Ford’s seminal My Life and Work was translated into Finnish in the late 1920s. The
Finnish historian Karl-Erik Michelsen described the campaign for rationalisation and
standardisation undertaken by Suomen Teollisuuslehti (The Finnish Industrial Journal)
in the early 1930s.^129 Nordic architects adopted rationalist influences via Continental,
and more specifically German, architectural discourse, whereas many engineers and
master builders absorbed the ideas directly from the United States.^130
1.3.2 MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND MASS MEDIA
Spanish art historian based in the United States Beatriz Colomina’s ground-breaking
study Privacy and Publicity discussed modern architecture as a form of mass media. She
argued that, in the 20th century, the production of architecture shifted from the building
site to the immaterial domain of the media: architectural publications, exhibitions and
journals.^131 She went on to maintain that architecture can be modern and become
industrialised only through a particular media relationship.^132 For Le Corbusier, media
was not merely a space for disseminating culture, but also an autonomous domain for
producing culture.^133 For him the location and the materialisation of the building were
secondary. Architecture was something to be negotiated purely in the domain of ideas.
When architecture is translated into a building, it becomes entangled with different
phenomena and loses its purity. When a completed, three-dimensional building is
discussed in two-dimensional media, such as the press, it re-enters the domain of ideas.
Colomina wrote: “Photography and layout construct another architecture in the space
of the page. Conception, execution, and reproduction are separate, consecutive moments
in a traditional process of creation.”^134 The interest in the present study was precisely in
this “contamination” of ideas, and their execution. I saw conceptualisation as something
more than simply a phase prior to the execution; it is a continuum that takes new
directions at the execution stage. Similarly, Colomina described Le Corbusier’s tactic
of creating new associations by juxtaposing image and text. Le Corbusier’s images
did not only illustrate the text, they built new meanings.^135 According to Colomina,
Le Corbusier also understood the potential of modern, targeted^136 advertising: when
129 The campaign targeted at policy-makers voiced fears about the efficiency demands on human labour and the loss
of jobs, but the problems were seen as transitory. Taylorism and Fordism were described as methods that were
not against workers’ interests and, in fact, created opportunities for the ongoing development of work. Many
sectors of society endorsed these ideas. Increased resources were allocated to teaching rationalisation methods
to engineering students at Helsinki University of Technology, and Suomen Rationalisoimistyön Edistämisyhdistys
(Finnish Association for the Promotion of Rationalisation) was established in 1930 and the construction industry
established a permanent exhibition of building materials. Michelsen 1999, pp. 287–292.
130 Brunnström 1990, p. 202; Standertskjöld 2010, p. 48.
131 Colomina 1998 [1994], pp. 14–15.
132 Ibidem, pp. 14 and 107.
133 Ibidem, p. 104.
134 Colomina 1998 [1994], p. 114; See also von Moos 1983 [1979], p. 299.
135 Colomina 1998 [1994], pp. 119, 148 and 153.
136 Modernity, from the 1920s onwards, has been considered the era of targeted advertising. Colomina referred to
Daniel Pope’s work The Making of Modern Advertisement. Colomina 1998 [1994], p. 190.