Et in Arcadia Ego : The Ruin Metaphor in Alvar Aalto’s Work as a Driver for Cultural Sustainability

Abstract

Since the mid-1930s, as Alvar Aalto's work acquires a more personal character, it starts to represent a recurrent thought with increasing intensity: the constant negotiation between the equally prevalent natural environment and human civilisation, and the transitory condition of man's habitation. An image by Andrei Tarkovsky (Fig. 1) helps to illustrate the idea this paper explores. The frame of Nostalghia shows a world in a continuous state of becoming, expressed by natural elements colonising the space of a robust Gothic ruin, where an ephemeral hut enables human life to flourish again: the temporary man's habitation takes place in between the two spatiotemporal orders established by the Arcadia and the Civitas. On the one hand, Aalto's work represents these two necessary mythical human habitats and, on the other, it builds the actual space for man's contingent living. This investigation interprets that this two-fold strategy is an enduring Aaltian characteristic and discusses that the ruin metaphor drives it. The mechanism triggers an ethical-esthetical proposition that recalls the well-studied Aalto's humanism. However, this study portrays Aalto as an early precursor of cultural sustainability values, which is a less explored perspective.