity of
the architecture. It is also, partially, a response to the inherent nihilism that
Giedion associates with the processes of mechanisation in this period. In fact,
Giedion sees the plant as a triumph of the machine, enabling individuals to
return to nature and, through industry, develop a more organic relationship
with urban ideas that is unique within the broader history of modernism.
The inherent productivity of the factory at Sunila – which can process 80,000
tonnes of cellulose with just forty-five workers in supervision11 – became a
social solution, enabling workers to return to the landscape (where more
than 3,000 people work to collect the logs that supply the plant). Giedion
concludes that “the problem of the production line here reaches a perfect
solution. Here no human being is misused to become an adjunct to a
machine.”12
This paper will look at the significance of the Sunila project as
representative of broader themes that came to dominate Aalto’s work and
approach. Focusing on the political and social aspects of the Sunila plant,
and with an emphasis on the proselytising of the project by Giedion at a
specific moment in architectural history, the paper argues for the importance of
industry to Aalto’s works. While much of the existing scholarship suggests that
Aalto’s industrial work was undertaken predominantly to subsidise his more
celebrated and designed architectural projects, this paper argues that it was
in his industrial projects that Aalto began to engage with a discourse of
modernism in all of its social, political and technological aspects. The
relevance of the industrial projects to the scholarship on Aalto is already
argued in the scholarship of Pekka Korvenmaa,13 although essentially as a

76 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
conduit to the associated housing projects and cultural buildings that these
commissions enabled. The current essay advances the role of industry in
Aalto’s work more directly through an exploration of its political and
historical connections to modernism generally and Sigfried Giedion specifically.
Aalto’s deliberate and prolonged engagement with industry was in recognition
of its importance to the process and production of architecture and a
questioning of its perceived autonomy in the period. Mechanisation was
transforming human experience at a dramatic rate, and Aalto, as a
pioneering architect of industrialisation, established a new relationship between
the machine and nature and an expanded political frame from within which
this should be viewed. It is in Sunila that this political frame is most
pronounced.

Geopolitics and Industry in Alvar Aalto’s Work

There has been a recent strand in the scholarship on Aalto’s work that argues for
its “geopolitical” characteristics, examining the extent to which Aalto managed his
emerging international profile within the discourse of modernism with the
realities of working in Finland and its idiosyncratic (and provincial) economic
context.14 This tends to focus more on the “geographical”, rather than “political”,
aspects of his work, arguing that Aalto’s “Finnish” heritage – in an era of devotion
to Scandinavian principles – allowed him to extend his career in North America,
while operating with relative autonomy in his homeland.15 Central to a lot of
Aalto’s discussion of Finland, as the scholarship shows, is a focus on the industrial
transformation of Finland: specifically, the way that industry and nature work in
harmony to create an ideal model of future urbanisation. For Aalto, Finland was a
model of industrial development that could form a precedent for other nations to
follow, marrying traditional and primitive values with the contemporary needs of
a modernising population.
This argument notwithstanding, there has not been a detailed study of the
political implications of Aalto’s work, especially in regard to his industrial
projects. Not only was industry a central arm of Aalto’s built work, but it was
the leaders of industry who commissioned a number of his most celebrated
houses. Aalto also undertook a huge range of “workers’ housing” projects to
accompany these large industrial works, and there is an intricate management
of hierarchy and scale that is a characteristic of this work. It is widely accepted
that within these projects Aalto was given much greater freedom in the design
and siting of spaces and, as a result, the housing projects were more
symptomatic of Aalto’s approach to design. Aalto refers widely to proletarian
values and issues of social justice in his writing,16 although there is limited
discourse or explicit evidence of his political views or how they directly or
indirectly influenced his work.

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 77

 In Aalto’s biography, Schildt observes that the architect had little interest in
politics growing up.17 The political struggles between Finland and Russia in this
period produced a clear ideological divide across the country, which, for the
most part, saw the emergence of a conservative, nationalist political mainstream
in response to the growing influence (and aggression) of their communist
neighbours. Aalto was raised in an environment unusually sympathetic to
socialist ideals, but not overtly political in any recognisable fashion.18 Schildt
also reveals that one of Aalto’s first jobs after graduation was in the production
of drawings and texts for a newspaper linked to the “right-wing” political group
Kokoomus,19 although his contributions were not political in nature, nor, for
that matter, was the newspaper. Clearly, by the 1930s, as Aalto’s architectural
approach began to mature, he developed much stronger connections with
socialist and humanist ideals and, in particular, the aspiration for a classless
society, fuelled in part by his friendship with Harry and Maire Gullichsen. He
also had, as Schildt demonstrates, a distinct sympathy for the Soviet Union
during this period and saw it as a model of great interest and achievement in
both housing and the arts, referring to it as a model for town planning in
numerous articles from the 1930s.20 This affiliation led to him being labelled
“Bolshevik” by more conservative sections of the local architectural scene; a
charge that he angrily refuted.21 This notwithstanding, Aalto’s relationship to
socialism in the 1930s could be seen as “subtle” rather than radical, but
embodied a coherent set of philosophical and ethical principles that
underpinned a large part of his practice.
Giedion, who Aalto knew well, had been through a period of (relatively) radical
political activity in the 1920s, and his influence on the work of Walter Benjamin
has inspired scholarship on his political position. In fact, Benjamin had been quite
enamoured with Giedion’s approach, to the extent that he contacted him and
organised a meeting.22 That this correspondence coincided with the start of
Benjamin’s immersion in radical leftist theories is of some importance. Also, that
Benjamin was writing his eulogy of surrealism23 while reading Building in France,
Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete24 has not gone unnoticed.25 It is
certainly reflected in the emphasis on “outmoded” building constructions within
that essay, which has, subsequently, left a discernible impact on the scholarship
on surrealism at large.26
That Giedion was introducing Aalto to the “canon” established with Space,
Time and Architecture in the same period as he published his studies on
mechanisation is significant. Mechanization Takes Command articulates a crisis
in the history of modernism and accompanies Giedion’s shift from a position of
confidence and advocacy towards technology to one of scepticism and critique.
The dehumanising currents of mechanisation are a recurring theme and, it will
be argued, Giedion saw in Aalto’s industrial works a resolution of the crisis

78 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
between the rational and the irrational. In Giedion’s historical account,
architecture, like design and art generally, was merely subservient to the forces
of mechanisation and productivity in the nineteenth century, and this had led to
the hegemony of the machine that characterised the twentieth century. Where
Giedion had pronounced, as early as 1922, that “architecture can only flourish
where it can be in control, and put other forms of art in their place”,27 by the
mid-1940s he was convinced that architecture had surrendered control to the
forces of industry (and economics) and was, more than most creative fields,
entirely dependent upon them. The work of Aalto was the exception, rather than
the rule.
Given the impact that it had on his choice of subject matter, it is significant
that Giedion held a degree in mechanical engineering, as well as art history.28
Equally importantly, Giedion’s parents had owned a textile factory (which he
had been groomed to take over) and this, no doubt, had an impact on his
prolonged interest in industrialisation. The themes of industrialisation were not
new to architectural and urban history at the time Giedion was writing. Herbert
Read’s widely read Art and Industry29 had, by 1934, established a popular
platform from which the creative arts could engage with this new culture of
manufacture, and the work of Lewis Mumford30 in the same time period had
already begun to investigate the role of the machine in the history of the city.
This would become much more of an obsession for Mumford in the decades that
followed.31 Many themes, and particularly those associated with power and
control, made their way into postwar American scholarship through the work of
Mumford, whose investigations of the historical development of technology
sought to challenge the role of the machine, and its pre-eminence in the
historical accounts of the twentieth century. Equally importantly, the seminal
histories of Abbott Payson Usher, charting the Industrial History of England32
and then, in a comprehensive account, the history of mechanical inventions,33
began to develop the framework for a sociology of industry that looked at the
historical evolution within a broader context of social and political reform. All of
these works preceded Giedion’s study and contributed, in a popular way, to the
emergence of a history of technology.
Aalto’s awareness of, or engagement with, this history is not clear, although
there is considerable evidence that the broad themes of the history of industry
were well known to him. Aalto, like Giedion, saw a distinction between the
relative autonomy of art and the experience of everyday life and this became
central to a lot of future critiques of modernism generally.34 Schildt argues
that:
[a]s early as the 1920s, Aalto repudiated the nineteenth-century view of art as a
special sector of human experience, separate from everyday life and the struggle for

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 79

 survival. For him, the concept of art represented human creativity, the ability to
tackle all the diverse demands that affect a task, producing an intuitive simultaneous
solution.35

Aalto’s most concentrated writing on the topic of technology came relatively

late in his career and certainly after he had completed a vast number of industrial
buildings. His reflection on “Art and Technology” suggests some familiarity with
the modernist debates regarding mass production and its social consequences, as
well as the arguments extended by Giedion in regard to humanism and
standardisation. In fact, Giedion had subtitled the chapter on Aalto in Space, Time
and Architecture as “Irrationality and Standardization”, and Aalto’s argument
sets out to address these two issues.
Easily the most comprehensive account of Aalto’s industrial concerns is Pekka
Korvenmaa’s “Aalto and Finnish Industry” (1998), which establishes not only the
role of industry in Aalto’s career, but also the idiosyncratic economic landscape of
Finland within which Aalto was working. Korvenmaa’s analysis focuses on the way
that Aalto’s career gradually assimilated industrial influences into the construc-
tion system of the A-house, giving him the opportunity to test his ideas at a level
not experienced by other modernist architects, despite their aspirations. It was the
role of manufacturing processes in Aalto’s work that also attracted Giedion’s
interest in Mechanization Takes Command, rather than his direct involvement in
the design of factories.
Korvenmaa argues that the actual collaborations on factory works were the
least significant and “lowest level” of Aalto’s engagement with industry. It was the
design of workers’ housing, public buildings and community projects collected
around factory sites that provided the creative opportunities for Aalto. The relative
lack of infrastructure and development in the dramatic Finnish landscape
meant that factory works often sat in remote and disconnected parts of the
country, and urban clusters and communities grew up around them as a result of
the influx of workers. It was also important to keep workers satisfied with their
living conditions, which meant that scope was afforded to architects in the design
of housing and public projects in these places. Korvenmaa’s analysis goes so far as
to suggest that the quality of housing provided had a role in both social and
political stabilisation, subverting “revolution” through “architecture”. Korvenmaa
writes:
the patrons of these communities were dependent on a stable and content work force
and housing of a high standard was an important element in the process of social
stabilization, especially in the aftermath of the disastrous civil and class war
of 1918.36

As early as 1919, Aalto had written to his father: “I’m a hell of a liberal and
oppositionist in theory; in practice, I’m an architect and generally top man!”37

80 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
While he was frequently affiliated with socialist practices and the rights of the
individual, he was immersed in the networks of advanced capitalism, producing
architecture for powerful companies engaged in vast and accelerating projects of
expansion and division. Korvenmaa is aware of the “paradox” of Aalto’s position,
which harboured leftist anti-capitalist ideals on the one hand, but at the same time
undertook high-level commissions with the leading and most powerful Finnish
industrialists of the period. As Korvenmaa observes:
Aalto rose to prominence among the supporters of the status quo and anti-leftist
values. Aalto was the foremost Finnish advocate of an architectural idiom and
ideology that originated in a hotbed of revolutionary aesthetic and political ideas but
yet became one of the most trusted architects of his country’s corporate capitalists.38

For Korvenmaa, Aalto’s resolution of this duality was that society had to
immerse itself within industrial processes in order to advance, and his works for
industrial advancement were ultimately socialist in nature, advancing the role and
rights of the “little man” within this system. Korvenmaa concludes that while
architecture reformed the “social distribution of space”, the overriding “power
structure” remained intact throughout the twentieth century, relatively unaffected
by reforms in both housing and factory design. While acknowledging the social,
rather than political, nature of these reforms, Korvenmaa concludes that, over the
course of the century, “the mechanisms of surveillance and differentiation
gradually became subtler and more progressive – for the mutual benefit of the
owner and the workforce.”39
There is no doubt that there is a concern for the organisation and
arrangement of space within Aalto’s industrial works that is both political and
strategic (see Fig 1). This strategy not only looked to position the individual
within a system of spatial and hierarchical organisation, but also to establish a
relationship with nature and landscape that ran contrary to the mechanising
processes of the plant itself. In the Sunila project, there is a dialectical
relationship between nature and the machine. The factory serves to situate
the individual in both their work and residential contexts, dismantling the
hegemonic structure of the linear factory and expanding the program of
the factory into a three-dimensional urban and topographic network of
individual encounters within the landscape (and the broader political context
of capitalism).

Sunila and the Organic Factory

The Finnish harbour city of Kotka stands at the mouth of the Kymijoki (or Kymi)
River, which opens into the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in southern Finland.
A line of water – now interrupted by hydro-electric power stations – connects
Kotka to Lake Päijänne in central Finland, where Aalto’s Muuratsalo house (1953)

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 81

is located and beside which Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall (1948–52) also stands;
the provincial capital Jyväskylä, where Aalto first practised in the 1920s, is at the
north of the lake. Logs for the sawmills of Kotka (established during the 1870s),
and later for the Sunila pulp mill, were floated from central Finland along the
Kymijoki.
In 1935, Aalto, who had moved his practice to Helsinki, began working with
the progressive industrialist Harry Gullichsen and his wife Maire (née Ahlstrom),
who became friends with Alvar and Aino Aalto and partners in the Artek furniture
and design business and who were the clients for Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1937– 39).
Harry Gullichsen supported a market economy and held that social privilege
entailed responsibilities, such as providing quality worker housing and associated
community buildings.40 His company, Ahlstrom Öy, and four other large paper
and timber enterprises initiated a project for an industrial community centred on
a new pulp mill at Sunila near the sea port of Kotka. The project was motivated by
the growth of the timber industry in Finland, as well as a desire to capitalise on the
global demand for Finnish pulp products.
The history of the city of Kotka is relatively recent. It was founded in the 1870s
on the strategic point where the extensive river network to the forested interior of
the country met the sea. The early decades were turbulent as the community grew
rapidly, experiencing unprecedented growth between 1871 and 1876. During this
period, up to ten mills were operating in the area supplying more than a quarter of
the country’s timber. Within a few years, production had dropped to a single mill.
Tied to the turbulent international economy, for the next forty years Kotka
experienced a period of economic decline, which saw the periodic cessation of
timber production and a vast reduction in its workforce. It was only in the 1930s,
when economic conditions in Europe began to change, that the plans for a
cellulose plant in Kotka began to be taken seriously. The global economy had
shifted from a demand for timber to the need for paper and pulp products. The
capital invested by some of Finland’s largest industrial companies (all to become
future clients of Aalto) enabled the strategic (and rapid) design of a cellulose plant
with a production capacity of 80,000 tonnes on a site located across the mouth of
the river on a narrow island peninsula overlooking the harbour. The masterplan
placed the factory itself on the island, with delicate fingers of workers’ housing
woven into the sloping landscape of the mainland (and radiating outwards into
the landscape).
By the late 1930s, Aalto had already been heavily involved in the design of
industrial buildings and their associated housing. As a student, he had worked
on a number of industrial projects, including a granary. Aalto established his
practice in Turku in 1927, and one of his first projects was the printing works
and offices for the Turun Sanomat Newspaper Building (1928–30).41 In this
same period, he completed the design for the Turku Fair in collaboration with

82 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
Erik Bryggman, developing a prefabricated timber construction system that
would become influential to his later work. He had been engaged throughout
this period in the design of employee housing for the Plywood Mill in
Joensuu,42 as well as an unfinished competition entry for the redesign of the
fac
ade of a power plant in Imatra (1926). From the late 1920s, he had been
involved in housing and competitions for numerous timber companies,
including the extensive plans he prepared for the A. Ahlstrom Company in
Varkaus, the Topila Pulp Mill and associated office buildings43 and the Anjala
Pulp Mill and associated housing projects for the Tampella Company in
Inkeroinen. As well as these projects, Aalto supplied urban plans for a number
of the critical industrial cities in Finland, including Ahlström, the Munkkiniemi
district near Helsinki,44 Interkoinen and Kotka itself. This work was varied in
nature (and frequently unbuilt), and Aalto was clearly using the competition
format to expand upon his architectural vocabulary. His entry for the Serlachius
Headquarters in 1930 had been rejected by the jury on the basis that it had an
“unmotivated and irregular contour”;45 a characteristic that would later become
emblematic in his work and a theme throughout a number of his industrial
housing projects.
When the commission to be involved in the Sunila plant came to Aalto, he
was clearly working as part of a multidisciplinary team and, as the architect, he
was subservient to the engineers, Lauri Kanto and Aulis Kairamo, in matters of
planning and program. The economic importance of productivity in the design
of factories has led a number of scholars to downgrade Aalto’s involvement in
the factory, preferring to emphasise the workers’ housing that formed a large
part of the commission and was more intimately connected with architectural
and spatial values. Weston, for instance, states that Aalto was little more than
an “aesthetic consultant” for the mill projects46 and stresses that even Aalto
conceded that his contribution was often reduced to the “outer shaping of a
project already designed in advance”.47 Despite this, there were a number of
clear and tangible outcomes of Aalto’s involvement in the factory, primarily, and
most famously, in the preservation of the rocky outcrop upon which the factory
was perched and the clearly delineated massing of forms that presented a
silhouette to the city from across the harbour. Even more significant was the
design principle that Aalto mandated for the plant, which, as Schildt observes,
meant that “each worker at his machine should have an unobstructed view out
of the window.”48 As a part of this, Aalto successfully argued to preserve the
natural topography of the site, so that the production line would follow the
forces of gravity down the site, like a skier traversing a mountain.49 The
outcome, which was highly unusual for an industrial works in the 1930s, was
that the workers supervising the machinery were given an unobstructed view of
the surrounding environment from the elevated terraces that this striation

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 83

 Figure 2: Alvar Aalto, Sunila pulp plant (1936 – 39).
Drawing by the authors.

enabled (see Fig 2). For Schildt, the scenario was an embodiment of Aalto’s love
of Italian hilltop villages, which married with the topography through a
cascading series of terraces, punctuated by built form.
Aalto’s sense of landscape was significant in his strategy for the pulp mill
design – a harmony of contrasts, between the rock of the island terrain and the
blocks of the industrial sheds – reflecting Aalto’s “intuitive” collaboration with the
“rational” engineers. This synecdochical representation shows Finland emerging
from its agrarian past into the modern world of the 1930s in the image of Sunila’s
silhouettes towering and breathing above the island site and the Baltic Sea – the
part representing the whole, a symbol and banner of survival and progress. In
Finland, nature underpinned and fed industry; engineers and businessmen solved
rational and financial problems; and the Finnish architect integrated the diverse
parts into the landscape and housed people in the landscape.
Of the various authors on the topic, Giedion is the most unconditional in his
praise for the plant and Aalto’s contribution to it. Drawing comparisons with both
American and European trends at the time, Giedion argued that:
Aalto knows how to raise a plant from a purely professional instrument up to a piece
of architecture in which the site, the use of different materials, and the organisation
of volumes in space are given as much attention as the production line.50

Despite this, Giedion concludes that “Sunila has the most perfect production
line”,51 operating effectively at the geographic, spatial and human levels to an
extent where workers, rather than being tied to the machines, are no longer even
visible in the operation of the plant.52 Giedion’s photographs of Sunila, taken on
his visit to the plant in the 1930s, show the predominance of landscape, selecting
angles and vistas that exaggerate the natural forms and tend towards a
topographical representation of the project, much more so than its reduction to an
architectural object. That Giedion saw the collision between the industrial and
nature as a liberating socialist aspiration in Aalto’s work is embodied in both the

84 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
photos and text, which imagine a utopian factory, without distinctions between
classes, hierarchies, nature and building, or architect and engineer.
As previously noted, Giedion’s praise can, in some part, be attributed to his
own research interests at the time, which were charting the path of
industrialisation in the nineteenth century from the perspective of humans’
increasing subservience to the machine. The argument presented in Mechaniza-
tion Takes Command is that, in the process of empowering the machine in order
to advance human capability, humans have become entirely subservient to the
machine. The body is a continual backdrop throughout, as Giedion analyses the
technology that has enabled its movement, sustenance, cleanliness, comfort and
productivity to be enhanced over time. The feeding of the body – the development
of agriculture,53 the making of bread,54 the emergence of the slaughterhouse as
the paradigm for the factory55 – is an ongoing concern, directly tied to the
“organic”, but lived, as Giedion shows, amongst the most advanced reaches of
industrialisation and mechanisation that he presents. Through the development
of incubators (for eggs) and the modification of seed (through its development as a
hybrid commercial product), the natural processes of “growth” are gradually
replaced with manufacture, to an extent that the industrial literally usurps the
biological. Also implicit is the dividing of the body in mechanisation, as it is
disassembled and displaced on the factory assembly line or is harnessed to
machines that tame the ground.
One critical passage in Mechanization Takes Command is of significance in
regard to the Sunila plant, where Giedion describes the “factory as an
organism”.56 Drawing from Taylorist principles of organisation, Giedion
describes the process whereby inefficient practices were eventually replaced
(through management and observation) by efficient ones. This led to a
structuring of the management of factories – a division of labour – which has
certain affiliations with military structures.57 What interests Giedion in this, is
that at a certain point the actual “object” of production is subservient to the
organism of the factory that produces it. The relationships between various
parts of the manufacturing process resemble social and spatial norms, drawn
directly from contemporary society. In this sense, as in Foucault’s, the factory
functions as a laboratory: a privileged spatial configuration for both
organisation and manipulation. This was a term that Aalto himself used in his
description of the housing at Sunila.58
Given this, it is noteworthy that Giedion’s description of Sunila specifically
refers to the plant as an “organism”, evoking more than just a place for the
production of cellulose and embracing the organisational and operational
potential that is embodied in the term. Giedion, earlier, argues that: “Sunila is not
merely a factory. It is a complex of homogenous living zones and production areas.
The living quarters were started before the factory itself and are strewn around the

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 85

fir forest, together with their saunas and laundries.”59 This is a factory without
people, because the organisation has inverted the traditional Taylorist model.
Instead of rationalising production into linear streams of human labour, the work
explodes the process of production, expanding its presence into the natural
landscape and announcing this tension at every symbolic and structural level.
Aalto explicitly described the layout in militaristic terms, writing that: “the
buildings must be placed strategically on hills, with the front running along the
edge of the forest.”60 This clear and deliberate approach to the organisation runs
through every aspect of the masterplan (see Fig 1). Sunila functions as a highly
advanced organism; where production is refined to such an extent that a new,
humanised model of civilisation is allowed to not only surface, but to flourish.

Heterotopic Landscapes: Patterns of Socialism at Sunila

Throughout the 1930s, Aalto’s connection with industrial processes intensified
and his relationships with key industrialists provided him with an insight into
manufacture that was to feed into both his architecture and furniture design. The
importance of industry to modern society was unquestioned by Aalto, who saw it
as inseparable from the transformative advancements that Finland needed to
make in order to fulfil the broader project of modernism. As Giedion’s reading
makes clear, part of the role of the factory within this broader socialist construct of
the 1930s was to free the worker from the burdens of industrialisation; returning
the individual to the landscape and removing the barriers and social structures
that were inherent to the capitalist system of production. Aalto made it clear
during this period that he aspired to a model with all of the force and grandeur of
Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle, where an urban and civilised system of living is
grafted onto the skeleton of an advanced industrial process.
Given this, the role of housing within the development of factory complexes
was a central fascination of Aalto, and one that he pursued throughout his career.
One of his primary motivations in this was to use the tactics of mass production to
remove the inherent hierarchies of workers’ housing and to allow communities to
develop in and around factory plants. While this had been a broader concern for a
number of modernist architects in the previous decade, in Aalto’s work there is a
specific role attributed to landscape within this, and part of the reorganisation of
the hierarchies of capitalism is an elevation of the role of landscape as the natural
domain of advanced civilisation. This was also, as has been mentioned, the
reconfiguring of industrialisation in order to facilitate a greater relationship with
nature, and allowing workers to be freed from the machinery and operate in a
much broader topography, of which the factory was only one distinct part.
Not surprisingly, much of the scholarship on the Sunila plant has focused on the
housing, which employs a number of innovative typologies of terrace and
townhouses in a model that can be adapted and manipulated for diverse contexts.

86 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
 Figure 3: Alvar Aalto, Sunila, housing (1937).
Drawing by the authors.

Much of the housing extends like fingers into the landscape and uses the techniques
of mass production to remove the traditional spatial and social distinctions that had
been conventional up until this point. The radiating fingers of housing (see Fig 1),
oriented towards the southern sun, allow the morphology of the development to
marry with the existing contours of the sharply sloping site, manipulating the
section of the housing in a way that allows both privacy and spatial autonomy. The
“fanning” plan that became a trope in the subsequent work of Aalto was used in this
development to structure a system of repetition where different modular forms
of housing, typically without hierarchy, were situated between gently raking walls
(Fig 3). This model was later adapted for the Kauttua Housing in the same year,
where modular cubic forms cascaded down the slope of the site, creating a multi-
tiered section and giving each house its own independent entry point. At Sunila,
there were three predominant housing types, organised according to area, ranging
between 40 and 60 square metres and embodying relatively conventional layouts,
but executed within a modernist idiom. The size of the apartments is the only
hierarchical distinction in the plan, and all facilities across the site are available to
all workers, regardless of rank. The apartment is the only “fully-private” zone,
which was unusually democratic for an industrial enclave in this time period.
As already argued, Aalto’s relationship to the structures of industrialisation
and capitalism generally was socialist/humanist, rather than radically Marxist,
and while the superstructure of capitalism and its controlling industrialist classes
still dominated the economic structure of Finland, there was an unprecedented
attempt to advance the proletariat through social housing, so that the distribution
of wealth and mobility was less concentrated. Again, this is a relationship that is
heavily romanticised in Giedion’s reading, and Korvenmaa61 is quick to point out
that the basic hierarchies of capitalism remained essentially unchanged, despite
advances in the treatment of workers. Aalto’s innovation in workers’ housing is, at
best, a softening and enhancement of the capitalist system of production, rather

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 87

than its radical or revolutionary upheaval. In fact, in many accounts, including
Korvenmaa’s, these were explicit (conservative) strategies to prevent revolution
and, in that sense, maintain bourgeois control over the means of production.62
These innovations notwithstanding, the social intentions of Aalto in the
production of his factory utopia have not always extended to the reception of the
work. While the organisational and master-planning aspects of the development
go to great lengths to immerse individual housing within a natural environment,
the perspective offered to Schildt, more than fifty years later, is of “a number of
rather dreary, lamellar and row houses spread out amid the remains of a forest in a
way which reminds one of the most ordinary suburbs in modern big cities.”63 As
Schildt also notes, many of the houses were built by the workers themselves, and
the repetitious nature of the housing, while fulfiling Aalto’s broader socialist vision
in the removal of both classes and hierarchy, was not in keeping with the desires of
the inhabitants. The workers had to pay for the houses, and the repetition tended
to be equated with a loss of identity. The white, modernist language also, for that
matter, responded to largely “middle-class”64 trends in housing construction,
which, for the most part, were still considered elitist, if not unattainable. As
Schildt concludes, in his description of the Varkaus housing project, which
immediately preceded Sunila:
the aim was flexible standardization, leaving scope for individual variation . . .
Unfortunately, it turned out that this kind of architecture, rational, social, and
tasteful as it was, did not appeal to those whom it was intended to make happy –
that is the workers. Since they paid for the houses and to some extent built them as
well, most of them rejected Aalto’s puritanical and unusual forms. Only in a handful
of buildings in the district were Aalto’s plans followed to the letter, while romantic
cottages and gentlefolks’ homes were the rule.65

This collision between the utopian-socialist values of modernism and the

aesthetic taste of the proletariat is not new. The manipulations undertaken by
residents of Le Corbusier’s Pessac Workers’ Housing (1924– 26) to dismantle the
Cartesian cubism of their modular homes was trumpeted in the 1970s by
postmodern critics anxious to demonstrate the chasm between the aesthetic taste
of the proletariat and its utopian incarnation in modernist purism. However, the
aesthetic tensions notwithstanding, there is a vast amount of social transform-
ation that occurs in the organisational principles of Sunila and the revolutionary
relationships that it was to set up between the workers themselves and, no less
importantly, between the workers and nature. Where many of the modernist
approaches to workers’ housing had drawn from the machine as the logical
aesthetic starting point, Aalto’s references are to nature, the village, the landscape
and the individual, and this alone carries the socialist values that Giedion was
most receptive to. The protean approach to landscape coincided with a specific
junction in time and geography when nature and industry were brought together

88 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
into some forced relationship for the first time. The history of industrialisation
since this point has been towards an increasing domination over natural forces
and the escalation of industrial cycles to an extent that dramatically undermines
the topography of landscapes and cities. The harmony at work in Aalto’s plant in
Sunila sees a symbiotic relationship between architecture and nature, and one
that, for Giedion at least, advances the claim of an “organic” modernism,
fundamentally aligned with socialist ideals, if not revolutionary ones.

NOTES
1. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1948] 1967), 645.
2. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History
(New York: Norton, [1947] 1969). Giedion’s name is spelt both “Siegfried” and “Sigfried” in his
various publications. In Space, Time and Architecture it is spelt Sigfried, although in
Mechanization Takes Command it is Siegfried. Sigfried has been generally adopted throughout
for consistency.
3. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.
4. This, as Giedion notes, gave the country a strategic advantage over Russia, where the rivers
meet the ocean in the north, and the river mouths are frozen for large parts of the year. See
Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 622.
5. Pekka Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” in Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and
Materialism, ed. Peter Reed (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 72. See also Alvar
Aalto Architect (Vol. 7) Sunila 1936 – 1954, ed. Pekka Korvenmaa (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto
Foundation; Alvar Aalto Academy, 2007).
6. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 640.
7. Göran Schildt, “Introduction,” in The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939:
Volume 11: Tailinn Art Museum, Kauttua Terrace House, Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 World’s
Fair in New York, and other buildings and projects, 1937 – 1939, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1994), xiii.
8. Elsewhere, Schildt is more cautious in the “revolutionary” aspect of Aalto’s industrial
works, conceding that “he often had to be content with designing factories and workers’
housing that were free from the worst ills of industrialism caused by unscrupulous speculation
and indifference to the environment.” See Goran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: Masterworks (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1998), 38.
9. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry”, 72. Korvenmaa cites Le Corbusier’s famous
passage from Vers Une Architecture on “Architecture or Revolution”.
10. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.
11. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.
12. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.
13. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.
14. See Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, “Alvar Aalto and the Geopolitics of Fame,” Perspecta 37 (2005): 86–97.
15. Giedion arrived at a similar conclusion, describing Aalto as “restless” and with “one foot in
America”. Giedion sees Aalto as an embodiment of traditional and modern values. He writes:
“Finland is . . . at the crossroads of east and west, but for the moment, we would only stress the
fact that many remnants of primeval and medieval times still remain alive there and intermingle
with modern civilization. This double nature is instilled in Aalto too, and gives creative tension
to his work.” See Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 621.
16. Aalto’s “humanization” – a central trope of the Aalto literature since the 1960s – seems to
derive from the proximity of Aalto’s universal user, the “little man”, to the natural world, rather
than, say, scale, materials or plan organisation; Giedion noticed Aalto’s concern for his fellow
humans: “Each line [of Aalto’s] tells of his close contact with human destiny. This may be one of
the reasons why his architecture encounters less difficulty in overcoming the resistance of the

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 89

 common [man or woman] than that of others of his contemporaries.” Giedion, Space, Time and
Architecture, 666.
17. Goran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life (Jyväskylä: Alvar Aalto Museum, 2007), 130.
18. Schildt sees the views of Aalto’s father as “little short of radical”, which “looked to the
Russian revolutionaries as welcome allies in the struggle against Czarist oppression.” Despite
this, he goes on to concede that for many in Aalto’s generation there was a turn away from
interest in political and international events, and this was partially responsible for Aalto
choosing a career in architecture. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 130.
19. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 192.
20. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 326.
21. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 325.
22. See Detlef Mertins, “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and
the Utopia of Glass,” Assemblage 29 (April 1996): 7– 23.
23. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Schocken Books, 1978), 177– 92.
24. Siegfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, trans.
J. Duncan Berry (Los Angeles: The Getty Center, [1928] 1995).
25. On this, see Mertins, “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory”; Hilde Heynen,
“What Belongs to Architecture? Avant-Garde Ideas in the Modern Movement,” Journal of
Architecture 4 (Summer 1999): 143; Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
(London: The MIT Press, 1999).
26. This has left a particular influence on the work of Hal Foster. See Hal Foster, Compulsive
Beauty (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 157– 91; Hal Foster, “The ABC of Contemporary
Design,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 195– 96; Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes
(London: Verso, 2002), 138 – 39.
27. Siegfried Giedion, Architektur und Kunstgewerbe (1922) quoted and translated in Sokratis
Georgiadis, Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Colin Hall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1993), 2. This can be compared with Aalto’s statement in “Art and Technology”
that: “[a]lmost every formal assignment involves dozens of conflicting elements that can be
forced into functional harmony only by an act of will. This harmony cannot be achieved by any
other means than art.” Alvar Aalto, “Art and Technology” (1955), in Alvar Aalto in His Own
Words, ed. Göran Schildt (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 175.
28. See Spiro Kostof, “Architecture You and Him: The Mark of Siegfried Giedion,” Daedalus
105, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 189.
29. Herbert Read, Art and Industry (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). This work went through
numerous reprints and editions. The second edition came out in 1944, as Giedion was working
on the manuscript for Mechanization Takes Command.
30. The formative work for Mumford, published in the same year as Read’s work, is Lewis
Mumford, Technics and Civilisation (New York: Harcourt Press, 1934).
31. Amongst the numerous works of Mumford on the topic of industrialisation are Lewis
Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); Lewis Mumford, The
Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (London: Martin and Secker, 1967); Lewis
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (London: Martin and Secker, 1964).
32. Abbott Payson Usher, An Introduction to the Industrial History of England (London:
Houghlin Mifflin Co., 1920); see also Abbott Payson Usher, A History of the Grain Trade in
France: 1400 – 1710 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1913).
33. Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (Harvard: Harvard University
Press, 1929).
34. Of particular note is Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity and Postmodernity,” trans. Seyla Ben-
Habib, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 11; Peter Bürger, “The Significance of the Avant-
Garde for Contemporary Aesthetics: A Reply to Jurgen Habermas,” trans. Andreas Huyssen and
Jack Zipes, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 20.
35. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: In His Own Words, 171.
36. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.
37. Schildt, Alvar Aalto, 161.

90 FABRICATIONS – JSAHANZ
38. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 73.
39. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.
40. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2009), 117– 18.
41. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939: Volume 3: Viipuri City Library,
Turun Sanomat Building, and Other Buildings and Projects 1927 – 1929, ed. Göran Schildt (New
York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 108– 228.
42. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939: Volume 2: Muurame Church,
Southwestern Finland, Agricultural Cooperative Building, and other Buildings and Projects
1926 – 1927, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 367– 71.
43. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939: Volume 5: Helsinki Stadium,
Zagreb Central Hospital, and Other Buildings and Projects, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 27– 111.
44. This proposal (never realised) was for a piece of land owned by the Stenius Company (later
purchased by the City of Helsinki). The project comprised a cluster of high-rise towers designed
in 1934 – 35. See The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939: Volume 6: Aalto’s Own
Home in Helsinki, Finnish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris and Other Buildings and
Projects 1932– 1937, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 126.
45. The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939: Volume 4: Paimio Tuberculosis
Sanatorium, City of Turku 700th Anniversary Exhibition, Standard Furniture, and Other
Buildings and Projects 1929 – 30, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and London: Garland Publishing,
1994), 62.
46. Richard Weston, Alvar Aalto (London: Phaidon, 1996), 76.
47. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 74.
48. Göran Schildt, “Introduction,” in The Architectural Drawings of Alvar Aalto 1917 – 1939:
Volume 11: Taillinn Art Museum, Kauttua Terrace House, Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 World’s
Fair in New York, and Other Buildings and Projects, 1937 – 1939, ed. Göran Schildt (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1994), xiii.
49. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 406.
50. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 641.
51. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 641.
52. Giedion writes: “[n]o men are visible . . . No one is to be seen on the stairways connecting the
different levels in the numerous halls. There is an atmosphere like that in Captain Nemo’s Nautilus
in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 645.
53. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 130– 67.
54. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 169– 201.
55. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 209– 40.
56. See: Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 99 –100.
57. Taylor himself made this connection, referring to this model as a “military type of
organization”. See Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 99.
58. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 410.
59. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 641.
60. Alvar Aalto, quoted in Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 408.
61. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.
62. Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” 72.
63. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 407.
64. Schildt uses this word when comparing the houses to the Swiss –German experiments in
urban planning from the same time period. See Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 410.
65. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: His Life, 404.

MICHAEL CHAPMAN AND JOHN ROBERTS 91