musical

No, not another middle-aged Alvar Aalto proponent. No, this is just a little note to say that one feature of the man's apparently offhand style is musicality. This fragment of a building in West Germany, built as the Federal Republic was reaching the zenith of its comfortable post-war certainties, does something musical with the elevation. It's a composition in which objects with an evident internal rythym of their own are combined together.

so ?

The plan is more euphoric (for the designer at any rate) than the elevation possibly because it is not subject to the figurative discipline of a facade. It may seem to the designer to be a tidy resolution of architectural intention and contingency - a diagram of this achievement. The elevation is much more fraught and reveals lack of intention - all that time spent in various dissipations a fraction of which might have been better spent in architectural investigation. The facade will not go away despite ever larger sheets of glass and various off-the-peg "systems" whether conceptual or constructional.