Chapter 4 | Conclusionsparticipating in exhibitions and expressing himself in writing. The sanatorium project
developed simultaneously as a social and material undertaking, through trials. In other
words, the heterogeneous actant was placed under constant testing. This process also
served to change the line of thought for its innovator. For example, the concept of the
minimum apartment, with which he was able to personally familiarise himself during
the design work for the sanatorium, inspired him to develop the daily environment of the
patient. In Paimio, the new type of consumer found a home in the patient room, which
Aalto designed based on the international discourse he had embraced. The focal points of
his interests were revealed through the successful integration of the different installations
in the patient room, although these very systems proved a problem in a larger context. It is
clear that he also learnt a great deal from the processes that he was unable to control, and
the outcome of which was not architecturally sound.
The task of the researcher is to follow the actants and to register any changes in them
and the impact resulting from these changes. As Latour points out, a social scientist cannot
know before the fact what society is made up of. It is something that only the actants, both
social and material, themselves can disclose. In a similar vein, an architectural researcher
cannot know in advance what architecture is made of, as I myself learnt from this work.
An idealised presentation of a building, as is often seen in architectural publications, does
not emphasise the nature of architecture as an applied art, but rather an individualistic
phenomenon detached from material and social interaction. Architecture is inherently
material and collective. It was possible to make visible the “movement” of a building,
that is, its transformation during the building process, by looking into the networks that
formed the interactive context where the building took place.
More interesting than the knowledge that a specialist hospital was built in Finland
in the early 1930s with a novel patient-centred approach, is the deeper insight into
the prerequisites for successful architecture that the present study has provided. The
most successful architectural solutions for Paimio Sanatorium, a demanding institu-
tional building project, came into being in circumstances where the architect-innovator
managed to create a strong and viable hybrid that merged collective competence with
knowledge and expertise. Creating such circumstances today, when hospital design is
strongly focused on patient experiences and hospital architecture is again understood as
an element of treatment, could lead to successful innovation processes.