John Pawson

For Alvar Aalto, Finland’s Karelian villages represented a supreme expression of wood’s versatility: ‘pure forest dwellers’ architecture, where wood is almost a hundred percent present, both as the building material and in the methods of joining, and usually uncoated, without the immaterialising effect of colour.
A dilapidated Karelian village is in some way akin in its outward appearance to the site of Greek ruins, whose predominant feature is also unimateriality, although instead of timber the material is marble, even the beams’.

 

 

 

 

Photography
Max Gleeson