Accident and the

u­nconscious as sources
Heterotopia
Although Alvar Aalto, like most architects of his generation, occa-
sionally applied proportional systems to determine the building design
in detail, he is usually pictured as the champion of an anti-methodical ap-
proach to architecture. His early masterpiece, the Villa Mairea (1939) in
Noormarkku, Finland, is said to embody such principles as “forest space”
or “Cubist collage.” The point is that the rich palette of materials and
forms in the building are not tied together by any concept but only by a
sensuous atmosphere. A little more analytically, architect and theorist
Demetri Porphyrios argued that Aalto’s architecture has a particular gen-
erating order, namely “heterotopia.” However, although Porphyrios claims
that in heterotopia there is no organizing principle that would collect the
different forms together, other writers have suggested that Aalto takes
the path of a visitor who enters the building as the original organization
around which other functions are arranged and distorted when it makes
the circulation more fluid. Another aspect of Aalto’s heterotopic designs
is that the variety of forms and organizations is used to highlight the
spaces that house the most important functions. Thus, he often cele-
brates the public spaces with an unusual shape, most notably a fan-shape
that resembles a Greek theater plan, and arranges the banal functions
(depending on the building, these might be offices, technical spaces,
standard apartments, etc.) in a repetitive, simple pattern.

Aalto’s design for the Cultural Center in Wolfsburg (1962) exempli-

fies the heterotopic method. Both the plan and the facade’s major pro-
grammatic elements have their specific organizational and aesthetic prin-
ciples. The polygonal auditoria above the main entrance are arranged in
a fan pattern and marked in the exterior walls with a striped marble clad-
ding. The offices, by contrast, are placed in an orthogonal order behind
a modernist facade that looks like an elongated version of the Villa ­Savoye
by Le Corbusier. Other relatively independent motifs are also introduced,
such as a Roman atrium house motif with a tent-like roof and an open
fireplace. Instead of a unifying grid, such as we might find in a Mies van
der Rohe building, > Precedent, Transformation of a specific model Aalto first gives
each programmatic element its own identity and specific form and then
packs the elements so close together that their ideal forms are distorted.
>  Figs. 38 and 39

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Fig. 38: Alvar Aalto, cultural center Wolfsburg Fig. 39: Alvar Aalto, cultural center Wolfsburg, 1st floor

While critics have debated the notion of heterotopia, Aalto himself

has suggested even stranger ideas about his design method. In one ­essay,
he claimed that he tries to ignore most of the information pertinent to
the design and draw almost child-like scribbles; and in another connec-
tion, he described his design approach as “play.” While the main building
of the Experimental House in Muuratsalo (1953), Finland, can be seen as
a romantic ruination of a more sober Roman atrium house, the strange
(only partly realized) “tail” section looks different. Indeed, it has been
suggested that the Experimental House involved playing with drawings
of different kinds and in different scales, using landscape features in min-
iature for free-form pavilion plans, and even mixing portraits with site
plans. One of Aalto’s recurrent devices is to use the same formal motifs
at radically different scales: thus, one of his signature motifs, a fan or-
ganization, appears as the leg joint of a stool, as the ceiling of his church
in Wolfsburg, as the plan of Seinäjoki library, and the site plan for a hous-
ing development in Kotka, Finland. > Figs. 40–42

Surrealist devices
Some contemporaries of Aalto more precisely articulated anarchic
design methods. For instance, Josef Frank promoted a notion of “acci-
dentism,” which involved the quasi-accidental combination of various
­images both from high culture and lowbrow kitsch, in order to achieve
the kind of vitality that characterizes naturally grown cities. > Fig. 43

The notion of accident as the driving force of artistic or architectural

creativity has been very popular in the 20th century. The roots of the idea
are found, however, in Antiquity: Aristotle comments on figures seen in
clouds and Pliny tells of Protogenes who created paintings by throwing
a sponge against the wall. Inspired by these classics, Leonardo remarked
that a wall spotted with stains contains landscapes, battles, and faces.
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Fig. 40: Alvar Aalto, weekend house Muuratsalo,   Fig. 41: Alvar Aalto, plan sketch
site plan

Fig. 42: Alvar Aalto, Muuratsalo, site plan sketch Fig. 43: Josef Frank, accidentist architecture

His comments were developed into a veritable theory of aleatorism in

1785 by Alexander Cozens, an English landscape painter whose treatise
A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions
of Landscape describes “a mechanical method … to draw forth the ideas”
of artists. It consists of making casual and accidental ink blots on paper
with a brush; the paper may be first crumpled up in the hand and then
flattened. Cozens stresses that the blot is not a drawing, but an assem-
blage of accidental shapes, from which a drawing may be made. After
­selecting a suggestive blot, the artist should trace an image out of it
­without adding anything not in the blot. The drawing is finished by add-
ing ink washes. The purpose of this method was to free the artist from
involuntary servitude to conventional schemes of landscape composition
by relinquishing deliberate control. > Fig. 44
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Fig. 44: Alexander Cozens, inkblots

Similar methods were applied in the 20th century by the surrealists,

who also revived the spiritist and theosophist technique of automatic
writing. While the theosophists had thought of automatic writing as a sit-
uation in which the medium releases his or her self in order to let spirits
guide the hand, the surrealists reframed the practice in psychoanalytic
terms. Adopting a popular parlor game, the first generation of surrealist
painters toyed with the method of “exquisite corpse” in order to replace
an individual author by a group. The first person draws something on top
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 of a sheet of paper and folds the paper to conceal the drawing, except
for a few points to which the next person has to connect. Max Ernst’s
­favorite method was frottage, creating automatic images and patterns by
making a rubbing on a piece of paper placed on top of a textured surface.
He also applied grattage, a technique in which paint is scraped off a
­canvas.

Later surrealists came up with several additional techniques to pro-

duce images. In Romanian artist and poet Gherasim Luca’s cubomania,
several images are cut into identically sized squares, which are then
­rearranged at random to make surprising new combinations. Soufflage
is a technique in which liquid paint is blown onto a surface; in parsemage
charcoal dust is scattered on the surface of water and then skimmed off
with a sheet of paper; in fumage images are imprinted on a sheet of
­paper or canvas by the smoke of a candle or a kerosene lamp; entoptic
graphomania, a variation of automatic drawing as devised by Luca’s com-
patriot artist Dolfi Trost, consists of marking accidental impurities in the
paper with dots that are then connected with lines. One of the few three-
dimensional methods is coulage, a technique in which molten wax, choc-
olate or tin is poured into cold water to create an accidental sculpture.

Later, Trost went on to abandon such artistic techniques of surreal-

ist automatism in favor of those “resulting from rigorously applied scien-
tific procedures.” However, in the latter cases as well, the result would
be unpredictable.

There are also a few architects who apply surrealist methods to

­ etermine the forms of their buildings. Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky
d
of Coop Himmelb(l)au revived automatic drawing in their Open House
project for Malibu, California (1990). The design was created “from an
explosive-like sketch drawn with eyes closed. Undistracted concentra-
tion. The hand as a seismograph of those feelings created by space.”
While one of the architects was drawing, the other converted the sketch
into a three-dimensional model without censorship or evaluation – while
Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix would blast out of high-performance loud-
speakers. > Figs. 45 and 46

Many other contemporary architects have been influenced by Sur-

realism, even if surrealist methods have not been used directly for form-
giving. Rem Koolhaas, who explicitly referred to Salvador Dalí’s Paranoid-
Critical Method, has focused on programmatic effects rather than formal
configurations, and has recommended overlaying incompatible programs
into a discontinuous whole that is expected to engender new events. One
example is the OMA design for the Parc de la Villette (1982) in Paris,
which is a montage of incongruent programmatic elements. In more
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Fig. 45: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Open House (project), Fig. 46: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Open House, model
sketch

Fig. 47: Bernhard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts, translating a story into architecture

Fig. 48: R&Sie, Dusty Relief/B-mu, (project) section Fig. 49: R&Sie, Dusty Relief/B-mu, View of the building

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­precise terms, architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi divides such opera­
tions into dis-, cross-, and transprogramming. He has also explored the
potential of montage, with explicit references to film, and proposed
­elaborate systems of notation. Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts
(1978/94) translates a detective novel narrative into an architectural pro-
ject. > Fig. 47

A more rigorously surrealist project is the design for a Contempo-

rary Art Museum in Bangkok, Thailand, by R&Sie (2002), entitled Dusty
Relief/B-mu. It involves, among other things, a random relief calculated
from the pixelization of “aleatory particles for a pure grey ectoplasm”; an
electrostatic system that collects the city’s dust on the surface of alu-
minum latticework; and finally, a schizophrenic contrast between the
“­Euclidean” interior and the “topological” exterior. The result is a build-
ing with a facade that constant changes in color, shape and texture in
­response to air pollution in the city. > Figs. 48 and 49

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