Editing Alvar Aalto (section)

==Critique of Aalto's architecture==
As mentioned above, Aalto's international reputation was sealed with his inclusion in the second edition of [[Sigfried Giedion]]'s influential book on Modernist architecture, ''Space, Time and Architecture: The growth of a new tradition'' (1949), in which Aalto received more attention than any other Modernist architect, including [[Le Corbusier]]. In his analysis of Aalto, Giedion gave primacy to qualities that depart from direct functionality, such as mood, atmosphere, intensity of life and even national characteristics, declaring that "Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes."

More recently, however, some architecture critics and historians have questioned Aalto's influence on the historical canon. The Italian Marxist architecture historians [[Manfredo Tafuri]] and [[Francesco Dal Co]] contend that Aalto's "historical significance has perhaps been rather exaggerated; with Aalto we are outside of the great themes that have made the course of contemporary architecture so dramatic. The qualities of his works have a meaning only as masterful distractions, not subject to reproduction outside the remote reality [sic] in which they have their roots."<ref>{{harvnb|Tafuri|Co|1976|p=338}}</ref> At the heart of their critique was the perception of Aalto's work as unsuited to the urban context: "Essentially, his architecture is not appropriate to urban typologies."

At the other end of the political spectrum (though similarly concerned with the appropriateness of Aalto's formal language), the American cultural theorist and architectural historian [[Charles Jencks]] singled out his Pensions Institute as an example of what he termed the architect's "soft paternalism": "Conceived as a fragmented mass to break up the feeling of bureaucracy, it succeeds all too well in being humane and killing the pensioner with kindness. The forms are familiar – red brick and ribbon-strip windows broken by copper and bronze elements – all carried through with a literal-mindedness that borders on the soporific."<ref>{{harvnb|Jencks|1973|pp=80–81}}</ref>

During his lifetime, Aalto faced criticisms from his fellow architects in Finland, most notably Kirmo Mikkola and [[Juhani Pallasmaa]]. By the last decade of Aalto's life, his work was seen as unfashionably individualistic at a time when the opposing tendencies of rationalism and constructivism – often championed under left-wing politics – argued for anonymous, aggressively non-aesthetic architecture. Of Aalto's late works, Mikkola wrote, "Aalto has moved to [a] baroque line..."<ref>{{harvnb|Mikkola|1969|p=31}}</ref>

[[File:Alvar-Aalto-1976.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Alvar Aalto portrayed on a stamp published in 1976]]