Alvar Aalto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvar_Aalto

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (3 February 1898 – 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer, as well as a sculptor and painter. His work includes architecture ...

‎Vyborg Library - ‎Finlandia Hall - ‎Paimio Sanatorium - ‎Artek (company)

Alvar Aalto MUSEO

www.alvaraalto.fi/

Offers a biography, bibliography and list of the Finnish architect's buildings, as well as information on the Alto archives, museum and academy.

In English - Alvar Aalto MUSEUM

www.alvaraalto.fi/index_en.htm

Alvar Aalto Foundation receives a generous grant to conserve Paimio Sanatorium. 1; 2; 3; 4. Retrieving RSS feed(s). Retrieving RSS feed(s). All current news.

Alvar Aalto | ArchDaily

www.archdaily.com/tag/alvar-aalto

The Alvar Aalto Symposium gathers together top names in contemporary architecture. This year's international figures include American architect Greg Lynn, ...

「Alvar Aalto 所秉持『人本為主』和『與大自然融合』的設計精神，是值得我們用不同的觀點再次去體會的。」

這是 Vitra Design Museum 館長兼 Alvar Aalto 回顧展策展人的 Jochen Eisenbrand，談到這位北歐設計之父留給世人設計啟發上的描述。而就 Alvar Aalto 自身來說，透過觀察、旅行、影像與藝術的薰陶，讓他不但更加熟悉光線和空間的掌握，也更深信「建築」與「藝術」是密不可分地相互影響著；因此，Alvar Aalto 在從古典主義走向現代功能主義的過程中，才能發揮與眾不同的創意，進而無違和地處理並使用自然材質。當然，Alvar Aalto 最為人津津樂道的典範之一：為建築量身打造家具，「讓日常生活中更為美好」，更是他在成立 artek 品牌時所傳達的中心思想。這也是為什麼此次回顧展的核心主題──「第二自然」(Second Nature)，是如此貼切地呼應了 Alvar Aalto 在設計上的不朽成就。

說了那麼多，你只需要知道的一點，就是 MOT/TIMES 特派記者這次親臨展場要讓設計迷們大飽眼福！從熟到不能再熟的設計作品，再到鮮為人知的手稿、繪畫和建築模型中，一同帶領大家走進北歐設計之父 Alvar Aalto 眼中的「第二自然」：http://goo.gl/GvwOLa

北歐現代主義之父 Alvar Aalto 堪稱是芬蘭國寶建築師，不過對芬蘭人來說，Alvar Aalto 雖是芬蘭之光，但更像是揮之不去的歷史包袱，因為芬蘭當地超過 80 棟的 Aalto 建築作品，居然讓芬蘭人因被過度包圍而無感，甚至還抱怨：「拜託來點不一樣的，別又是 Alvar Aalto 的設計了！」

雖然小編很想對芬蘭人說：「拜託你們才身在福中不知福」，但為了一探究竟，MOT TIMES 決定將目光移到 Aalto 的成長之地──芬蘭中部的 Jyväskylä，畢竟要瞭解一個人，就要去他生長的地方。而我們這次不但探訪當地著名的 Alvar Aalto 博物館，也特地專訪館長 Tommi Lindh，他不僅是 Alvar Aalto 專家、又是芬蘭在地人，若想打聽芬蘭人對 Aalto 不為人知的真心話，問他就對了！http://goo.gl/nmHh6D
‪#‎AlvarAalto‬

到 Alvar Aalto 博物館來趟大冒險，卻聽見館長 Tommi Lindh 的真心話：「拜託來點不一樣的，別又是 Alvar Aalto 的設計了！」 - MOT TIMES…

MOTTIMES.COM

Vitra Design Museum 經典 Alvar Aalto 回顧展──帶你一覽北歐設計之父眼中的「第二自然」 - MOT/TIMES線上誌

若說在德國 Vitra Design Museum 所舉辦的「Alvar Aalto 展」是個回顧展，那麼展覽主題：「Second Nature」則表達了此展用有別以往的角度和深度，再次展現芬蘭國寶級設計大師 Alvar Aalto，其建築、家具、玻璃器皿等創作上的歷練和成就。這次 MOT/TIMES 特派記者深入直擊的展出內容中，除了設計迷早已熟悉且獨具特色的有機主義作品，還有鮮為人知的手稿、繪畫、建築和都市建構藍圖；而讓此展覽更顯特別之處，則是館長兼策展人的 Jochen Eisenbrand，邀請了德國攝影師 Armin Linke，特為此展親往拍攝 Alvar Aalto 多件至今仍完…

MOTTIMES.COM

"For Judd what mattered was the placement of these pieces, very deliberately sandwiched between walls, floor and ceiling. There is nothing inherently magical about any of these units. This is one of the very important contributions that Judd's art makes. Its really about space as much as it is about object." Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, on artist Donald Judd, who was born this day in 1928. Judd will be the subject of a MoMA retrospective in fall 2017.http://bit.ly/1Kas9Mr

[Donald Judd. "Untitled (Stack)." 1967. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Judd Foundation, licensed by VAGA, New York]

SoHo Home and Studio
Critic’s Notebook
The Artist’s Force Field, Frozen in Time

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Donald Judd’s library, with his drawing pencils, stones and Alvar Aalto furniture, at 101 Spring Street in SoHo. Starting on Monday, the restored building will be opened to small group tours. More Photos »

Donald Judd - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Judd‎
Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 – February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism (a term he nonetheless stridently disavowed).

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 30, 2013

“Things that exist exist,” the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd once wrote, “and everything is on their side.” His words are in a sense the credo of an empiricist, which was Judd’s preferred description of himself. He disdained the term Minimalist, along with the whole idea of art movements.

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Donald Judd’s SoHo Home and Studio

Judd, who died in 1994 at the age of 65, didn’t believe in the afterlife, but he did believe in his art and his legacy. So it is hard not to imagine some kind of Judd spirit approving when 101 Spring Street, the five-story 19th-century cast-iron building in SoHo where he lived and worked off and on for 25 years, opens for small public tours on Monday, his 85th birthday. Its inauguration can only be good for art, design and architecture in New York City and elsewhere.

Spring Street is once again almost precisely as Judd left it, after a painstaking three-year renovation, at a cost of $23 million, that has included extensive repairs to the cast-iron facade, new double-pane windows and frames (in a building that is mostly windows), the installation of climate control and adjustments to meet fire and safety regulations. Various pieces of Judd’s art, as well as that of artists he admired — Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Frank Stella and Larry Bell — remain exactly where he placed them. So does the furniture — most of it by Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveld and Judd himself — and the kitchen utensils, stacked dinner plates and rows of ceramic bowls and glasses. African sculptures line the five-story stairwell, which Judd left largely untouched.

Astoundingly, given the generations of artists that New York has nurtured, the Judd building is the first fully preserved artist’s house-museum in Manhattan and only the second in the city as a whole. (The other, in Staten Island, is the home of the documentary photographer Alice Austen, who died in 1952.) Its preservation and elaborate rehabilitation reflect the obstinance and inspired dedication of the artist’s son and daughter, Flavin and Rainer Judd, now 45 and 42. They refused to listen when advised to sell Spring Street to settle the debts of Judd’s messy estate and to support the larger concentration of Judd’s many activities in Marfa, Tex. — his art, extensive collections and immense library, as well as the several buildings he redesigned, turning them, he rightly claimed, into architecture.

But Spring Street is the template for all things Marfa, and New York is where Judd became an artist. It is more than right that the city should have its own, more compressed, equally revelatory Judd environment. After all, Judd’s many interests — art, design, visual culture — are expressed most fully and accessibly by the spaces in which he lived and worked. Spending time in them looking at the art, the everyday objects and his deliberate arrangement of everything can be a life-changing experience.

That totality changed my life when I first encountered it as a Midwestern college student in the fall of 1968. I suspect it will similarly affect others, starting on Monday. (Reservations can be made at juddfoundation.org; admission is $25; $12.50 for students.)

I met Judd while participating in the Whitney Museum’s fledging independent-study program, and I ended up writing my senior thesis on his decadelong evolution from painting into the realm of three dimensions. He was the first prominent artist I had ever known; his work, the first contemporary art I had ever tried to understand and write about.

I didn’t understand much at that point or write very well about it. But I got something immediate and irrevocable when I first visited the small loft at Park Avenue South and 19th Street — now replaced by a Gwathmey Siegel monstrosity — where he lived at that time with his wife, Julie Finch, and Flavin, then 9 months old. Just about every object in sight held my attention, whether it was a kitchen pot or the bead-encrusted gold box with a knife piercing one corner, a work by Lucas Samaras placed (then as now) at one corner of his bed. A cactus garden set in big, shallow, galvanized-iron pans signaled his affinity for the Southwest. (He much preferred the crisp distinctions of that area’s topography and flora to the blending greens of the Northeast.)

Every object chez Judd had a kind of strength of personality or presence, as if it had been carefully scrutinized before being let in the door, which it had. This sense of scrutiny helped me not only to understand Judd’s work; it also clarified something in myself. I liked looking at things, all kinds of things, analyzing them, figuring out what was good, what worked and why.

The Whitney semester salvaged my college career by setting my sights on New York and its art world. To research my paper, I interviewed Judd extensively, and for the next few years he was a good friend and mentor, and for some time after that, I was an unabashed Juddite. Occasionally during that semester I accompanied him on trips to his fabricator, Bernstein Brothers, an industrial metal shop in Long Island City, Queens. Once or twice I went with him to 101 Spring Street — in what was then called the Cast-Iron District — which he had just purchased. As the building was being cleared out, he was moving things in. I remember standing in the building’s filthy basement unrolling his paintings from the 1950s, which seemed like ancient history.

When I returned the following fall, after graduation, Judd and his family were living, or at least camping out, at 101 Spring Street. Soon he began a series of improvements and adjustments, some of which I witnessed firsthand while working as his secretary and later on his catalogue raisonné in the early 1970s. They would continue until his death.

Judd once characterized himself as having been “born attracted to space,” and 101 Spring Street was his first chance to show what he meant: art and other things worth looking at deserve to be seen, properly placed in the proper amount of space; space is interesting in itself, whether as open landscape or apportioned by architecture. The building intensified his already sharp preservationist instincts, which gave priority to existing structures and the natural landscape. He disliked most Earthworks as violations of nature and preferred improving existing buildings to erecting new ones. “I’ve never built anything on new land,” he once wrote proudly.

Judd was especially attracted to the cast-iron buildings that dominated SoHo (a term he hated almost as much as Minimalism) for the incipient modernity of their uncluttered lines, spaces and simple method of fabrication: their iron parts were sand-cast in multiples and assembled.

Judd must also have admired 101 Spring Street’s repeating forms. Its many windows and the five light-filled spaces that they sheath corroborated his favored compositional approach of “one thing after another.” He conceived of each floor as a single, unobstructed space dedicated to a single activity: sleeping (fifth), working (third) and eating (second). He viewed the fourth floor, which contains tables and benches of his design, as a kind of parlor.

Judd’s plans changed as the building evolved. When the studio was being plastered, he decided that he liked the rough undercoat; the white finishing layer was never applied. His alterations were subtle but striking: he opened the fourth floor to the stairwell and — perhaps his most brilliant addition — covered the ceiling with the same kind of wood used in the floor, implying a planar volume often found in his sculptures. He also experimented; for a while in the 1970s the building’s elevator shaft was painted his signature color, cadmium-red light, before reverting back to white.

Long before he started seriously designing furniture, you can see that the line between art and functioning object blur at Spring Street. For example, on the second floor, some of the kitchen shelves progress from 2 to 12 inches high in increments of 2 inches. The design is a simplified form of the progressions he used in some of his wall sculptures — and who knew that a two-inch-high shelf was perfect for storing cutlery?

On the fifth floor he designed and built a small wood and plaster structure to serve as a walk-in closet/dressing room. It has stainless-steel sinks (never hooked up) whose elliptical shape and slanted bottoms echo a circular, site-specific sculpture he made for display on the ramp of the Guggenheim. Overhead, a sleeping loft for Flavin has one of my favorite design touches: a ladder with footholds requiring the children to face inward while ascending or descending. Other signs of fatherly attention include, in a shelf-lined nook on the third floor, a collection of his children’s grade-school efforts in ceramics.

The resurrection of 101 Spring Street is Flavin and Rainer Judd’s hard-won tribute to their father, and a testament to their own perseverance. It may be something he could not have quite imagined, and he probably couldn’t have pulled it off, given his disdain for red tape. It pays homage to his life and vision, but it is not just a shrine. Beyond illuminating Judd’s exacting sensibility, the building and its contents offer a multitude of lessons in looking, pure and simple, at things that exist, in space, and their potent effect on our lives.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 30, 2013

Donald Judd’s SoHo Home and Studio

Roberta Smith writes: “Spring Street is once again almost precisely as Judd left it, after a painstaking three-year renovation, at a cost of $23 million, that has included extensive repairs to the cast-iron facade, new double-pane windows and frames (in a building that is mostly windows), the installation of climate control and adjustments to meet fire and safety regulations.”

Ms. Smith writes: “Beyond illuminating Judd’s exacting sensibility, the building and its contents offer a multitude of lessons in looking, pure and simple, at things that exist, in space, and their potent effect on our lives.”
A Judd sculpture, left, and a desk on the third floor.