separate from the heat-insulating structure. The load-bearing transverse partition walls
were made of prefabricated Tapani slabs, which supported the longitudinal interme-
diate floor beams. The external wall only served the function of heat insulation. Aalto
wrote in Rakennustaito (The Finnish Construction Magazine ): “The façade of the
building, a light-weight wall supported entirely by beams, is to be completed only after
the building has been waterproofed with the roof. Part of the façade is formed by the
outer beam on each floor, while the remaining sections beneath the windows are made
of cored brick laid on top of the beam. This means that the question of heat insulation
on the external wall is treated completely separately from the load-bearing question.
It was treated merely as a matter of insulation. The insulation of the external wall was
partly based on the air contained in the cored tiles and the expanded cork covering the
whole of the inner surface of the external wall.”^352
The innovators of concrete bricks had long been trying to resolve the question of
load-bearing, heat-insulation and waterproofing with one single structure. Achieving
an adequate level of heat-insulation had proved a difficult challenge. Aalto’s solution
for the Standard Apartment Building, which he developed together with Henriksson,
was based on a completely different approach. He treated the functions of insulation
and load-bearing as separate, from which it followed that the thermal conductivity of
reinforced concrete no longer presented a problem. In terms of the material qualities,
the Standard Apartment Building is all but optimal.^353 The structure of the Tapani
concrete slab was designed to prevent the conduction of heat from the inside to the out-
side. Since the load-bearing structure in the Standard Apartment Building remained
mainly inside the frame, its only function was to stand as the supporting structure
and its conductivity qualities became irrelevant. As Finnish historian Jari Kankaanpää
pointed out, the Standard Apartment House put an end to the Tapani concrete slab in
the design-philosophical sense.^354
The name of the building project was a rhetorical statement from Aalto, who used the
title to emphasise the modern building typology and topical international architectural
ideology it represented. He also probably wanted to avoid the use of the “Tapani” epi-
thet. Discussing the aspects of standardisation, construction technology and acoustics
showed how central the technological questions were from the point of view of design.
Juho Tapani hired Aalto as the designer because he believed Aalto to be a person quali-
fied to resolve technology issues but also to explain them to the public. This strategy was
crucial for Tapani, as the success of his Tapani bricks and their popularity as a building
material had crumbled because of their poor heat insulation qualities. He was, in other
words, keen to boost the sales of his own products. However, Aalto resolved the struc-
tural problem of the Standard Apartment Building by separating the load-bearing and
insulating structures, which meant that the improved insulation qualities of the Tapani
352 Aalto 1928b, p. 76.
353 Kankaanpää 1997, p. 80.
354 Kankaanpää 1997, pp. 80–81.