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The
great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto made warm, wonderful buildings that
were inspired by the spirit of his homeland. So why do the results have
such universal appeal? By Jonathan Glancey

Alvar Aalto was one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. A
modernist, he designed warm and curving buildings that were unlike the
mechanistic, coolly geometrical, abstract designs of his European
peers. This had much to do with his being born and educated in Finland,
setting out on his professional path shortly after Finnish independence
in 1917. His work remains as fresh as it was between the late 1920s and
mid-1970s.

As part of its 25th anniversary celebrations, the Barbican in London
has chosen to pair Aalto with a more recent and very different
architect, Shigeru Ban, who has only lately won international acclaim.
However odd the idea of a show entitled Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes
of Shigeru Ban might seem, with equal billing given to the 50-year-old
Japanese architect, it promises to be one of the more rewarding
architectural exhibitions of recent years.

It
does, however, make good sense. Ban - who made his name building paper
houses and even a cardboard church for those caught up in natural
disasters, including the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami - is one of the most subtle "ecological" architects yet. He has
a knack for making the humblest buildings from the cheapest natural
materials, which are sustainable in modern environmental terms, as well
as rather beautiful.

Born in 1898, Aalto was the first
20th-century architect to demonstrate that modern architecture could
also be warm, even compassionate. Anyone who has ever visited his
finest house, Villa Mairea at Noormarkku, or the civic centre he
designed for the little town of Saynatsalo, also in Finland, will have
come away wondering why so many other European buildings of the modern
period, and for a long while after, were so soulless, machine-like and
grim.

The interior of Villa Mairea is designed like some highly
stylised, flowing trail through a forest clearing. The exterior is a
rigorously thought-through play of materials, hard and soft, ancient
and modern: split logs, concrete beams, steel posts, grass roofs. The
civic centre at Saynatsalo is balanced in a different way, between a
meticulous architectural geometry and soft red bricks and finger-like
timber beams. It is somehow both singularly Finnish and universal, a
building of profound intelligence and modest beauty.

So Aalto and
Ban are environmentally aware architects, one living, one dead, who
have much to teach their fellow practitioners. As a student, Ban was
keen on the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, who, along with
Frank Lloyd Wright and Aalto, have long been the generally accepted
masters of the modern movement. In the Barbican catalogue, Ban tells
curators Juhani Pallasmaa and Tomoko Sato: "I was, of course, aware of
Aalto's work through architectural books, but I was not particularly
impressed by the reproduced images of his buildings."

In 1984,
however, Ban was assigned to work on a special Aalto edition of the
Japanese magazine Global Architecture, and was taken aback when he saw
the buildings for the first time. They changed his way of thinking. Ban
says Aalto was the first architect he had encountered "whose work was
inseparable from its surroundings, aesthetically and functionally". As
Aalto's work matured, it became more site-specific; it couldn't readily
be copied and plonked down elsewhere in the world, although its lessons
could be applied almost anywhere. Ban points out that many architects
today are professional nomads, lacking Aalto's deep-rooted sense of
home. Paradoxically, it was his immersion in Finnish topography,
climate, materials and culture that encouraged Aalto to develop a style
with universal appeal.

Aalto believed that "great ideas arise
from the small details of life". He was no academic philosopher: his
writings, apart from a few articles he wrote as a journalist to foot
the bills early on, were brief. He was more a philosopher by doing - a
poet in brick, timber and natural light. He was also born at just the
right time, coming to maturity just as a newly independent Finland was
forging its own cultural identity.