The Alvar Aalto Museum’s autumn exhibition brings the public face to face with seven decades of sketches and drawings by the architect Eric Adlercreutz (b. 1935). It tells us about his work as an architect and his passion for drawing.

Ever since his first trip to Italy, Adlercreutz has been recording street views and landscapes in Finland and the Mediterranean region on his sketch pads. The architettura minore style of buildings in Italy’s small towns has inspired generations of architects and architecture students throughout the decades, and journeys to the roots of European architecture have been an integral part of their studies. Adlercreutz’s six years working at Alvar Aalto architect’s office reinforced the enthusiasm this skilled wielder of pen and pencil felt for Italian architecture, an enthusiasm he still feels today.

For Adlercreutz drawing means thinking – a collaboration between brain and hand, and a multifaceted way of contemplating things seen and experienced. The drawings in the exhibition allow us to study the architect’s way of working, as the drawer’s pen seeks ways of enacting the dialogue between a building and its surroundings. A freehand sketch develops through multiple stages into a meticulously refined architecture-competition entry. The exhibition pays homage to and presents the case for hand-drawn image in this era of technology-aided drawings. In addition, the works chosen for the exhibition include delicate, yet powerfully expressive drawings of animals and human portraits, the earliest being from the 1950s.

Adlercreutz has created abstract acrylic paintings and coloured-pencil drawings of architecture as a spatial experience. They offer us a viewpoint onto the architect’s creative play with line, form and colour, and a window into the meaning of freeform practice and the joy of drawing.

The exhibition opening is at 18:00 on Thursday, September 26, 2019. You are welcome!

The exhibition has been curated by Juha-Heikki Tihinen, PhD, and designed by Eric Adlercreutz.
It has been mounted in a collaboration between Pro Artibus Foundation and the Alvar Aalto Museum.

ERIC ADLERCREUTZ – THE ARCHITECT’S PEN MEETS THE PAPER
Sketches and drawings from 1950 – 2018

Alvar Aalto Museum Gallery, September 27, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Alvar Aallon katu 7, 40600 Jyväskylä
Tel. +358 40 135 6210
open 11-18, Tues-Sun
www.alvaraalto.fi