In this lecture we're going to take a look at Scandinavia and Italy. And we're gonna look at their modern design, with, really, a kind of focus on what happens as they transition from that kind of early modernism in Europe into the design that ends up having a lot of impact on America after the Second World War. Taking a look at the map of Europe here, we can see that Scandinavia, located in the northern portion of Europe, is actually composed of five countries. It includes Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. We're not going to be looking at all five of those countries, but I do want you to keep in mind that the design that comes from the individual countries is a little bit different one country from the next, but we can talk about them in a kind of general sense because they share some commonalities. In the southern portion of Europe, we have Italy, the yellow boot there down at the bottom of the screen. They have very different climates and, although they're very distant from each other in Europe, both of them have a very strong impact on what's happening in the United States after World War Two. Now the image on the left-hand side kind of represents, for at least the purposes of this lecture, ideas about Scandinavian design. Scandinavians have, for many, many decades actually, been wonderful stewards of their land. They have a tremendous respect for for the natural environment and they actually use it quite a lot as well, but they replant, they take very great care. This relationship with nature and natural materials really informs a lot of their work in the first half of the century and continues to inform their work even into the second half of the 20th century, when all kinds of new technology has developed in new materials enter the design scene. Italy, on the other hand, is a much more kind of urban country, although it also has beautiful natural landscapes, the focus is more on the urban environment and because of that we see a lot more design discourse. It's not that in Scandinavia they don't write about or think about design, but in Italy that's much more of the focus; so we very often see designs that are the result of a kind of intellectual exploration coming out of Italy. Let's start by looking at Scandinavia. So one of the other things that's really important about Scandinavian design is that the Scandinavian countries have a very strong political and social desire to keep their economics very even amongst all people, so they kind of avoid the situation of extreme wealth or extreme poverty. And they do this through a system of sort of social, a sort of social network that's built up. Well this desire to have a strong middle class is really reflected in their designs, so there's kind of a focus on creating design that's going to serve the middle class as well. It means that it's thoughtful, very functional, beautiful, and long-lasting. And we can see that kind of idea permeating much of Scandinavian design and it's also part of the reason that Americans embrace Scandinavian design in the 1940s and '50s. So here, looking at Finland first. Probably the most well-known architect of the first half of the 20th century in, in Finland is Alvar Aalto. He's a man who approaches modern design with many of the same kind of ideas that we saw coming out of the Bauhaus and those of Corbusier. And when we look here at the Villa Mairea, from the latter part of the 1930s, we see a building that really reflects a lot of those ideas. It's got the white stucco façade that's completely devoid of ornament, it has windows that are placed for functionality and, in order to allow light in, and access to outdoor spaces. We see the use of this kind of built-in awning that comes out over the path to protect the family as they're coming and going from the house, but we, and we see the flat roof, as well; just as we had seen, for instance, at the Master's houses in the Bauhaus. What's different here though? There's something very different about this exterior than, for instance, the Master's houses at the Bauhaus. There's a tremendous amount of wood being used here and it's being used really in a way that relates to the forest that surrounds the house. So we see these perpendicular strips of wood all along the balcony that really reflect the way that the forest outside is made up of perpendicular tree trunks, and it's that same kind of rich pine color as the trees. Now the house has a very strong relationship to the garden area and the forest as well. It has a much more kind of undulating form to it so that it seems to be built kind of reaching out in the front, into nature, and then circling around and kind of enclosing the the back garden really embracing it and creating, in essence, an outdoor room. When we look, for instance, at the back façade what we see is a building that is very much integrated into the landscape. And it's not just through the shape of the building, it's also through these trellises that encourages the growth of the plants up onto the side of the building, sort of like the forest encroaching on the building; a sort of sense of ruins that he encourages. Even when we take a look at these poles that, in a Corbusier Building, or in a building by one of the students of the Bauhaus, would have been of tubular steel, here what we see are actually natural wooden sticks and they, and they actually still have the marks from where the branches were and everything. These are, these have a very kind of rough natural quality to them. Looking below that balcony you can see a fireplace that's been built out of fieldstone, creating this kind of indoor/outdoor space encouraging kind of integration with nature, both through the materials and through the function of the space. When we enter the house it's no less integrated. Again, there's no applied ornament, we see the use of an open plan, many of the things that we see in modern architecture in other parts of Europe. But here there's really an attempt to integrate this interior space with the exterior through a kind of reminder of the tree trunks in the forest, here, in these pine poles that run floor-to-ceiling and you can see, as well, how they're randomly placed. They continue on the side of the staircase; it's a free-standing staircase; the treads of which are made of slabs of pine. Moving into the sitting room we see that the ceiling is also sheathed in wood giving it a very kind of warm quality, the floors also have this kind of rich warm quality because they too are made of natural materials, and even the metal column that sits in the center of the room, expressing the way that the building was made, is wrapped in a natural material. I believe that this is a kind of cane that's wrapped on this, on this pole although he also wraps poles sometimes in leather. Looking around the room we see simple, comfortable, functional furniture. There's definitely an eye here for functionality, but comfort has not been forgotten and, to that end, there's a great deal of texture. He introduces carpets that are woven in the tradition of the rye, which was a kind of carpet that had been produced in Scandinavia and in all the Scandinavian countries for a very long time. And here he's chosen examples and very simple, kind of monotone colors, but still there's a kind of textural warmth to them. Alvar Aalto wins the competition to build the Finnish pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair and the exterior of this building reminds us, in some ways, of the Villa Mairea with these vertical wooden slats covering a very, very simple façade, again, with no applied ornament; very much in the modernist genre. We can even see this as the the sort of early years of the International Style the only applied elements to the exterior are purely functional, letting us know that it is the finished pavilion and and the lighting. Moving to the interior of the pavilion, we see the same kind of wall treatment; but here the wall has this kind of undulating quality to it. This form actually becomes signature to much of Aalto's work. He's organized the display in this interior as a series of photographs of both the nature of Finland and also the manufacturing in Finland; and on the ground floor there is a display of manufactured goods. This, this display and what was presented at the other Scandinavian pavilions was really much admired by the Americans who visited it and, had the Second World War not taking place shortly after this, Scandinavian design probably would have entered the United States full force shortly after 1939. Unfortunately the war comes along and sort of messes things up. If we take a look at the kinds of designs that Aalto was exploring in the 1930's we can see that he was doing very similar things to what the designers at the Bauhaus and people who were connected with this kind of modernism were doing; he certainly was part of that group, in fact. But what's really different about the work that's coming out of Scandinavia is that the same kinds of ideas are being interpreted, very often, in wood. There's still this desire to create very functional design, and to use modern manufacturing processes, it's just that metal is not adopted the way that it is in other parts of Europe. And it's often with the same kind of functional underpinnings that we see for instance in the Wassily chair or the Cesca chair. It's the idea of using materials to their best end and having those materials respond to the problem at hand. And we can see that here in the Paimio chair. This is a chair that was made for a kind of health clinic in the forest; a place where people could go to recover, especially from diseases that affected the lungs, lots of fresh air and sunshine available. The chair was meant to be brought outside during the day, the patients would sit in the chair and get fresh air and sun, and then the chairs could be brought inside or moved around by the staff; so it, by necessity, needed to be light. Using wood meant that the, the material itself wouldn't get very cold, it wouldn't transmit cold on cold days, so that, sitting in the sun, the wood would actually start to warm a bit. And you wouldn't have that with, for instance, one of those tubular metal chairs. He takes the plywood and makes the seat out of it thinking about actually what this seat is going to do when somebody sits in it, kind of the response to the weight of the human body, and so he includes these great curving forms at either end of the seat in order to give it bounce, a kind of response to the weight shifting, so that the chairs although they're very, very simple are also rather comfortable. And, being made out of plywood and bent wood, the chair is not terribly expensive to produce, it's using local materials, and it's also easy to clean; it really answers quite a lot of the design problems included in creating a chair for a clinic like this. Moving on to a very practical piece of furniture, a tea trolley here, he again comes up with an answer that's similar, in many respects, to what we see coming out of the Bauhaus or from Corbusier, but here what we see is that same kind of approach to design, very, very functional, being carried out in wood. One area of design that Aalto spends a lot of time considering is the stool. And one of the reasons for this is that the stool has a kind of decidedly Democratic quality. When it's placed in a room it has no front or back, so if you have a room full of them anyone in the room can be the focus of attention just by kind of swiveling on the stool. It's a very simple seating form and he produces designs for less expensive stools, you can see them here in this stack on the right-hand side. On the left-hand side we see a more expensive design; a design that actually includes the development of a very kind of complex joint, and you can see that it kind of reads as a fan at the top of the leg where the leg joins the stool top. And this was, in fact, a design that was produced by the company that Aalto founds, Artek, a furniture manufacturing company. Another of his very well-known designs is the Savoy Vase and you can see here that same kind of undulating form that we saw on the interior of the 1939 World's Fair pavilion. This is from just a little bit earlier than 1939 but it continues to be produced and interpreted in lots of different colors and sizes. It's almost become a symbol of Finnish design. To this idea of taking cues from nature and responding to nature in your design, Tapio Wirkkala is probably one of the best examples. We can see here a design for a kind of platter made out of wood that looks as if it's a leaf, and it's using the process of layering wood to create the kind of striation that one would see in a leaf. It has a very natural quality and yet has an extremely simple form. He doesn't just work in wood, he also designs in glass and, we can see here, two of his very famous designs; one is this lovely vase that looks like a wood lily and on the left-hand side we see part of a series of drinking glasses and pitchers that actually works into the design for Finlandia vodka bottles. It looks as if it's frozen water with little droplets of of icy water melting off of it, really giving a person a sense of drinking something that's fresh from the frozen waters. The new technologies and materials that are developed over the course of the Second World War and which enter the world of design in the '50s and '60s also have a tremendous impact on Scandinavian design. They're no less interested in exploring those new materials than they were in exploring natural materials and in part due to their real respect for material we see some really extraordinary experimentation. Here we have the work of Eero Aarnio. He develops this kind of bubble chair; sometimes it's referred to as a bubble chair, sometimes it's a ball chair, you can see he creates a design where it's standing on a single leg and it's completely upholstered on the interior so it's sort of encases the sitter in this kind of padded environment. On the right-hand side we have these chairs that are made out of molded clear plastic; really using this clear plastic to its best advantage. It's completely supporting and enclosing the sitter, but it stays entirely translucent, so it's as if they're floating in space. Also from the late 60s we have the Pastil chair. This was like a candy that you could use either in your home or float in water and, in fact, the advertising for this, for this chair shows it in all kinds of natural environments. So, even though it's an entirely plastic chair, the vision for this design is that it integrates with the natural environment. The '60s and '70s is also a time when we see the rise of the design firm Marimekko. At Marimekko we see designs being produced that are bold, they reflect a kind of shift in culture. They're responding to a real youth market. This is something that changes over the '60s and '70s greatly; where we start to see young people having more money, having more mobility, and making choices in the consumer market and in the political realm, it really shaped design. With Marimekko we see these kind of oversized, brilliant prints but even, even there, even in this kind of pop culture world, we still see such a strong relationship to nature. So, for instance, in the image on the left, we have this black and white graphic design that reads from a, from a distance it's just an all-over pattern but when you get a little bit closer to it you can see that it's based on something that looks a little bit like a, like a, like a flower or a bloom. The red squiggling lines could be seen as air or water. They still have a kind of natural quality to them and certainly prints like this are relating directly to nature. So even, even in this kind of bold moment we still see that there's a real inspiration coming from the natural environment you