Snowflakes in Snowflakes

This was Aalto University this last Wednesday, and this was a great way to see it, a crunchy carpet of crisp snow beneath your boots, wrapped up in your 'Crombie' with a big smile behind your scarf. What a great complex; it was time to look again at what Aalto actually does. I say does because it still matters to me. This is not an architecture with a narrative, not an architecture of fairy stories. You find yourself looking strictly at composition; at how he racks and stacks, how he layers horizontally, how he bookends, and how he manages to break out with lecture theatres and libraries suddenly filled with light and exuberance. And it's all brought together with such finesse, a language of detailing perfected over time and applied according to the situation; you can tell a Beethoven symphony if you have the ears, you can tell an Aalto building if you have the eyes (whatever the present enthusiasm for The Eyes of the Skin). And all this done from that small studio with a handful of trusted assistants wielding pencils!

Julie and I had joined a university field trip for the day, a bunch of nineteen year olds with nineteen year old enthusiasms, which is basically being glued to Whatsapp and Facebook. I had already feared the worst for our future passing through Heathrow. 'Robots, robots, robots' I wrote. The whole place appeared suddenly a prototypical corporate prison to be rolled out across the universe, where if you didn't shop virtually continuously, you were a threat to society, and everybody was noodling crap on their phone.

Even an eighty-seven year old George Soros has noted this as a threat to society. I doubt my sense of this threat is quite the same as his, but all this instantaneous twittering, so addictive to youth (and so levelling; nobody can step out of line- they face instant ostracisation) really makes me wonder (or rather sent me, repetitively to Harry's Bar on Liisankatu, where the old men still read their newspapers in the quiet, while they still can). That ability to concentrate, to actually look at a building (or for that matter the calm interior of Harry's Bar) and appreciate a hierarchy, is what is so compromised with this technology, and it is also when the future becomes just 'robots, robots, robots'.