Alvar Aalto’s Atmospheric Light: Haptic and emotive light in architecture

On the 8th of June, the Royal Danish Academy, the Institute of Architecture and Design and Copenhagen Contemporary have the pleasure of inviting you to the last event in the knowledge track 'Light and Space'; a series of talks and lectures that unfold the interdisciplinary meeting between art and architecture during the spring of 2022.

This time, with the Finish architect, professor emeritus and writer, Juhani Pallasmaa. He will give a lecture, with the title: 'Alvar Aalto’s Atmospheric Light: Haptic and emotive light in architecture'. 

Early on, Alvar Aalto was seen as the dissident among the leading modernists.

His architecture echoes history and time, and its forms, materials and details project emotive and tactile experiences. Instead of intellectualized generality, he sought differentiation, specificity and intimacy. As modernist architects in general were interested in the quantity of light, Aalto aimed at a qualitative and atmospheric light.

Both in his architectural illumination and designs of fixtures for artificial lighting, he created realms of nesting spaces of light within each other, and lights that caress surfaces and turn them into haptic experiences, as opposed to pure visuality. Aalto also understood that we need differences of illumination level, and even twilight or darkness.

The Council Chamber of his Säynätsalo Town Hall has a surprisingly low level of illumination, but it supports the privacy and individuality of the Council members. As a total contrast, the interior of the Three Crosses Church is bathed in a omnipresent and elevating light without direction; space, form and light are totally fused.

In many of his buildings, Aalto created illuminations that evoke the experiences of being in the spotted and constantly changing light of the forest. He used natural phenomena, the rhythmically varying spaces of forests and even the northern lights as metaphoric generators of architectural spaces. Aalto's design for the Finnish Pavilion at the World Exhibition of 1939 in New York has been often connected with the spaces of the Baroque era, but it is really a synthetic image of the northern forest space and the amazing image of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. 

Juhani Pallasmaa
Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor emeritus, writer, Helsinki. Design work in 1983-22 through his office in Helsinki. Rector of the Institute of Industrial Design, Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Helsinki University of Technology. Several visiting professorships in the USA; teaching and lecturing in numerous universities in Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury 2008-14.

Pallasmaa has published 70 books and 800 essays and prefaces; writings translated in 36 languages. His books include: 'The Embodied Image', 'The Thinking Hand', 'The Architecture of Image: existential space in cinema and The Eyes of the Skin'.

He is honorary member of SAFA, AIA and RIBA, and has received six Honorary Doctorates and numerous Finnish and international awards.

'The light and space' – series of talks is supported by The Dreyers Foundation and The Danish arts Foundation.