THE BODY IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE:

PERCEPTIONS, PHILOSOPHIES, AND DESIGN CONSEQUENCES

IN THE WORK OF LE CORBUSIER AND ALVAR AALTO

by

Isabelle Ghabash

A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The University of Utah
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Honors Degree in Bachelor of Science

In

Architectural Studies

Approved:

____________________ ____________________
Ole Fischer Prescott Muir
Supervisor Chair, Department of Architecture

____________________ ____________________
Mimi Locher Dr. Sylvia D. Torti
Department Honors Advisor Dean, Honors College

May 2014
 ABSTRACT

This thesis explores the place of the human body in architectural design during the

modern period. A brief history of using the human body as design inspiration is given,

which includes a discussion on our tendencies as humans to use anthropomorphism,

cognitive patterns, and our body to understand the world around us. Key features of

modern architecture are identified, and its perceived failures are introduced. This is

followed by an analysis of two 20th century schools of psychological thought and their

impact on body perception and architectural theory. The first was the prevailing Gestalt

theory that showed humans favored rational patterns and simple geometry (i.e. the

machine aesthetic), the basis for the strain of modern architecture called techno-

rationalism, historically embodied by Le Corbusier. The second was the emerging

phenomenological view, which showed that the rational and irrational thought processes

of people could not be separated. This resulted in the organic functionalism of Alvar

Aalto’s work. This analysis shows the context in which modern architects thought about

the human body, and explains how Le Corbusier might come to see the human body

differently than his contemporary Aalto. Hospital buildings from both architects are then

explored as a case study. The hospitals are compared to see how each architect’s

sensitivity to the human body—and more specifically, a sick body— influenced their

respective concepts and how these concepts then play out in plan, section, and elevation.

This case study serves to illustrate a fine distinction between these two modern masters:

Le Corbusier used the human body only as initial inspiration, while Aalto constantly

referred back to the body to orient his designs.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii

INTRODUCTION 1

MODERNISM: AN INTERSECTION 3

PSYCHOLOGY AND BODILY PERCEPTION 7

THE BODY IN THE WORK OF LE CORBUSIER 12

THE BODY IN THE WORK OF ALVAR AALTO 17

CASE STUDY: PAIMIO SANATORIUM AND VENICE HOSPITAL 24

Overview: Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium 26

Overview: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital 27

In Section: The Horizontal Body 29

Light, Color, and Sound for the Horizontal Body 36

Nature as Cure 40

CONCLUSION 41

IMAGE SOURCES 47

WORKS CITED 50
 1

INTRODUCTION

For centuries, architects (long before there was even such a title) have been using the

human body as a model. This may have come about unintentionally as limbs are a readily

available unit of measurement, but the architecture-body correlation was well-established

as early as the 1st century B.C.E. De Architectura, (published as Ten Books on

Architecture after its “rediscovery” in the Renaissance), was written by Roman architect

Vitruvius around 15 B.C.E. and is one of the most influential texts in Western

architecture. Vitruvius saw a direct parallel between limbs and building elements:

Thus in the human body there is a kind of symmetrical harmony between

forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small parts, and so it is with perfect

buildings…Since nature has designed the human body so that its members

are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that the ancients

had good reason for their rule that in perfect buildings the different

members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general

scheme. (Pollio 14)

While designing with the human body in mind may have been a deliberate act of

anthropomorphism--humans have, after all, ascribed human characteristics and

relationships to inanimate objects, complex phenomena, and abstract ideas since the

beginning of our history—pareidolia may also come into play. Pareidolia is the

evolutionary, unconscious, and instantaneous tendency to see patterns in random stimuli.

The human brain is hard-wired to find animals in the clouds, a man in the moon, and the

Virgin Mary in grilled cheeses, and a study conducted in 2010 shows that pareidolia

extends to architecture. Images of facial expressions associated with certain emotions

 2

were analyzed and generalized by a computer program. The computer then selected

images of house fronts with architectural details that matched these generalizations. Test

subjects were either shown all facial images or a mixture of facial images and house

facades; they were able to determine the emotions represented in both sets (Chalup). We

actually see faces in architecture.

Since we have tendencies to ascribe human characteristics to unexplainable things

and to see human faces where there are none, it is likely we have a similar tendency with

respect to the human body. This tendency would be especially strong when an individual

relates to architecture. We as humans don’t see ourselves the way we actually are, but in

relation to other things. Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, both professors of

Architecture at Yale, argue that humans perceive their environment through their

physical, scalar relationship with it and then unconsciously and automatically orient

themselves, defining their body-image. In other words, random, intersensory stimuli are

immediately turned into some perception of our body. This explains why we feel, on a

psychological level, small amid the towering structures and bustle in Manhattan or giant

when we revisit our elementary school to find we no longer fit in our old desk. Bloomer

and Moore argue that when humans are unable to define their body-image—which can

result from too little, too much, or conflicting stimuli—we become disoriented and feel

alienated in our built environment.

Many critics argue that the modern movement, which I will loosely define as the

period between 1900 and 19721, produced buildings that had that effect—that the average

1
The “official time of death” of modern architecture is often dramatically given as 3:32 p.m. July 15 th
1972, when the first dynamite charges were set off to level the failed Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St.
Louis. The complex was promised to be both the epitome of modern architecture as socially-responsible
public housing, but it soon became a hotbed of crime and was shortly demolished (Roth 560).
 3

person subconsciously felt disoriented and dissatisfied in buildings and cities that were

out of scale and purely functional. Critics claim modern architects reduced buildings to

cold machines by eliminating the human body from design. Two modern masters,

however, show this is not the case.

Architects Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto have time and time again been pitted against

each other, each the leading figure in what are traditionally considered two opposing

strains of modernism. Le Corbusier is seen as a producer and proponent of “inhumane”

architecture, while Aalto’s work is always “human.” The work of Le Corbusier shows us,

however, that the human body was present in both strains.

MODERNISM: AN INTERSECTION

The role of the body as a design principle in the modern period can best be

understood by investigating the intellectual and societal influences on architects of the

age. Modern architects found themselves at an exhilarating intersection, and no one could

ever claim they were afraid to cross the street. Since the beginning of time, man has

debated about how best to improve his position, his health, his moral character, but

modernists believed that humanity had evolved and finally acquired the tools and

knowledge to actually do so. The romantic and religious ideals of the last century had

been outgrown, replaced by rational, enlightened progress. Newly-invented steel and

concrete allowed for buildings to be taller and stronger, and the proposed cities of glass

would make it appear “as though the Earth clad itself in jewelry of brilliants and

enamel…Then we should have a paradise on Earth and would not need to gaze longingly

at the paradise in the sky” (“Glass Architecture” 32). There were even new types of
 4

buildings to consider: train stations, factories, and enormous meeting places for world

exhibitions. Technology and rationality could save the masses and it was the architect’s

job to bring it to them. Architects could no longer be artists; they had to be engineers. Le

Corbusier applauds contemporary engineers, saying their work approaches art, in his

famous book Toward an Architecture.

Anonymous engineers, greasy mechanics in workshops and forges have

conceived and built those formidable things that are ocean liners. The rest

of us landsmen, we lack the means of appreciation, and it would be a good

thing if [we appreciated the work]. Architects live within the narrow

confines of what they have learned in school, in ignorance of new rules of

building, and they readily let their conceptions stop at kissing doves. But

the builders of the liners, bold and masterful, realize palaces beside which

cathedrals are tiny things, and they cast them onto the waters! (148-149)

Figure 1. Le Corbusier's superimposes architectural icons onto the liner Aquitania, launched in 1913, to show scale.

When speaking of the modern movement today, this strain of modernism, oftentimes

referred to as Corbusian modernism, is usually what is meant. This strain is also

sometimes called techno-rationalism, which is the term that will be used hereafter

because it will soon be seen that Le Corbusier cannot be simply lumped in with the other
 5

practitioners (and their failures with respect to the human body) associated with this

strain. Clean lines, rectilinear forms, geometric volumes, unornamented surfaces, open

plans (or sparse plans based on the Cartesian grid), and expressed structural systems are

some of the architectural features of this strain. Repetition of standardized units is another

characteristic. Historical precedents and typological clues were rejected; a library by a

techno-rationalist would not look like any other library that been built in the past. There

was also a rejection of place; a skyscraper of glass and concrete could, according to the

true techno-rationalist designer, conceivably be placed in any city.

Figure 2: Examples of techno-rationalist architecture. Left to right: Fagus Factory, Walter Gropius. 1911-
1925. Citrohan House, Le Corbusier, 1922. Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe, 1958.

Another strain of modernism called organic-functionalism has recently been

recognized, with Alvar Aalto as the leading figure in this group. “For the organic

functionalists, a building’s design must emerge first from the specifics of program and

site” (Williams 15). Their buildings belonged only in one place and were not intended to

be transposed globally. Because designs are generally location-specific, there is great

variety in lighting qualities, material choices, and landscaping project to project. Organic-

functionalists started with the human activities that would go on in a space, while techno-

rationalists oftentimes began with designing an object, then figuring out a way the

necessary human activities would fit inside. Organic-functionalist buildings did not

directly reference historical buildings, but instead of throwing these references out as the
 6

techno-rationalists did, these designers took gestures from many different buildings from

different types and places, creating an unorthodox architectural mishmash. They were

also less concerned with geometrical relationships, abstractions, standardization, and

structural honesty than their techno-rationalist counterparts.

Figure 3: Examples of organic-functionalist architecture. Left to right: Robie House, Frank Lloyd Wright,
1908-1910. Villa Mairea, Alvar Aalto, 1939. Phillips Exeter Library (interior), Louis Kahn, 1967-1972.

Both strains believed in the essential tenets of modernism. More than any aesthetic,

the movement was a spirit. Both Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto would have agreed that

the architectural form must be radically reevaluated in light of conditions

of modernity; that a new architecture must be devised that is appropriate to

the conditions of modern life: that this new architecture must express the

conundrums and ameliorate the ills visited on humanity by modernity; and

that it must accommodate not just the powerful but also the less powerful

or even the disempowered. This new architecture must create more than

just monuments; it must create architectural spaces in the service of an

ordinary life well lived. (Williams 33)

Architects from both the techno-rationalist and organic-functionalist schools recognized

they were practicing in a period of history unlike any other, and that the solutions of the

past could not keep pace with the rapid urban population growth, societal restructuring,

and technological advances that were happening in the first half of the twentieth century.
 7

Perhaps for the first time in architectural history, there was widespread acknowledgement

that architecture served a social purpose and that ordinary people, not just the elite,

deserved the attention of architects. This required architects to have an understanding of

how ordinary people thought, behaved, and experienced architecture.

PSYCHOLOGY AND BODY PERCEPTION

To truly understand the two strains of modernism, one must first examine the two

prevailing schools of psychology in the twentieth-century. The first, called Gestalt theory,

was more widely accepted at the time (less so today) and is closely related to the techno-

rationalist aesthetic. The second was the emerging phenomenological view that shaped

organic-functionalism. The impact these psychological theories had on architecture, and

how architects viewed the human body and believed beauty was achieved, cannot be

underestimated.

In 1910, findings from the Berlin school of Gestalt (“form”) psychology

demonstrated, by experiment, the effects of what psychologists termed “closure”, but we

today would recognize as an early understanding of pareidolia.

…they were able to recognize certain consistent patterns in the way the

majority of healthy adults recognized data during the act of perception.

Events in the visual field of perception, for example, were simplified by a

phenomenon they called closure (a tendency to reduce a complicated

pattern to a more recognizable and simpler pattern). Remarkable in these

observations was the revelation that individuals also tend to simplify

patterns toward horizontal and vertical rather than skew organizations;

 8

toward symmetry rather than asymmetry; and toward basic geometric

groups rather than random or less precise ones. For example, a square was

shown to be the most memorable and neutral form because of its

orientation and regularity. (Bloomer 31-32)

For centuries, artists had been searching for the golden mean, the essence of beauty, some

sort of explanation for why certain elements arranged in a certain way looked “right”

somehow, but techno-rationalists had arrived at it scientifically. They had derived a

universal, objective formula for beauty. And this formula called for rectilinear forms,

mathematical relationships, and unadorned surfaces. The human mind was rational,

simplifying all stimuli into basic geometry and recognizable patterns. Building upon

Descartes’ seventeenth-century rationalism, techno-rationalists believed meaning and

truth were to be deduced, not felt; the body, its senses, and emotions were inferior to

measurement. Bodily stimulus and enjoyment took a backseat to visual order,

mathematical logic, and pure function. Any sensation felt by the body was not reliable as

it was information clouded by emotion and memory.

The organic-functionalists, taking a more phenomenological view, believed that

emotion and memory could not be filtered out of information received by the brain, and

that this “clouded” information was nonetheless valid. Phenomenology posits that

“reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human

consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness”

(“Phenomenology”). Reality is what we sense, and we cannot reinterpret or sift through

what we perceive in order to achieve knowledge acceptable to rationalists.

 9

By the early twentieth century, a number of prominent psychologists and

aestheticians held that human cognition and reason is fundamentally

embodied, fundamentally intersensory, and fundamentally creative; that

emotion, memory, and imagination are integral to human reason; and that

the commonly accepted gulf dividing subject from object does not exist.

(Williams 19)

The body exists in this gulf “between subject and object, ambiguously existing as both”

(Merleau-Ponty 408). We experience the world through the body, and every physical

sensation is flavored by what we have previously experienced, what we are currently

experiencing, and what we anticipate experiencing. This meant designers should

encourage physical sensation, allow ambiguity for individualized memory recall, and

draw upon archetypal metaphors. Belief in phenomenology may explain why the

organic-functionalists are generally seen as more “humane” practitioners of architecture

than techno-rationalists. They believed that we existed in our embodied reality; human

beings cannot understand the world unless many senses are activated simultaneously and

we are given cognitive space to make

our own associations. Organic-

functionalists paid special attention to

human scale (Fig. 4), textures, natural

lighting, and colors because they

thought the human body needed these

things in order to orient itself in the

Figure 4: Human Scale. The towers in the image on the left
are not built to human scale, while the buildings on the right
world. are much more relatable.
 10

Techno-rationalists overshot the machine aesthetic because they believed the

body was unreliable, and that only the mind understood the obviously mathematical

world humans inhabited. Techno-rationalists also exhibited a certain disregard for human

scale—most evident in their two major urban legacies: skyscrapers and mammoth city

blocks. Techno-rationalists thought that if a project showed order in plan, from a birds-

eye view, it should work on the ground. They forgot that human beings need sensory

stimulation, but also have limits to those senses. If something is so far removed from our

size or view, offering no chance for sensory interaction, we have difficulty

understanding.

Why are we not moved by our neighborhood shopping mall or city center

office tower? Take for example, a typical curtain-wall skyscraper. Its

potential for pulling us into the realm of a movement or sound game is

almost nil. We can neither measure ourselves against it nor imagine a

bodily participation. Our bodily response is reduced to little more than a

craned head, wide eyes, and perhaps an open jaw in appreciation of some

magnificent height…(Bloomer 131)

What is missing from our dwellings today are the potential transactions

between body, imagination, and environment…comfort is confused with

the absence of sensation. The norm has become rooms maintained at a

constant temperature without any verticality or outlook or sunshine or

breeze or discernible source of heat or center or, alas, meaning. These

homogenous environments require little of us…(Bloomer 105)

 11

Most criticism of the modern movement is aimed at the techno-rationalists. The

unchecked scale of many buildings and urban projects, paired with a penchant for

repetitious standardization and the machine aesthetic, led many critics to choose words

such as “alien”and “lifeless”— another way of saying “not human”— when describing

modern buildings.

In the last years of the modern period, architecture critic Lewis Mumford, once

himself an outspoken advocate for techno-rationalism, wrote:

Does a dynamo need ornament? Does a Diesel engine need color? Our

world is essentially a world fit for dynamos, diesel engines, steamships, a

thing of black, gray, white, conscientiously utilitarian. Now, this is an

extreme position; but it emphasizes a reality. One part of the modern

feeling for form, the thing that distinguishes us from the Baroque or the

Gothic, is a positive pleasure that we take in the elemental structure of an

object. We do not paint pansies on our typewriters or griffons on our

automobiles, nor are our office files covered with decorative plaster. To

realize form-in-function, by its clear, lucid expression, is what constitutes

the modern feeling…but we are still human beings, not dynamos or diesel

engines; and there must be something more. (13)

The organic-functionalists seem to have provided this phenomenological “something

more” Mumford wrote about. They did this by adhering to human scale and providing

varied sensory experiences through texture, material, lighting, and historical references;

Aalto’s work was certainly never criticized as being “inhumane”. However, while Le

Corbusier is still unquestionably the poster child for techno-rationalism, he, at least after
 12

the 1930s, cannot be lumped in with other techno-rationalists who didn’t bother with the

human body at all. While he may have started out favoring the mechanical aspects of

architecture over the human, his work as a whole shows an awareness of the human body.

THE BODY IN THE WORK OF LE CORBUSIER

Like many great architects, Le Corbusier

dabbled in various artistic mediums outside

of architecture, notably sculpture and

painting. He often split his daily schedule

between his interests: painting for half the

Figure 5: Arcole Simla, 1952. Oil on canvas.
day in his private studio, then working at his

architecture office for the other half. The human body

is an ever-present theme in his sculpture and painting.

Barely abstracted versions of various body parts—

ears, intestines, faces, noses, hands, hearts—make

continual appearances in his art. As one example,

Figure 6: Deux Figures, 1947. Oil on canvas.
shapes resembling ears, lungs, and lips can be

seen in in Le Corbusier’s Arcole Simla (Fig. 5). When the full body is depicted it is

usually full-figured and contorted, cramped into the canvas almost like a room that is too

small. Deux Figures (Fig. 6) calls to mind a person sitting on a piece of furniture, perhaps

a sofa. This is an architectural proposition in itself, but the fact that the body is bounded

by the edges of the canvas implies walls and a ceiling. Additionally, the painting is

rotated from its expected vertical orientation of sofa on bottom and person on top, which
 13

could mean Le Corbusier, consciously or unconsciously,

was examining the body’s relationship to its architectural

confines by gaining a new perspective from an

unconventional angle. Panurge II (Fig. 7) features an

abstract ear shape, but more interestingly a vertical

element that recalls the human figure. The space between Figure 7: Panurge II, 1962. Wood.

the other curved elements and the “walls” of the box element are a study in personal

space. How a body fits into and feels in a defined space has direct architectural

implications; Le Corbusier’s art shows he was deeply concerned with this.

Some would argue that the lessons Le Corbusier learned in these artistic pursuits

never made it into his architecture or that his twisted figures and depiction of parts of the

body, seemingly severed, exemplifies a cold and reckless apathy about the human whole.

This may be true of his urban planning projects and some of his earlier work, but at

intimate scales could not be farther from the truth.

Le Corbusier was very preoccupied with the manner in which the body

would respond to art and to architecture. ‘I have a body like everyone else,

and what I’m interested in is contact with my body, with my eyes, my

mind’…Nowhere in architecture is the potential of bodily contact felt

more readily than in the realm of detail, designed specifically to be

touched or seen at close quarters—here ‘the architectural work enters the

plane of sensitivity’ and ‘We are moved.’ (Samuel 39)

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His architectural details are deeply concerned with touch and the human hand, which

“attains the status of fetish in the work of Le Corbusier—his handprint is a mark…[of] a

knowledge gained through touch”(44).

[He] designed door handles and

handrails to invite touch and

support the body. My hand is

received by the handle; it is

Figure 8: Door at Maison des Jeunes, 1965..
mirrored by its forms, like holding

hands with another person. In order to open the door to the Maison des

Jeunes at Firminy [Fig. 8] I press my palm against the palm of the door in

a gesture of greeting and I am mirrored by the building. Here a bright

shiny square plate, itself a mirror, set into the glass door has a cut-out in

the shape of a hand. Beneath the cold metal at the place where my skin

makes contact with the door there is a layer of the finest mortar, warm and

smooth to the touch…the door handle gives scale and humanity to the

whole. (47-48)

Corbusier’s ergonomic details and tactile juxtapositions extended into the

furniture he helped design. He saw furniture as an extension of the body, writing that

“These objects are in proportion to our

limbs, are adapted to our gestures” (59).

He designed his famous LC4 chaise

lounge (Fig. 9) to mirror the body’s curves

so the user could totally relax. The neck is

Figure 9: LC4 Chaise Lounge designed by Le Corbusier
and Charlotte Perriand, 1929.
 15

supported by the headrest, then the chair folds where the human body does: at the torso

and then again at the knees. Each folding point could then be adjusted to various

positions for individualized comfort. The part that touched the body was also

differentiated from the structure through the use of materials—leather or fur juxtaposed

against steel—“each material inviting touch and heightening the experience of the other

through difference” (61).

A discussion of the human body’s impact on Le

Corbusier’s design would not be complete without discussion

of his famous Modulor (Fig. 10). Twentieth-century architects

and fabricators lived at the advent of mass-production and pre-

fabrication. Products could now be designed in one place,

made in another, and shipped to another still; a common

design language and unit of measurement was called for in this Figure 10: The Modulor, 1943.

increasingly globalized world. Le Corbusier proposed the

Modulor, based on human (albeit standardized human)

proportions. He saw it as an evolution of Da Vinci’s

Vitruvian Man (Fig. 11) which harkened even farther back

to early construction and archetypal proportion.

One thing remains to be explained: the

Parthenon, the Indian temples, and

cathedrals were all built according to Figure 11: Vitruvian Man by

Leonardo da Vinci, 1490.
precise measures which constituted a code,

a coherent system: a system which proclaimed an essential unity.

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Primitive men at all times and in all places, as also the bearers of high

civilizations, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek, all these have built, and by that

token, measured. What were the tools they used? They were eternal and

enduring, precious because they were linked to the human person. The

names of these tools were: elbow (cubit), finger (digit), thumb (inch), foot,

pace, and so forth…Let us say it once: they formed an integral part of the

human body, and for that reason they were fit to serve as

(measurement)…More than that, they were infinitely rich and subtle

because they formed part of the mathematics of the human body, gracious,

elegant, and firm, the source of that harmony which moves us:

beauty…the elbow, the pace, the foot, and thumb were and still are both

the prehistoric and modern tool of man. (Modulor 18-19)

Le Corbusier saw the golden ratio and the Fibonacci number series, which he believed

governed nature and beauty, in human proportions and in the regulating lines of the

greatest architecture. If designers used the proportions prescribed by the Modulor, it

would be difficult, here paraphrasing Albert Einstein’s praise of the system, to create

something ugly. Le Corbusier had found a formula for beauty; as a true man of his time,

he tried to patent it.

With the Modulor, Le Corbusier is guilty of certain techno-rationalist oversight. The

Modulor is arbitrarily based on a six-foot tall man; a design using this system might, in

theory, exclude certain users—notably women and anyone who doesn’t meet the height

requirement—at a certain intimate scale. Using a formula for beauty and enjoyment also

means the design is generated by a system, not by user needs. And while the proportional
 17

relationships originate in the human body, the system was meant to be scaled up or down

between the tiniest architectural detail to the largest city, which means actual human scale

could easily be lost. The insistence on a single, universal, discoverable formula for beauty

also stems from a rationalist Gestalt worldview. However, it also evident that Le

Corbusier revered the human body, claiming it possessed the same beauty that governed

all of creation.

THE BODY IN THE WORK OF ALVAR AALTO

Interestingly, the human form is visually less present in Aalto’s work than in that of

Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier painted, sculpted, measured, analyzed, and abstracted the

human body; there is little evidence that Aalto did the same. Aalto doesn’t make overt

anthropomorphic architectural gestures and only literally referenced the body in order to

diagram. While the human body may not be visually evident, Aalto’s writings and

phenomenological approach to architecture prove it was never forgotten, and in many

cases is more physically present than in Le Corbusier’s work.

In his essay entitled “The Humanizing of Architecture”, Aalto writes: “Modern

architecture has been rationalized mainly from the technical point of view…but since

architecture covers the entire field of human life, real functional architecture must be

functional mainly from the human point of view” (Nerdinger 13). Instead of approaching

problems starting with the machine, Aalto argued rationalism should stem from human

needs, activities, and comfort. He gives the following example:

One of the typical activities in Modern architecture has been the

construction of chairs and the adoption of new materials and new methods
 18

for them. The tubular steel chair is surely rational from a technical and

constructive point of view: It is light, suitable for mass production, and so

on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human

point of view. Steel is too good a conductor of heat. The chromium

surface gives too bright reflections of light, and even acoustically it is not

suitable for a room. The rational methods of creating this furniture style

have been on the right track, but the result will only be good if

rationalization is exercised in the selection of materials which are most

suitable for human use. (Aalto 300)

Next, Aalto guides his reader through

his Viipuri Municipal Library project (Fig.

12) emphasizing that the starting point is

the human body coupled with the activity

that would go on in the space.

The main problem

Figure 12: Viipuri Municipal Library, interior. 1927-1935.
connected with a library is

that of the human eye. A library can be well constructed and can be

functional in a technical way even without the solving of this problem, but

it is not humanly and architecturally complete unless is deals satisfactorily

with the main function in the building, that of reading a book. The eye is

only a tiny part of the human body, but it is the most sensitive and perhaps

the most important part. (301-302)

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In both these examples, Aalto illustrates his process—which is essentially rational,

unromantic, and modern; he is simply solving a problem. But, unlike the techno-

rationalists, he defines the problem fundamentally as a problem for the human body.

Instead of asking what the library or chair needed to do, he first asked what the human

body needed to do in a library or chair, then designed to support the answer. This

approach explains why Aalto was one of the first to suggest a movie cinema with a

blackened interior. He started with what the body needed—in this case, to clearly see a

projected image— instead of relying on the typical solutions for theatres of his time or

subordinating the human need to presumptuous modern constraints of plan and form.

These constraints—whether typological, historical, economic, constructional, or

formal—outside of what the human body, and by extension the mind, needed to be

comfortable were, according to Aalto, secondary and often arbitrary. This attitude is

evident in his attention to detail, especially in his Paimio Sanatorium. He chose paint

colors that would relax the patients and provide visual variation to their monotonous stay.

He directed heat at the foot of the beds, away from a patient’s face, to keep them warm

without overheating.

The floor plans were also designed to reinforce the patient’s associations

of warmth, brightness, and tranquility with rooms arranged so that the

patient could move easily from bed to wall-length desk. Once seated, she

could look out large, plate glass windows into the surrounding forest… In

between the double-glazed windows, Aalto threaded a heating element to

warm the glass, a material highly sensitive to variations in temperature.

Ensconced at her desk, the patient could read, write, or just look, resting
 20

her feet on the curving footrest protruding from that typically recessed

moment in a room where floor meets wall. (Williams 24)

Aalto’s protective cradling of the human body described above presented itself,

perhaps ironically, in a great deal of freedom for it. Aalto sought to provide a somewhat

ambiguous environment for his users, antithetical to the techno-rationalists who often

leaned toward heavy-handed, prescriptive, and dictatorial modernism. Aalto gave his

users options—they could be warm or cold, seated or standing, with others or alone.

[Aalto] rejected any form of outside interference in people’s lives and thus

dismissed all universal Utopias. The concept of a unified, overall design

embracing all realms of life—as advocated by the Art Nouveau

movement, by the German Werkbund and by the Bauhaus—and related to

this, the idea of the architect as an educator who provided the appropriate

forms of life for the man of the future were alien to Aalto.(Nerdinger 9)

Aalto didn’t believe it was the architect’s job to prescribe universal rules or acceptable

social behavior through design (something the young Le Corbusier did). The militant

calls for standardization in construction—especially in the residential realm—coming

from the techno-rationalists alarmed Aalto as he saw this as a slippery slope that ended in

the standardization of human beings, activities, and bodily experience. If the techno-

rationalists called for standardization and universalism, organic-functionalists like Aalto

preached individualism and particularism.

 21

Aalto’s provisions for

the individual are evident in

many of his floor plans. In his

Baker Dormitory (Fig. 13) on

the MIT campus the “slithering

snake” plan meant every room

had a view of the Charles

River. “Aalto provided an

environment fitting to the

robustness and independence of

student life, celebrating the

Figure 13: Baker Dormitory, 1946-1948. Top: view from Charles River.
uniqueness of the individual Bottom: plan showing student rooms and circulation.

rather than the anonymity of the institution…the undulating wall…provided the

opportunity for varying room configurations and thus a range of environment for the

students” (Trechner Guide 220). Similarly in the Paimio Sanatorium, Aalto

managed to incorporate the needs of the individual…by proposing diverse

bedroom units and a range of opportunities for self-curing, from sitting by

the open window of one’s room, to gathering in the smaller terrace or

going to the main roof deck, to finally exiting the building and walking

throughout the grounds on a defined exercise pathway. In this way, Aalto

supported the uniqueness to each individual by providing a broad range of

interactions, by articulating throughout the design a complete scale of

social hierarchies. (Trechner “Baker House” 185)

 22

In both the Baker Dormitory and the Paimio Sanatorium, Aalto employed differentiated

units to give each individual a sense of autonomy. This was likely a rebuttal to the

techno-rationalist strategy of designing one singular unit that was then repeated

throughout the whole of a building.

This individualism is not only sought after in physical space, but in the subconscious

as well. Aalto’s intriguing collages of

materials, volumes, and historical

references provide countless

opportunities for each individual user to

make his or her own phenomenological

associations, making their understanding

and experience of the building different

from anyone else’s. Figure 14: Villa Mairea, interior. 1939.

Merely providing accommodation for certain functions, such as eating,

sleeping, or living, is not an adequate response to human life. Aalto

evidently wished to express the constant interplay of rational and

irrational, mental and sensual, playful and concentrated human activities

through an infinite wealth of impressions and by providing scope for

experience in his architecture. A walk around the Villa Mairea [Fig. 20]

thus evokes an “endless stream of memories and images.” Technology and

naturalness, Finnish traditional and modern mechanized civilization, the

forests of Finland and nautical metaphors are juxtaposed here in a

 23

permanent state of dialogue or contrast… [It] achieves vibrancy and

tension from its contradictions and inconsistencies. (Nerdinger 18-19)

These inconsistencies and the tactile quality of Aalto’s work create comfortable, yet

unpredictable environments that require bodily, multi-sensory participation from the user.

Aalto’s spaces could be called messy and confused, but they are enjoyable because of this

and appear humane and refreshing when compared to the sterility of many techno-

rationalist works.

It is important however, to realize that Aalto’s appeal to individualism comes with its

own pitfalls. While techno-rationalists overestimated their ability to understand the

Everyman, Aalto may have overestimated his ability to understand everyone.

To justify the difference in apartment plans, one could, of course, appeal

to Aalto’s emphasis on individuality against the ideology of the

Normalmensch, as preached by the heroic [techno-rationalists]. However,

unless the architect can determine the specific wishes of each future

inhabitant and match them with the appropriately tailored apartment, there

is no guarantee of a functional gain from the variations. Still the variation

in the apartment plans can symbolize Aalto’s respect for the individual,

just as for the inhabitants, the absence of a uniform appearance may

support a sense of individuality without actually corresponding

functionally to individual needs. (Kuhlmann 40)

In other words, Aalto’s “individualized” floor plans cannot possibly be tailored to the

individual user because the architect had no way of knowing the needs of every present

and future user. As a modernist, he may also be guilty of assigning architecture too much
 24

power. Aalto assumed a sense of individuality is something that architecture could

provide, as opposed to something inherent in a person or something that a person would

assert on their own.

Despite these pitfalls, there is little argument from the architectural community that

Alvar Aalto provided a “human touch” to the overt rationalism that pervaded twentieth-

century architecture. However, Le Corbusier’s paintings, sculptures, and architectural

details show he did not overlook the human body as many other techno-rationalists did.

In fact, his work with the exception of his very earliest projects and perhaps the Modulor,

displays a strong phenomenological streak, especially if the work is produced at intimate

scales (i.e. details, furniture, and rooms). Both Aalto and Le Corbusier understood that

our comprehension (and enjoyment) of the built environment springs from a multi-

sensory, bodily experience, and not purely from a visual logic based on mathematics.

However, an important distinction between the two architects must be made. The human

body for Aalto was the constantly-revisited origin of design, while for Le Corbusier,

despite what he said to the contrary, the body was only the initial inspiration. This may

seem like a minute distinction, but the following case-study shows it has large

implications.

CASE STUDY: PAIMIO SANATORIUM AND VENICE HOSPITAL

In 1960, noted architecture critic Lewis Mumford, after the fervor of the modern

movement had died down, reproached Le Corbusier for what Mumford now saw as cold,

over-zealous standardization: “he would amputate the human leg or stretch the soul to fit

the form he has arbitrarily provided for it” (Mumford 160). While this is may or may not
 25

have been true for Le Corbusier’s earlier work, the architect, now in his late seventies,

was once again pushing the boundaries of what architecture could be and a new

sensitivity was emerging. Only four years after Mumford’s essay, Le Corbusier and his

atelier designed a hospital on the edge of Venice that, although never built, offers

evidence to refute Mumford. In this hospital, surgeons are the only ones amputating

bodies; Le Corbusier accommodates them. In fact, the attention to the human body that

Le Corbusier shows on the scale of the patient room is on par with Alvar Aalto’s Paimio

Sanatorium, a widely acclaimed hospital that serves, even today, as an architectural

precedent in patient comfort.

It is unsurprising that two of the most “human” works of Le Corubsier and Aalto

are hospitals. There is perhaps no other typology as concerned with the human body

because there is no other typology that deals so closely with a sick one. A sick body,

because of its weakened state, requires special attention from both doctors and designers;

Le Corbusier and Aalto would, as modernists, agree that a person’s environment

contributes to their well-being. Aalto referred to the Sanatorium as a “medical

instrument” (Pallasmaa 74n37). Perhaps more scientifically (and never one to forsake

efficiency), Le Corbusier wrote in his “Rapport Technique”: “For the patient, a more

comfortable hospitalization represents, in fact, a more effective cure which is always

more economical” (42). An analysis of Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium and Le Corbusier’s

Venice Hospital, especially of the typical patient room, yields intimate insights into how

each architect viewed the human body because each architect was ultimately concerned

with and felt responsible for healing it. However, before that analysis can take place, a

little background on both projects is needed.

 26

Overview: Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium.

A defining work of Alvar Aalto’s early career,

the Paimio Sanatorium was one of many

facilities built in Finland between the World

Wars because Finland had an unusually high

mortality associated with tuberculosis

compared to the rest of Europe

(“Tuberculosis”). After placing first in a

1929 competition, Aalto refined his

design and construction started in 1931.

Nestled in a pine forest, the white

structure rose seven stories and was

Figure 15: Exterior views of Paimio Sanatorium.
meant to accommodate just under 300

patients. The building included the large sun balconies typical of contemporary

sanatorium architecture, a light-filled cafeteria, meeting rooms, and a chapel.

The basic functions of the building have been resolved so that each wing

of the building and the functions within it form a unit of its own. A-wing

is the patients' wing with the sun balconies, the most important

architectonic element, facing south. B-wing contains the common spaces:

treatment rooms, dining hall, library and common rooms. C-wing contains

the laundry, kitchens and staff accommodation. The single-story D-wing

contains the boiler room and heating plant. Circulation centers on the main

entrance hall between A-wing and B-wing and the stairwell linked to it,
 27

which together give access to the

other wings of the building.

(“Paimio Sanatorium”)

There were also walking trails that meandered

through the forest. Aalto’s attention to detail and

focus on patient comfort makes the Paimio

Figure 16: Paimio Sanatorium plan.
Sanatorium a precedent for hospital design even

today, more than eighty years after its inception.

Between its 1933 completion and 1956, the Sanatorium underwent few changes.

However, by the 1960s, the threat of tuberculosis had substantially subsided, so the

Sanatorium was slowly converted into the Paimio Hospital. The flexibility of the original

spaces made this relatively easy, which means that the building found on site today is

extremely similar to the first construction.

Overview: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital. The Venice Hospital for the acutely ill was

one of Le Corbusier’s last projects. Perhaps sensing he was slowing down—he was, after

all, in his late seventies—Le Corbusier somewhat reluctantly took the project on in

December 1964 after extensive correspondence with the Venetian administration.

Determined not to deprive inhabitants of Venice (or Venice of Venice), Le Corbusier

conceived of a low structure that matched the 3-4 story heights of surrounding buildings,

although parts stood on typical Corbusian pilotis (Fig. 17). Regularly repeating modules

of space, starting with the patient room, and circulation generated the sprawling plan. In

this way, Le Corbusier sought to recreate the Venetian streets he fell in love with inside
 28

the hospital without disrupting the

actual urban fabric outside.

Atelier Le Corbusier called the

Hospital the “potato building” or

a building “façade sans façade”

(Shah 190) to describe its

ambiguous boundaries that Figure 17: Venice Hospital model.

allowed for flexibility, growth, and

osmosis both within and without, but

today, this kind of structure is usually

referred to as a mat.

By mat…architects

usually mean a

building type that is

low-rise and high-

Figure 18: Venice Hospital plan diagram.
density, that is

homogenous in its layout, and that consists of a systematic repetition of a

simple element such as a column, skylight, or modular room. The

repetition provides the framework, both conceptual and spatial, for

different possibilities of inhabitation… By virtue of its ability to frame but

not interfere, the mat building becomes available for different possibilities

of usage…. (Sarkis 14)

 29

In the Venice Hospital, a grouping of 28 patient rooms, or care unit, was the “simple

element” that was “systematically repeated”.

As the project progressed, Le Corbusier travelled less and less frequently from his

office in Paris to the site in Venice and gave increasing responsibility to his assistant

Guillermo Julian de la Fuente. Less than a year after signing the contract for the hospital,

Le Corbusier died of apparent cardiac arrest while swimming at Cap-Martin on August

27, 1965. Fuente and the atelier finished drawing the project, but construction was called

off due to lack of funding just after the first concrete piloti was poured.

Since the Venice Hospital was never constructed, it is impossible to definitively

know how functional or comfortable the spaces would have been for patients (or how the

massive scale of the building would have affected Venice). However, there are extensive

sketches and sections, as well as numerous interviews with Fuente, the man arguably

closest to Le Corbusier during the hospital project, that show the human body was

unquestionably present in Le Corbusier’s late work.

In Section: The Horizontal Body. Both Aalto and Le Corbusier noticed an important

aspect of the human body in the hospital context: it would, in most cases, be lying down.

The “horizontal man” appears again and again in both the writings and sections of Aalto

and Le Corbusier when they are describing the patient care room, or “cell” as Le

Corbusier called it. Both architects recognized that a healthy human body walks around;

it is vertically-oriented. A sick one, on the other hand, is stationary and horizontally-

oriented. While both designs originated with the “horizontal man”, this critical section

begins to show the different attitudes Aalto and Le Corbusier had toward the body.
 30

Aalto claims that his design was generated after he conducted experiments to see how the

patients would respond, on a psychological level, to different room layouts, colors, light

qualities, and other factors.

Echoing experimental psychology’s research experiments conducted at the

universities in Leipzig and Munich, he recounts analyzing the impact on

patients of variation in temperature, types or degrees of ventilation, and

levels of noise. From the “results” of these “experiments”, he concluded

that the sanatorium’s design needed to address an intertwined array of

physiognomic, phenomenological, and cognitive phenomena particular to

its afflicted users’ needs. The organizing spatial principle for patients’

rooms needed to differ from that of ordinary rooms. In a perhaps direct,

perhaps unconscious, and perhaps completely unrelated allusion to one of

[the] best-known premises [of August Schmarsow, a 19th-century German

art historian and precursor to modern phenomenological studies]—that

spatial experience depends on a vertically-aligned, ambulatory embodied

subject—Aalto wrote that although most interior architectural spaces

accommodate an ambulatory person whose body is oriented along a

vertical axis, Paimio’s patients would be lying down. Hence a

sanatorium’s spatial organization needed to dissimilate the ordinary room

in that it should be designed not around a vertical axis in motion but

around a stationary, low-slung horizontal one. (Williams 22)

 31

It is unclear whether Aalto meant to

challenge the “vertical”

phenomenological universe of the time,

but it is unquestionable that his so-called

“experiments”, phenomenological in

nature, helped to generate the horizontal

Figure 19: Aalto's sketch of the horizontal body.
section of the patient room. The human

body is the origin of Aalto’s work; he

always comes back to it, testing his

designs against its requirements.

Le Corbusier arrived at his similar

section in a much different way. On one of

Figure 20: Le Corbusier's sketch of Carpaccio's Burial of
his first visits to Venice, even before Saint Ursula.

accepting the hospital commission, he made a few quick sketches (Fig. 20) after visiting

local art galleries, notably one of Carpacccio’s Burial of Saint Ursula (Fig. 21).

As [architectural scholar] Joseph Quetglas recently noted after

encountering those sketches in the Carnets [Le Corbusier’s sketchbook]:

“In the original paintings, Saint Ursula appears in a turbulent scene: the

butchery of the pilgrims that arrived for her burial. So that the corpse of

the Saint would become conspicuous in the muddle, Carpaccio moved it

away and raised it, placing it on an elevated bed—like Le Corbusier’s

beds, like the beds in Venice Hospital. In the second painting, Jesus is

lying in a straight horizontal board too. The bed and the corpse is what Le
 32

Corbusier sketches in his carnet. These two impressions—the need to

build without intrusion and with special concern for scale, and the image

of a body elevated over the mundane—could be seen as starting points for

the project. (Sarkis 23-24)

Le Corbusier became enamored with

Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula and even asked

that photographs of other works by the

artist be sent to his atelier in Paris.

The human body in the painting is

Figure 21: Martyrdom of the Pilgrims and the Burial of
the inspiration for Le Corbusier. Like in Saint Ursula. Vitorre Carpaccio, 1493.

the painting, Le Corbusier raised the sick

above the ground, as can be seen in the

section of the patient cell in (Fig. 22).

Here is the important distinction between

origin and inspiration (Fig. 23). For Aalto,

the body is the origin; he starts with it and

continually revisits it to orient his design.

Le Corbusier, using the human body as

Figure 22: Section through the patient room unit in the
only inspiration, starts with the body2, then Venice Hospital.

departs from it in a number of ways that do not necessarily provide for it. For example,

Le Corbusier raised the sick body in its room off the ground partly because that is how it

is best cared for and partly because he saw it in a painting: the inspiration. However, he

2It is important to note here that the body providing inspiration to Le Corbusier is an image, not a
physical 3-D human body with sensory perception and preferences.
 33

then elaborates this idea of the patient’s removal from the ground into the section of the

hospital as a whole: the departure.

The first level, on the ground, is the level of connection with the city; there

one finds the general services and all public access–by water, by foot, and

from the bridge across the lagoon. The second level is the story of

preventive care, of specialized care, and of rehabilitation. It is a level of

medical technology. The third level is the zone for hospitalization, and the

visitors’ area. (“Rapport Technique” 42)

The sickest patients, the acutely ill,

receive care on the top floor of the

hospital, closest to the sky and farthest

away from the hustle and bustle of the

ground. Corbusier acknowledges this Figure 23: Aalto comes back to the body (origin), while Le
Corbusier starts with the body (inspiration), but then departs from
hustle and bustle as healthy when he it to pursue other concepts.

accepted the hospital commission but warned the mayor of Venice of placing skyscrapers

in the low-lying urban fabric of the city: “Don’t kill Venice, I beg you” (Shah 4). Le

Corbusier saw a life in the busy, social streets of Venice, but the streets (and therefore,

the first floor of the hospital) are the domain of the truly healthy— reception,

administration, security, and kitchen and laundry staff. The second floor was then,

appropriately, given to those patients who were not bedridden but not yet healthy enough

to enter back into normal society—those in physical therapy or seeking preventative care.

Le Corbusier thought the sickest patients needed to be alone in their rooms to be

healthy. He did, however, at the same time try to give them aspects of the streets of
 34

Venice by putting gathering spaces (“campiello” in Italian, “public squares” in English)

and circulation corridors (“calle” or “streets”) nearby.

[The patient room] created at the human scale, gave rise to a “care unit” of

28 patients, which functions autonomously. This unit is organized around

a central space of communication (campiello) and four paths (calle),

which are intended for both circulation and inhabitation by patients in

convalescence…On the same level the patient will find the conditions of

daily life, upon entrance into the “calle,” the “campiello,” and the hanging

gardens. (“Rapport Technique” 42)

Le Corbusier gave his patients (and it is likely he really did think of them as his) what he

saw as healing, architectural analogies to the Venetian urban fabric: private dwellings

surrounded by social spaces, engaging circulation paths, and greenery. When patients

were at their weakest, they were to be alone in their cell and removed from others; when

they were feeling a stronger, they could venture out into a hospital version of the street.

The schematic section of the Venice Hospital shows that Le Corbusier did not

revisit the human body’s needs after the initial moves; the human body was the

inspiration, the starting point in the form of the patient cell, but the design of the hospital

as a whole was soon subordinated to the

ultimately poorly-executed concept of

bringing Venice inside the hospital,

resulting in a mat building that would have

been a planning disaster given Venice’s

Figure 24: Figure/ground study of Venice Hospital (in red)
dense, historical urban fabric (Fig. 24). compared to Venetian context (in black).
 35

However, on the scale of the patient cell, both Aalto and Le Corbusier are

successful in caring for the human body. The focus on the “horizontal man” had

immediate implications on the architecture: ceilings, lighting and sound qualities,

circulation, views to the exterior, and even minor architectural details all needed to be

reconsidered for a room tailored to a horizontal body that could not easily relocate itself

when bored or uncomfortable. This was not lost on either Aalto or Le Corbusier. The

patient cell will from this point remain the main focus of analysis because it is the space

most relevant to a discussion of the human body. Le Corbusier called these cells “points

of departure” (Sarkis 26) for the whole scheme of the hospital. While the Venice Hospital

as a whole showed little consideration for the human body, the details of the patient cell

were actually quite responsive to a horizontal body’s needs. Aalto similarly started with

the patient room. Obviously both hospitals had an immense network of circulation,

service, and complementary spaces that served the doctoral, nursing, administrative,

maintenance, and other staffs, but the attention given to the patient resting in their room

is the key component in evaluating each architect’s sensitivity to the human body.

Even though they had differing attitudes about the human body’s role in the

design process, both Aalto and Le Corbusier made similar architectural gestures in the

name of patient comfort, likely because they arrived at the same “horizontal man”

section. Light, color, and sound were controlled to create a restful, but varied

environment. Nature was incorporated to encourage personal reflection. If the Paimio

Sanatorium is a masterpiece for the human body, then the Venice Hospital, at least when

examined on the scale of the patient room, is too.

 36

Light, Color, and Sound for the Horizontal Body.

Both Aalto and Le Corbusier recognized the patient’s

need for comfort and quiet, and both took care to

provide spaces free from visual stress or unnecessary

auditory disturbances.

Aalto thought through how his infirm

users would respond, visually and

perceptually, to different ceiling colors

and illumination schemes. He oriented Figure 25: Typical patient room in

Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium.
their bedrooms south-southeast, which

he explained, offered the most variable natural light, basking resting

invalids in the morning’s softer rays while shading their eyes from the

sharp glare of the afternoon sun. He painted some walls to reflect light,

others to absorb it, depending on how much sun each would receive in

different seasons and at different times of day. In the interest of visual

variety, he exaggerated tonal variations in the ceilings with dark hued,

highly-saturated (and therefore perceptually variable) bluish-green. No

overhead fixtures cast light into the resting patient’s eyes: Aalto explains

that his scheme for artificial lighting, combined with the room’s dark tonal

values, would greatly reduce eye-stressing glare. (Williams 24)

In a similar way, Le Corbusier also provided variety using colors and natural daylight.

It was anticipated that for each (bed unit) there would be a glazed opening

3 x 1 meters, placed above a ceiling 2.25 meters high, located in front of

 37

it, which would give pleasant reflected light for the patient in bed. A

colored panel placed on the outside of the unit gives color to the reflected

light, or an intensity that varies at different times of the day. These panels

were to be of different colors, creating a variety of effects/moods. At the

same time, the arrangement permits an exact control over the intensity of

light. All these factors were to correlate the psychological importance of

color on the spirits of patients. (Shah 56)

Both architects also knew the positive

psychological effect that natural light has on people.

Aalto provided large plate-glass windows for each

patient, giving them access to views of the

surrounding forest, as well as variable natural light.

Le Corbusier, on the other hand, employed

controversial hidden skylights that offered similar

light, but no views to the outside. He writes:

Figure 26: Le Corbusier saw the sky as
As you have seen, all the rooms are Venice's "real" window.

illuminated from the ceiling. This can accommodate two possibilities: If

the patient is confined to bed and does not have the need or wish to look

outside, the light is received from above (or diffused along a wall)…If the

patient is unable to move and wishes to look outside, the patient is moved

to the middle of the room and is able to watch the sky. For in reality, the

sky is the true Venetian landscape: for we have walked in the narrow

Venetian streets and have observed the position of the houses and the
 38

windows, and have discovered that the true window is really the sky and

in the patient cell/room we create again the same situation. (Shah 58)

Even though the hospital was sited on the edge of a lagoon, patients in the Venice

Hospital would only have been able to look at the passing clouds had they wanted an

outside view. The logic behind these “windowless roof-lit patient cells” has been

repeatedly questioned, but

In defense of the roof-lit patient cells, Julian [de la Fuente] mentioned that

Le Corbusier identified the Venetian sky as the ‘real’ window of the city.

Furthermore, it can be argued that Le Corbusier was commissioned to the

design of the hospital primarily for acutely ill patients. In the

contemporary hospitals, these patients were almost always kept at the

[ICU]…[which] usually do not include clear glass windows and direct

light—this is primarily due to the fragile emotional and physical health of

the patient, who remains mostly bedridden and at times unconscious or

only partially conscious of her/his surroundings. Therefore it can be

postulated that the hospital project did provide a realistic design strategy

to be able to function as a reasonably successful hospital. (Shah 174-175)

The average sanatorium stay for a patient with tuberculosis was a little over year,

although many patients stayed 3-5 years (“Sanatorium Age”). In most cases, these

patients were aware of their surroundings, but their illness necessitated their isolation.

Acutely ill patients, the kind the Venice Hospital catered to, stayed on average a mere 15

days. They floated in and out of consciousness as their care was administered. It was,

then, in Aalto’s case more necessary to give the patients at Paimio a view of the outside,
 39

to break up the boredom by letting them more fully see the change from day to night and

season to season. Given the types of patients cared for in each hospital, the lighting

schemes in both are appropriate and tailored to the needs of the patient.

Quiet reigned in the Paimio Sanatorium and Venice Hospital.

[Aalto] placed access panels to plumbing fixtures in the hallways outside

invalids’ rooms so that the pipes could be serviced without disturbing a

patient’s rest. He packed one wall in each room with sound-absorbing

materials. Most famously, he specially designed “noiseless sinks” [Fig.

27] reconfiguring the conventional

sink basin to reduce the auditory

disruption of tap water splashing at

acute angles onto an impermeable

porcelain surface. (Williams 24)

Similarly, Le Corbusier sought to create a Figure 27: Aalto's sketch for the noiseless
sinks at the Paimio Sanatorium.
quiet space conducive to reflection and healing.

Although Corbusier did not draw attention to acoustical considerations when

discussing the project as Aalto did, the considerations are clear if one looks at

Corbusier’s specifications in the “Rapport Technique”.

The entire surface of all interior masonry walls will be coated with a

sound- and weather-insulation material…The floors will be covered with

an insulating and sound-absorbing material…Some doors will be sliding

doors (as with the panels between patient rooms); these will be covered

with plastic laminate and equipped with devices that allow them to
 40

function silently, such as nylon wheels, or any other device that will

provide full sound absorption. (46-47)

Nature as Cure. Along with silence, both

architects also believed that access to nature

was beneficial to one’s health. Standard

medical treatment for tuberculosis at the time

included fresh air and heliotherapy (sun

treatment), so Aalto gave each patient a large

Figure 28: Sun patios at the Paimio Sanatorium.

window in their room with a view to the

surrounding forest. While it appears these

windows were inoperable, the Sanatorium

also featured exterior sun patios (Fig. 28) so

patients could bask in the sun, which was

thought to kill the bacteria that caused certain

Figure 29: Rooftop garden of Le Corbusier's Villa
types of TB. If patients were well enough to Savoye, 1928-1931.

move about on their own, Aalto also landscaped walking

trails through the forest to allow quiet contemplation and a

break from the monotony of treatment.

Aalto’s secluded forest site allowed for more direct

contact with nature, but Le Corbusier found a way to

incorporate greenery—one of his “essential joys” (Shah

xviii), along with light and space, that he believed every

Figure 30: Plantwall by Green

Fortune.
 41

person interacting with his architecture should experience. Just like he recreated the

streets and courtyards of Venice inside the hospital, Le Corbusier placed greenery, which

he called “le jardin suspendus” inside the hospital’s patient gathering spaces. While “le

jardin suspendus” translates into “hanging garden”, given the plan of the hospital,

specifications in the “Rapport Technique”, and Le Corbusier’s earlier writings and

projects such as the Villa Savoye (Fig. 29), these were likely more akin to landscaped

roof terraces than actually suspended plants or the green walls (Fig. 30) popular today in

contemporary architecture.

Again, it is interesting to note that Le Corbusier made no use of the lagoon on the

hospital’s site. Since the hospital was planned on the site of a slaughterhouse, it is likely

that the lagoon was used industrially and was not fit, either in actuality or deemed so by

Le Corbusier, to offer the salutatory benefits of nature.

CONCLUSION

If Aalto’s Paimio patient room is a successful example of design for the human body,

then so is Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital cell because the gestures both architects made

are extremely similar. Both designed for a horizontal body in a weakened state, and took

responsibility for healing it using the instruments of an architect: space, circulation,

views, light, color, sound, and landscape.

It cannot, however, go without saying that Le Corbusier’s hospital as a whole is as

successful as the Paimio Sanatorium. The scale of the Venice Hospital may have worked

in elevation as it stayed in line with the height of existing buildings in the city (Fig. 31)

Figure 31: Le Corbusier shows how he stays true to the height of the Venetian context.
 42

but the scale of the far-flung plan is completely questionable. Le Corbusier implied, when

he wrote the mayor of Venice accepting the commission, that skyscrapers would “kill”

Venice. It is likely that the mat hospital, because of its enormous scale would have acted

as an urban vacuum and had the same disastrous effect on the neighborhood, if not the

whole city. The repetitious, modular plan of care units, calle, and campiello also speak to

the efficiency and standardization that Le Corbusier favored from the very beginning of

his career, instead of the sensitivity to the individual called for in a hospital project.

Aalto’s sanatorium is more successful for a variety of reasons. He did not have to

worry about urban problems as his site was secluded. His patients, because of their

disease, were not expected to make a quick turnaround. Because of these reasons, he was

in a better position to focus on patient comfort than Le Corbusier. However, another

factor comes into play: his attitude toward the human body. His design started and ended

with the human body, while in Le Corbusier’s work, it was only the start. This is why, for

every step Le Corbusier made to help his patients recover, Aalto could take one more. If

Le Corbusier provided silent doors, Aalto provided silent doors and noiseless sinks. If Le

Corbusier gave patients a shared roof garden, Aalto did the same, plus gave each

individual patient an individualized view of the forest. Despite this, on the scale of the

patient cell, one cannot claim that the human body was absent from Le Corbusier’s final

product or his design thinking. The patient cell shows Le Corbusier, when dealing in the

small scale, was concerned for the body and was capable of providing comfortable,

salutatory environments almost on par with Aalto.

So why, then, if Aalto and Le Corbusier made similar gestures given the same

building typology, are they always pitted against each other? Why is Le Corbusier,
 43

despite evidence to the contrary, the cold techno-rational modernist with zero concern for

human enjoyment of architecture? Why is Aalto the cushy, humanist alternative on the

outermost fringes of the modern movement? This typecasting may come down to each

architect’s own words and how loud they were speaking. Le Corbusier burst on the

architecture scene with a series of projects and writings that screamed for a radical re-

evaluation of form, materials, and construction techniques. He proposed that an

engineer’s aesthetic and logic could solve both architectural and societal problems, as

well as be an indisputable formula for beauty. He started what would be a very

controversial and very global career with an incredibly emotional argument for efficiency

and standardization based on Gestalt principles; humans, at their core, appreciated the

machine aesthetic and anything else caused deep dissatisfaction.

…the man of today senses, on one hand a world that is elaborating itself

regularly, logically, clearly, that produces with purity things that are useful

and usable, and on the other hand, he find himself still disconcerted, still

inside the old hostile framework. This framework is his home; his city, his

street, his house, his apartment rise up against him and, unusable, prevent

his tranquil pursuit of the same spiritual path that he took in his work,

prevent which is to start a family and, like all animals of the earth and like

all men of all times, to live an organized family life. Thus is society

witness to the destruction of the family, and it senses with terror that this

will be its ruin. A great disaccord reigns between a modern state of mind

that is an injunction and the suffocating stock of centuries-old detritus.

(Toward an Architecture 305-307)

 44

If society didn’t shift and embrace this new aesthetic and ethic, they would grow

increasingly dissatisfied until they revolted: “architecture or revolution” (307).

These statements, essentially architectural battle cries, made him famous and flavored

everything he did thereafter. His first writings are indeed very prescriptive and

presumptuous; he writes that everyone: “children, savages, and metaphysicians” (102)

understand and appreciate the machine aesthetic. They even go as far to say that “all me

have the same organism, the same functions. All men have the same needs” (182). His

writings do, however, recognize that human enjoyment, comfort, and freedom are core

goals of architecture. If Le Corbusier started out his career as a mechanically-bent

techno-rationalist, he certainly did not end it that way. Only his very early works adhere

to his initial manifestos. His architecture and his sensibilities shifted. The human body

was a constant motif in his artwork and metaphor in his urban planning projects. His

ergonomic designs and Venice Hospital patient cell are evidence of an ever-increasing

consideration of the body; they show that the architect was indeed capable of “human”

design when the scale remained small.

Le Corbusier’s evolution is perhaps best exemplified in two statements: At the

beginning of his career, he famously wrote that “the house is a machine for living in”

(Toward an Architecture 87). At the end of his career, he said the Venice Hospital project

“must be a home for man, just like a house is a home for man” (Shah 25). Despite this

evolution and much evidence to the contrary, he is still lumped in with other modernists

who truly didn’t concern themselves with the body.

While Le Corbusier’s words made it difficult for anyone to see anything human in his

projects, Aalto’s writings and lectures made it difficult to see anything but.
 45

Throughout his career, Aalto repeatedly invoked the word “human”,

asserting that architecture should “serve human life,” or that is must

“humanize” an overwrought world. These vague, sometimes repetitious

incantations to humanism—the word “human” or its derivations appear no

less than 32 times in one of his articles—can be and at times have been

misleading. The allude not, as some writers have assumed or concluded, to

a kinder, gentler modernism…By “humanism” Aalto meant to exhort

modernists to create a rationalist architecture of the human being: a

physciological, perceiving, thinking creature, whose experiences and

cognitions are by their very nature phenomenological. (Williams 21).

Aalto didn’t write about how geometry and standardization would save the world. He

did not have a particularly global career; he practiced mainly in his home country of

Finland, so it was easy for critics to overlook him as merely a local practitioner, and not a

global architect as “true” masters were. Instead of rejecting all references to history,

typology, or place, he used many at the same time. This created a certain hodge-podge

architecture that didn’t line up with the reference-less concrete and glass boxes of his

contemporaries, giving Aalto a reputation as a bit of an eccentric. All these things, along

with a certain disregard for the structural clarity called for by his contemporaries, put him

outside of the typical definition of “modern.” This, however, should not be the case.

Aalto identified with and embraced the conditions of modern life, and

believed that Western culture was in the midst of an all-encompassing

break with the past. He consumed with nearly child-like enthusiasm

products that became the emblems of 20th century modernity, such as the
 46

automobile, the cinema, and the phonograph. As an artist he moved in the

society of modernism and befriended many of its most vigorous

proponents. And as an architect, he insisted on and incorporated the

central tenets of the new architectural credo that he believed would

advance architecture. This included incorporating new technologies when

appropriate to the task at hand: the elevator at the Paimio Sanatorium was

one of the earliest glass elevators in Finland, and his flexible

standardization of building parts for low-cost housing and his furniture

designs relied heavily on the techniques of mass-production that were

simply not possible before the technological innovations of the 20th

century. In other words, Aalto practiced what are indisputable the core

tenets of modernism… (Williams 32-33)

If Le Corbusier is a modernist, and Aalto is a humanist, then Aalto is also a modernist

and likewise, Le Corbusier is a humanist. Both are masters of the modern movement, and

the masters didn’t forget about the human body.

 47

IMAGE SOURCES

Images marked with an asterisk (*) refer to sources found in Works Cited, and are
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Fig. 1*: Le Corbusier. Toward an Architecture. 149.

Fig. 2: Fagus Factory. N.d. Let’s Keep It Wild. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

<http://mimimatelot.blogspot.com/2013/03/fagus-factory.html>

Citrohan House. N.d. Petit Cabanon. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

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villa-mairea-2/>

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Region. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

<http://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/tech_doc/hkpsg/full/ch11/ch11_fig_1

7.htm>

Fig. 5: Le Corbusier. Arcole Simla. 1952. Fondation Le Corbusier. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

Fig. 6: Le Corbusier. Deux Figures. 1947. Fondation Le Corbusier. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

Fig. 7: Le Corbusier. Panurge II. 1962. Fondation Le Corbusier. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

Fig. 8*: Samuel, Flora. Le Corbusier in Detail. 47.

Fig. 9: LC4 Chaise Lounge. N.d. Le Corbusier Chair. Web. 30 Dec. 2013.
 48

Fig. 10: Le Corbusier. Le Modular. 1945. Fondation Le Corbusier. Web. 30 Dec. 2013.

Fig. 11: Da Vinci, Leonardo. Vitruvian Man. 1490. Web. 28 Feb. 2014.

<http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/history/leonard

o.html>

Fig. 12: Viipuri Library. N.d. World Monuments Fund. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

Fig. 13: Baker House Dormitory. N.d. North Carolina Modernist Houses. Web. 19 Mar.

2014. < http://www.ncmodernist.org/aalto.htm>

Baker House (plan). N.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

<http://academics.triton.edu/faculty/fheitzman/architecturalmethod

ology-C.html>

Fig. 14: Zwartz, Kim. Villa Mairea, Normarkku. 1998. Oce. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

Fig. 15: Paimio Hospital Landscape. N.d. Archiprix Montevideo 2009. Web. 30 Dec.

2014. <http://www.archiprix.org/2013/index.php?project=2544>

Boo, Esther Serrano. Paimio Sanitorium. N.d. Mimoa. Web. 30 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/Finland/Paimio/Paimio%20Sanatorium>

Fig. 16: Paimio Sanatorium Plan. N.d. The Last Threshold: From Welcome to Farewell.

Web. 30 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/mellin/arch671/winter2004/student/Laroc

que/architect.html>

Fig. 17*: Sarkis, Hashim. Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital. 30.

Fig. 18*: Sarkis, Hashim. Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital. 41.

Fig. 19*: Williams, Sarah Goldhagen. “Aalto’s Embodied Rationalism.” 23.

Fig. 20*: Sarkis, Hashim, Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital, 23.

 49

Fig. 21: Carpaccio, Vittore. Martyrdom of the Pilgrims and the Burial of Saint Ursula.

1493. Web.

Fig. 22*: Sarkis, Hashim, Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital, 23.

Fig. 23: (generated by author)

Fig. 24: Tomas, Valena. 1994. Beziehungen, Ernst&Sohn Verlag. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

<http://predmet.fa.unilj.si/siwinds/s1/u1/su6/S1_U1_SU6_P2_1.htm>

Fig. 25*: Williams, Sarah Goldhagen. “Aalto’s Embodied Rationalism.” 25.

Fig. 26: (author-generated diagram over photo)

“Studmarsh to Venice.” 30 Jan. 2013. Blog from the Bog. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.

Fig. 27*: Williams, Sarah Goldhagen. “Aalto’s Embodied Rationalism.” 24.

Fig. 28: “Three Favorites.” N.d. Not P.C. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.

<http://pc.blogspot.com/2008_07_20_archive.html>

Fig. 29: Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. 13 Nov. 2010. Youth + Influence. Web. 30 Dec.

2013. < http://youthandinfluence.blogspot.com/2010/11/michael-

sorkin.html>

Fig. 30: Plantwall. N.d. Green Fortune. Web. 30 Dec. 2013.

Fig. 31*: Le Corbusier. Venice Hospital Elevation. 1967. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.

<http://mobiletest.moma.org/explore/collection/object/93640.iphone?mom

a_url_type=int&moma_title=Hospital,%20Venice%201962%E2%80%93

65.%20Elevation#object_93640>
 50

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<http://www.alvaraalto.fi/net/paimio/paimio.html>.
 51

Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Aalto’s Image of America.” Aalto and America. Ed. Stanford

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Trechner, Michael. The Alvar Aalto Guide. New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

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Trechner, Michael. “Baker House: The Individual and Mass Housing, a Delicate

Balance.” Aalto and America. Ed. Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, David Fixler.

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 52

Williams, Sarah Goldhagen. “Aalto’s Embodied Rationalism.” Aalto and America. Ed.

Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, David Fixler. 2012. 13-35. Print.

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Name of Candidate: Isabelle Ghabash

Birth date: December 7, 1991

Birth place: Greenville, Texas

Address: 3188 S. Bountiful Blvd.

Bountiful, UT 84010