Chapter 1 | IntroductionFor Hughes the problem solving is usually concerned with reordering of the material
world to make it more productive of goods and services. He has also paid attention to
the special ability of technological systems to postdate the problem to the emergence of
a system as a solution.^257 In the context of the present work, technology is understood
as a heterogeneous system comprising of inanimate or physical artefacts and humans,
including people, organisations, norms, economics, and architectural theory. Further-
more, here a building has been understood as a technological system, in which the
building with all its aspects and subsystems is the artefact.
The researcher must of course question the concepts he or she uses. As the meaning
of the concept of technology in 1930s Finland very obviously differs from its mean-
ing in the researcher’s culture, there is the risk of anachronism, i.e. that the researcher
examines the phenomenon using the concepts of an alien culture. For example, the
use of the term “technology” in its modern sense only became more common in the
USA after World War I, and was established there after the Great Depression of the
1930s.^258 According to Finnish Professor Jorma Kalela, the historian must aim at a
true and just description of the object of research and must assess it according to the
premises of the research, meaning the questions that the researcher’s social position
and cultural environment have caused him or her to ask, in the same way as the object
of historical research, in order better to control his or her own cultural limitations.^259 I
have gone through the factors influencing my research framework in the Foreword and
Chapter 1 “Introduction”. As regards the concept of technology, the most significant
difference between the culture of the object of study and of the researcher is probably
that nowadays researchers explain technology as being heterogeneous, and our general
understanding of the concept of technology prevailing in the 1930s is that it leaned
towards the mechanical. However, in my research I question the premise that Alvar
Aalto’s conception of technology in the 1930s was purely mechanical, basing my reser-
vations on the expressions he used in his articles and his methods of working.
257 Hughes 1997 [1987], p. 53.
258 Marx 1998 [1994], pp. 247–248.
259 Kalela 2000, p. 87.