Aalto's attitude to the town was grounded in his love of Italian urban culture, but it was only in the youthful enthusiasm of the
1920s that he attempted to transplant Italian models directly to Finnish soil. In I932, in a remarkably prescient article entitled 'The Geography of the Housing Question', he speculated on the impact of the telephone on settlement patterns and argued that 'it allows for geographic decentralisation based on local groupings', and demonstrated with 'a funny, almost graphic, clarity . . . what the ideal conditions for settlements are when the need for contact between people is set as the criterion'. Written at the height of his enthusiasm for mainstream European Modernism, the article is clearly in line with the thinking behind the Athens Charter and Aalto remained committed to such an approach to housing throughout his career. But unlike Le Corbusier, who at the time of drafting the Charter apparently discounted the need for a monumental urban centre, Aalto, when faced the challenge of designing town centres, drew directly upon older European traditions exemplified by Camillo Sitte's analysis of urban space and the tradition of the 'city crown'.
(Die Stadtkrone, the city crown, was the title of a book by Bruno Taut, published in 19l9, which became widely known as a counter - argument to the garden city).
The traditions represented by Sitte and Taut were both present in the book Staden som lonstverk ('The City as a Work of Art'), written by Aalto's friend Gustav Strengell in 1922. Strengell, like Sitte before him, delighted in the 'organic' order that emerged from the seemingly adventitious historical processes of urban development; and while Aalto shared his enthusiasm, he was also influenced by the seemingly antithetical garden city tradition, which Lars Sonck, amongst others, had advocated as particularly appropriate to the layout of small Finnish towns. Aalto believed that, 'as a norm one may clearly hold to the desirability of as high a percentage as possible of single-family dwellings in immediate contact with nature'. He argued that, 'in Finland nature itself suggests, in a remarkable manner, a spread-out mode of settlement These ideas on the interweaving of town and countryside are demonstrated in plans such as those for Imatra (1947-53) where, even close to the centre, large tracts of farmland and forest are preserved. They are also evident in so-called 'Reindeer Horn Plan' prepared for Rovaniemi in I945. However, as with his great plan for Helsinki, Aalto had little success in realising his larger scale visions politics invariably intervening to thwart his holistic approach.
The first opportunity to propose a complete town centre came in 1944, in Sweden rather than Finland, for the small, relatively new mining community of Avesta. Aalto's plan combined a range of functions - offices, cafes, shops, workers' club, theatre and library - to create a picturesquely varied group of buildings around an informal pedestrian square. The composition was dominated by the cubic form of the city hall - complete with clock - and by the raking roof of the theatre, which was placed at an angle to the surrounding city grid as a mark of its civic status. The project contains the seeds of all Aalto's later town-centre plans but was rejected by the community, who disliked the relationship to the surroundings and particularly objected to Aalto's determination to combine different functions in the same buildings; the town hall wing, for example, had boutiques on the arcaded ground floor, and the library stood above shops. Aalto argued that such combinations of activities were healthy in promoting day- and night-time use of the civic centre - a principle he later applied, as we have seen, to the National Pensions Institute - and hoped that by grouping them he could create a complex of sufficient scale, variety and presence to with stand the onslaught of commercial buildings, which, in many city had already wiped out any possibility of establishing the civic complex as a visual and symbolic 'crown'.
In I949, as part of his comprehensive plan for Imatra - the need for which arose as a result of the territorial concessions made to Russia under the 1944 peace treaty - Aalto produced a detailed, but wholly unrealised design for the town centre, whose boldly articulated silhouette of towering masses clearly shows the influence of Italian hill-towns. The plan proposed an open-sided square, framed on three sides by the town hall and administration building, a theatre, an apartment building and a fire station. The stage of the theatre could open sideways on to a balcony overlooking the square, as well as into the auditorium through a conventional proscenium arch. The town hall was designed as an L-shaped plan capturing an implied courtyard, with a butterfly roof, long external staircase (akin to that employed in the competition entry for the new Finnish Parliament building in I923) climbing up to a cubic council chamber, which sat on an 'acropolis' of freely angled grass steps; the similarities with the smaller Saynatsalo Town Hall are obvious, and hardly surprising, as they were designed in the same year.
The ideas developed at Avesta and Irnatra were later applied to the new centres for the Finnish towns of Seinajoki, Rovaniemi and Jyvaskyla. None of these was completed by the time of Aalto's death in 1976, but both Seinajoki and Rovaniemi have subsequently been realised in line with drawings and sketches produced in the office during his lifetime. The most successful is Seinajoki, which will be considered in detail here as representative of Aalto's approach and achievement. Rovaniemi, although impressive on paper, clearly lacks the master's touch in its posthumous realisation; despite the fact that the completed buildings at Jyvaskyla were finished during his lifetime (the planned town hall remains on paper), there is a slackness in both overall spatial organisation and detail, and a tendency to indulge in gratuitous form-making, which cast doubts on the extent of Aalto's personal involvement with much of the design.
Aalto began work on what would become the Seinajoki town centre when he won the competition for the church, which he called 'The Cross of the Plains', in 1952. Construction did not start until 1958, and the following year he won another competition for the design of the complete centre, comprising - in addition to the large church and parish centre - a town hall, library, civic theatre and municipal offices. Aalto conceived the town centre as a traffic-free precinct of three interlinked squares. The first, in front of the church, is framed by the extensive accommodation required for the parish centre - offices, meeting rooms, facilities for children - and approached up a broad flight of steps from Koulukatu, a wide street which cuts across the centre. Designed to form an extension of the nave, the grassed 'square' can accommodate up to 15.000 people for services when the church's west wall, consisting of large sliding doors, is opened Seinajoki acts as the religious centre for the Lutheran church in central and northern Finland, hence the need to cater for such large number on special occasions.
The second square, defined by the town hall (1961-5), library (1963-5), and theatre (1968-87), is more like a broad street, paved with a tartan grid, which runs across Koulukatu up to the entrance to the church precinct, while the third is essentially a space for cars, hidden to view from the pedestrian areas. Although not obvious at first sight, the arrangement of the town hall and library closely follows the pattern established at Saynatsalo: the town hall is wrapped around a landscaped courtyard, all but taken over by the grass steps, which here create an informal amphitheatre from which to view civic events in the 'forum' of the street-square below. The Saynatsalo pool has likewise been expanded here to form an elongated basin, into which water spouts from a low stone wall, and the council chamber rises to loom large over the predominantly low-rise surroundings.
The main public / ceremonial spaces of the town hall are clad in Aalto's favourite dark blue tiles, which effectively suggest both the coursing of traditional masonry and the vertical texture of the forest. The tiles appear as vertical stripes or rectangular patches across the 'internal' courtyard facades of the administrative accommodation, establishing dominant vertical accents in what would otherwise be a predominantly horizontal effect. They also form a counterpoint to the structural grid behind, which is rendered almost illegible in the elevations; this is a typical example of that avoidance of 'artificial architectural rhythms' we first noted a connection with the Villa Mairea. The council chamber itself rises like a geometric hillside over this abstracted forest. Seen from the pedestrian side, it is a sectional 'slice', which one might expect simply to be extruded, but it steps back in plan and curves around at the opposite corner in response to the plan below, in which the seating is laid out diagonally in the rectangular room and focused on a quasi-classical circular alcove behind the raised table.
To avoid a visual clash with the richly coloured and highly articulated form of the town hall, the library presents a surprisingly reticent entrance elevation to the main public space. The long, white-rendered facade is set above a dark stone base, establishing the familiar 'geological' satisfaction of the overall mass, while the window to the offices are covered with protective screen of closely spaced, vertical, white-painted metal bars, which rhyme with the birch trees planted in the small park behind. Once inside, one of Aalto's most arresting and felicitous spaces unfolds, with bookshelves fanning out beneath an undulating ceiling designed as at Viipuri - to distribute reflected light evenly throughout the interior. The organisation similarly follows the spatial type developed at Viipuri: the central control desk looking out over a sunken reading area, the volumetric articulation of the Programme into a figural library hall, which reads externally as an undulating Aalto wall facing the lawn, spattered with silver birches; and a low, linear block of support spaces.
The theme of the richly modelled ceiling is one to which Aalto returned throughout his later work in the Villa Carré in France, as well as in numerous churches and auditoria to be considered in the next chapter - but nowhere is it more gracefully or appropriately deployed than here. In barn Utzon's later development of the theme, as for example in the Sydney duced two revised designs for the Viipuri Library and, in 1929, collaborated with Bryggman on the city of Turku's 700th Anniversary Exhibition, which doubled that year as the Finnish Fair for industrial products. This was an altogether more modest undertaking than the great 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, but none the less offered an opportunity to make a significant public statement about the virtues of Functionalism. The Finnish Fair Corporation was founded in 1920 to oversee such events. Its function was to promote trade - Russia no longer being the principal trading partner after the Revolution - and an international outlook in a climate still hostile to foreign culture. Although the Turku Fair was held a year before Stockholrn, Aalto was familiar with the designs being Prepared by Asplund and his colleagues, and they clearly provided a source of inspiration; he confirmed this point for future researchers by placing a postcard of the Stockholm Exhibition amongst the drawings in his office archives. However, as Elina Standertskjold has demonstrated, the influence of recent German exhibition design is also conspicuous in the emphasis on advertising and typography.
As the senior of the two architects, Bryggtnan seems to have been largely responsible for the overall site plan, also designing the major pavilions and restaurant, while Aalto organised the entrance area, smaller row pavilions and advertising stands. He also co-ordinated the innovative typography, to which all the exhibitors had to conform, much to their annoyance. This reflected the principles developed at the Bauhaus, notably by Laszl Moholy-Nagy. It was also no doubt hardy inspired by his experience of working for dhe Turun Sanomat. Aalto treated the whole exhibition as an exercise in communication. A letter to exhibitors from the organisers explained that visiting the fair would be like 'reading a newspaper', and that 'after the visitor has walked a few dozen metres, a new page will be turned with new advertisements'. The pavilions were cheaply constructed using a standardised timber system developed by the architects, and in the presentation of the project in Arkkithti Aalto stressed that the buildings, like a modern newspaper page, did not follow a specified form but were free variations which shared 'a similar tone'. As in the Paimio Sanatorium, he wanted to allow the parts a life of their own within a chosen formal, constructional language. This refusal to impose what he saw as an 'artificial synthesis' on form, and implicitly life, gradually asserted itself as a key motivation of all his work, although he reserved he right to suppress the vulgar (and stylistically outmoded) commercial imagery, which would have resulted from allowing the exhibitors total freedom. Aalto also designed the well-known choir platform, which, like the earlier choir shell and bandstand for the 1922 Industrial Exhibition in Tampere, was an organic form inspired by acoustic requirements; in retrospect, the double-curved reflector with its subtly stepped profile seems almost to pre-figure the articulation of his auditoria.
The final project normally assigned to Aalto's Functionalist phase, the Viipuri Public Library, underwent a series of transformations from the classical scheme we examined in the last chapter. Aalto received instructions to proceed with the design at the end of February 1928, by when he had completed the Paimio competition and was firmly committed to the new architecture. The jury had criticised the external stair hall and suggested that the glazed roof be replaced by site-lighting 'for climatic reasons', thereby effectively negating his elaborate outside-inside game. In his first revision, Aalto glazed the stair hall, eliminated the roof-lighting, and effected various planning changes, including the introduction of a radiating arrangement of shelves in the children's library, which hints at the fan-shaped plan that became a feature of his later libraries. The Building Committee were still unhappy with the projecting stair hall and Aalto responded by incorporating it as the inner face of an L-shaped plan; despite the Functionalist clothing of the fenestration, the volumes and planning remained essentially classical in spirit - a fact emphasised by the projected inclusion of a two-storey high relief or fresco of classical figures and Corinthian columns in the entrance hall. Aalto was saved from building this unhappy compromise by numerous delays and a change of site, and eventually, in 1933, he was instructed to prepare a scheme for a completely new location.

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