- Title
- Instead of apocalypse: Aalto and Utzon, and a gentler structure for high-rise living
- Creator
- Roberts, John
- Relation
- 4th International Alvar Aalto Meeting on Modern Architecture. High-Rise Shuffle: 4th International Alvar Aalto Meeting on Modern Architecture (Jyväskylä, Finland 27 - 28 August, 2011) p. 121-132
- Relation
- http://www.alvaraalto.fi/conferences/2011
- Publisher
- Alvar Aalto Academy
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Rem Koolhaas has chastised recent ‘masterpieces’ of high-rise architecture for their excesses: ‘collectively they form an ultimately counterproductive and self-canceling kind of landscape. So that is out.’ Such a seismic shift in attitude signals a need for more sustainable, gentler, high-rise models. As Reinier de Graaf argues in his Simplicity manifesto, this ‘graveyard’ of iconic architecture could engender ‘a laboratory for the rebirth of modern architecture’. Decades earlier, the house architecture of Alvar Aalto had famously provided experimental laboratories for architecture. This paper reviews strategies through which high-rise architecture might be re-imagined, optimized, even re-born. Alvar Aalto’s radically viable apartment plans and the inflected envelopes of his tall buildings suggest themselves as models for fresh consideration of the high-rise type as dwelling in the landscape. In many ways, Aalto’s thinking inspired Jørn Utzon, who devised and employed his mode of ‘additive architecture’ in resolving and building the Sydney Opera House, and in subsequent major works. While Utzon designed only a small number of high-rise projects, his economical, repetitive, yet expressive principles appear to offer strategies for a re-thinking of the tall building. David Leatherbarrow has recently considered spatial and topographic problems of tall buildings – within themselves, and in their city settings and landscape contexts. Leatherbarrow’s extensive discussion provides a nuanced theoretical basis for thinking about high-rise spatiality. This paper reviews high-rise buildings in the work of Aalto and Utzon, and seeks models and methods in their work. Their inventions, particularly when considered together, appear to provide a framework for envisioning a gentler version of the tall building – and perhaps even newly sustainable models for the advancement of design of tall buildings – for the new century.
- Subject
- Jørn Utzon; Alvar Aalto; high-rise buildings; sustainable design
- Identifier
- uon:9252
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/921111
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789525498240
- Language
- eng
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