that inspired them.^158 She found similarities between the sanatorium and the spatial
structures of Soviet communal houses and passenger ships.^159 Heinonen does not even
attempt to explain the formal motifs with interaction between different stakeholders
during the building project, the qualities or availability of materials or the production
method; in her reading, the architect was incorporating ideas he had adopted from
international discourse. She understood form as essentially symbolic and, moreover, her
thorough investigation was limited to theoretical questions in architecture.
The second volume in Göran Schildt’s three-volume biography of Alvar Aalto,
Alvar Aalto. The Decisive Years, concentrates on the architect’s life in the period between
1927 and 1939.^160 Schildt and Aalto became friends only later, and the biography
was published some 10 years after Aalto’s death, in the 1980s. Owing to his personal
friendship with Aalto, Schildt had a special advantage as a researcher because he was
privy to the kind of background information on and insight into Aalto’s life that other
researchers could never access. On the other hand, he was in a completely different
position from Giedion, who was an active participant in the phenomenon that was
also his object of research. Schildt had no presence in Aalto’s life during the period in
time under review. I see Schildt as a kind of mouthpiece for Aalto.
According to Schildt, Aalto pursued not only serial housing production but also
modern building types, of which Paimio Sanatorium is one example. Schildt suggests
that Aalto may have reiterated the ideas he saw at Duiker’s Zonnestraal Sanatorium in
resolving the design problems of his own type sanatorium.^161 Aalto was undoubtedly
interested in serial production as well as the standardisation of individual building parts
and accessories. Shortly thereafter, he also embarked on developing type houses. The
idea of a type sanatorium may, however, represent Schildt’s or Aalto’s own, later inter-
pretation of the Paimio project.
158 She pointed out that organising spaces into wings was typical in the new architecture of Continental Europe. This
had been the choice solution at Zonnestraal Sanatorium, which according to Heinonen served as a model for both
Aalto’s and Erik Bryggman’s entry for the Paimio Sanatorium competition. The wings at Zonnestraal are in free
angle towards each other, while the overall composition is symmetrical. Heinonen held the view that the spiral
staircase and the smokestack in the service building at Paimio were directly influenced by Zonnestraal. Heinonen
likened the canopy covering the main entrance of Paimio Sanatorium to the small pavilion behind the Palace of
the League of Nations assembly hall, which was raised on pillars. She also found that the tall dining hall at Paimio
Sanatorium is a reference to works jointly designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. On the other hand, the
workshop wing at the Bauhaus school and Van Nelle tobacco factory housed an uninterrupted window wall span-
ning several floors. Heinonen also saw parallels between Aalto’s design of a window reaching to the floor, which
still existed at the competition stage, and André Lurçat’s tourist hotel in the Mediterranean (1927), and argued that
the plant windows at Paimio Sanatorium were inspired by the refurbished Palmgarten restaurant in Frankfurt am
Main (1929), designed by Ernst May, Martin Elsasser and Werner Hebebrand. Heinonen 1986, pp. 239–241.
159 In a communal house, small flats or rooms were situated alongside long corridors in their own wings, while the
common spaces had been placed in a separate connected block. Of the Soviet examples, Heinonen mentioned
Ivan Nikolaev’s student and communal house and The Narkomfin collective apartment block by Moisei Ginzburg
and Ignaty Milinis. In a passenger ship, the cabins were placed alongside corridors and communal dining rooms
and lounges were similar to those in the sanatorium. In addition, the sundecks at the sanatorium were, in Heinon-
en’s view, reminiscent of open ship decks. She also drew attention to the pragmatic and minimised use of space,
pruning out of all superfluous elements and the optimisation of the tiniest details, principles that were identical to
those applied at Paimio Sanatorium. Heinonen 1986, pp. 242–243.
160 The second volume of the biography was first published in Swedish in 1985 entitled Moderna tider. The Finnish
translation by Raija Mattila was published the same year. The English-language edition, Alvar Aalto. The Decisive
Years, was published in 1986. See Schildt 1985 and 1986.
161 Schildt 1985, pp. 212–215.