Explaining an enigma

摘要

I've long been puzzled by Alvar Aalto: a great architect, certainly; but at the same time his work is strangely personal, so that discussing it seems to constitute almost an invasion of his privacy. We use his three-legged stools in our living room, so I think of him frequently. When I designed a block of flats in Highgate, I took the garden side with its balconies from Corb, and the road side with high strip bedroom windows from Aalto. I tried to make the design fit intimately to the sloping site, as he advocated.