brick were now redundant as the product was used merely for load-bearing structures.
Aalto did, however, make use of the cavities inside the bricks for pipes to legitimise the
use of the product. In the case of Standard Apartment Building, Aalto was not, in other
words, loyal to the commercial pursuits of his customer, giving priority to solving the
structural question and following his own ambitions. It is obvious that this damaged
the relationship between Juho Tapani and Alvar Aalto. Although Emil Henriksson
served as the structural engineer in the Standard Apartment Building project, Aalto
never credited him as a member of his team in the project description in Arkkitehti
(The Finnish Architectural Journal). Such selective use of information bolstered Aalto’s
image as an expert in concrete structures. These roles became evident from the building
permit documents, which did not include structural drawings.^355
The industrial art trade show, Suomen Messut (Finnish Fair), continued the series of
events to mark Turku’s 700th anniversary in 1929. Aalto wrote that the designers, Erik
Bryggman and himself, had mainly aimed to develop a building system that would be
both economical and individual. Aalto compared the trade fair structures to row houses,
explaining that as many stands as necessary could be added. The contract offers had, accord-
ing to the architect, been requested for a running metre of structural units. In Aalto’s view,
organising the actual trade show was a simple matter of assembling prefabricated elements.
The architect’s task was to design the overall composition for the space. He praised the cost
savings afforded by the use of standardised elements.^356 The master plan for the area was
originally created by Bryggman. Elina Standertskjöld has argued that Bryggman’s staggered
exhibition stands were modelled after Ernst May’s terraced houses, and that the graphic
expression of the architect had been influenced by Bauhaus books, Das Neue Frankfurt (The
New Frankfurt) magazine and the Danish publication Kritisk Revy (The Critical Journal).^357
In the project description of the 700th anniversary exhibition published in Arkkitehti,
Aalto used several expressions that were foreign to the Finnish language or difficult to
grasp, such as “panoramic overall composition”, “row pavilion”, “added publicity”, “func-
tion”, “terminal” and “standard”. The use of these terms reveals the architect’s intention of
creating an impression of his work being scientifically sound. By introducing the exhibi-
tion structures, he emphasised the rationality of developing a flexible, serial system instead
of building new, individual exhibitions from scratch. He argued that such a system would
be economical but did not specify further whether savings were actually achieved.^358
The following summer in 1930, Aalto introduced the Turun Sanomat Newspaper
Building to his Finnish peers in Arkkitehti. Aalto wrote that the challenge had been to
design a building with good lighting and communication arrangements on a narrow but
deep plot. Upon its completion, the building housed the newspaper printing presses, the
355 Archive reference VII-30-3. TKA.
356 Aalto 1929c, pp. 99–100.
357 Standertskjöld 1991, pp. 112–114.
358 Aalto 1929c, pp. 99–100.