Chapter 4 | ConclusionsAs the example of the patient room window shows, Aalto succeeded in redefining
the cultural concept of the window, in this case, the horizontally oriented health win-
dow in a patient room. The architectural press was an ideal forum for devising such new
meanings. He faced trials in the realisation process, however, and his original idea as
the architect-innovator to have the windows made exclusively from steel profiles com-
pletely changed. Latour has voiced his concern that technological systems are explained
through social rationale. Latour claims that: “‘Society’ has to be composed, made up,
constructed, established, maintained and assembled. It is no longer to be taken as a hid-
den source of causality which could be mobilised so as to account for the existence and
stability of some other action or behaviour.” In his view, a social scientist has to explain
society “through the presence of many little things that are not social by nature, but
social in the sense that they are associated with one another”.^1000 Various distinctions,
as in the case of windows - the definitions of the traditional wooden structure and the
modern structural hybrid - were material facts associated with, for example, different
production techniques. The window was associated with various social definitions that
had to do with health and the way of things are seen. To apply Latour’s idea: the window
of the patient room does not as such explain anything, but instead we have to explain
the “complex ecology” of the static-looking object.^1001
Aalto used the media as a domain to publicise his analytical design method. The
best example from the period is perhaps his article for the Danish Kritisk Revy journal
(The Critical Journal) on the design of a cinema. The article features section diagrams
illustrating the reflection of sound waves. In his articles on Paimio Sanatorium, Aalto
also focused attention to rationalistic qualities in his diagrams, of which the section
drawing of the B wing is especially noteworthy, since this illustration was useful in suc-
cessfully persuading the medical experts on the decision-making bodies of the virtues
of its unusual ceiling construction. Aalto also used section drawings as a tool for the
sundeck wing, the tectonics of which evolved throughout the competition stage both as
a rational and artistic process during which he accumulated knowledge and the design
achieved its final shape, which was eventually very different from the initial designs.
It is also interesting to note that even when there already existed finalised structural
calculations determining the requirements of reinforcements, completed by a structural
designer, the architectural media published diagrams drawn by the architect based on
the drawings of the structural designer, presenting idealised models of the outcome.
Architectural media wanted to see one hero, one innovator-architect and closed its
eyes to the collective nature of the process. Aalto’s own actions endorsed the media’s
intention as he omitted to mention the structural designer in the project descriptions
of all his other projects from his period in Turku in Arkkitehti, except for the Paimio
Sanatorium project. Similarly, overlooking the state-of-the-art medical technology in
his descriptions of Paimio Sanatorium helped emphasise the role of architecture as the
1000 Latour 1999b, pp. 112–113.
1001 Latour and Yaneva 2008.