Industrial organisms : Sigfried Giedion and the Humanisation of Industry in Alvar Aalto's Sunila factory plant

This paper explores the role of industrialisation in Alvar Aalto’s work, with a particular emphasis on his Sunila pulp mill and associated housing and community projects, completed, for the most part, by 1939. While it is well known that Aalto was heavily involved in industrial projects, and this had an enduring influence on the trajectory of his practice (both directly and indirectly), the scholarship on this topic tends to suggest that this was secondary to his more well-documented interest in the cultural, site-related and humanist aspects of spatial design. This paper challenges this position, arguing that Aalto’s industrial works were not only central to his creative oeuvre, but presented a coherent and sustained attitude towards the urban challenges of modernisation. Aalto’s exposure to the work and ideas of Sigfried Giedion at this critical time, as well as his increasingly international profile, gave Aalto’s projects a resonance with broader historical issues that were having an effect on Europe at the time. Aalto used the Finnish industrial context to promote an expanded social and cultural context for modernism, negotiating a complex truce between the concerns of an emerging class of bourgeois industrialists and a migratory regional proletariat. Drawing from the model established at Sunila, the paper investigates the political and historical role that industry played in framing Aalto’s work and the relationship this has to the broader issues of architectural history and modernism.