Elephant and Butterfly - permanence and chance in architecture
Alvar Aalto Academy | Alvar Aalto Museum | City of Jyväskylä | Museum of Finnish Architecture | The Finnish Association of Architects
At the Alvar Aalto Symposium in 2000, architecture was likened to an elephant. Elephants live a long time and never forget - unlike a butterfly which lives only today and knows nothing of yesterday.
What else is left as a testimony of past empires and cultures, if not their architecture?
Today, those same old walls seem good enough again as the settings for new uses of all sorts: a 19th century railway station becomes a museum of art, or a dockside warehouse is turned into a luxury hotel. And people are more interested than ever in “genuine” materials and traditional building methods.
At the same time, it is claimed that the great tales of history are no more - that we are about to enter the new age of the nomad where fixed walls are no longer necessary.
It has been said that a butterfly can change the world with one flap of its wings.
It will be in the context of this charged atmosphere that we will prepare to discuss at the next, the 9th Alvar Aalto Symposium.
American artist James Turrell speaks about ‘old ditch and new water’. In Jyväskylä we will study the old riverbed’s geology, as it were, and take samples of the new water flowing through it.
Chance has two meanings in English: possibility and coincidence.
In Alvar Aalto’s works, tradition and revolution live in symbiosis but they often reveal a desire to surprise and amaze - the merest touch can change everything.