Arquitectura e interiorismo: Reima Pietilä

Fuente: Pietilä. Alvar Aalto Museum
Fotografías: © Iñaki Bergera

Tampere 1959-66

I do not know the rules for designing a ‘correct’ modern church. But I do know that in goog modern architecture the exterior and interior spaces form a constructive union. Perhaps in the church, a certain ‘genius loci’ together with the construction becomes ‘metaphorical’. In orther words – an architectural imagery emerges and communicates. The church is “a limenphenomenon” an ‘ eternal-between-two-worlds’; a metaphor for ‘this-side-nees’ and ‘that-side-ness’… Kaleva Church is a functionalistic building if we accept that its function is to be a metaphor of metaphysical ideas and that its artistic form can then follow that!

Genius Loci – personal interpretations. SAFA seminar on architecture and urban planning 1982

The following form relationships give the composition its character: 1) as the ‘form embryo ‘, an angled fine, 2) al/ ‘embryos’ vary in size, 3) at least tour ‘embryos’ in each form unit, 4) the form characteristics are continuous in adjacent form units, and 5) there is continuous transformation of form characteristics within the groups of adjacent form units and 6) there is a contradiction of form characteristics in the form units situat-ed in relations differing in denomination.

Kaleva Curch. Arkkitehti 11-12/66 (Translated by Fred A. Fewster)

You have said that Umberto 8occioni is the architect of Kaleva Church or that Suvikum-pu is de Stilj architecture in Finland. How is it so?

The young generation of artists and architects were creating in the relatively short period of 1910-1920 many new and revolutionary cultural ideas that stilj are living architecture. Forme the ltalian Futurist Movement has been a source of impulses. lt is necessary to fill certain gaps in the development of our present architecture also. Thus Kaleva church is emerging from the sculptural space concept of Umberto Boccioni. I was conscious of this spiritual descendance. Thus.¡ design became an “homage to Boccioni”.

The dwellings of Suvikumpu in Tapiola ha ve the character of that “Art-Architecture Synthesis” typical for the early Bauhaus. The studygroup, Le Carré Bleu, founded by Aulis Blomstedt in the middle fifties, was analyzing the heritage of Functionalism. From that time comes the idea of REVIT ALIZED HERITAGE that is applied experimentally also in Dipoli. lf I have to date its origin then the year 1910 and Futurism could be the hit.

An lntrospective lnterview. A+U 9/74