Could-Have-Been Modernism: Aalto in Brooklyn
After a fire damaged a small Sunset Park church in 1947, the congregation asked Alvar Aalto to lead the redesign. The world-famous architect agreed, and then the drawings disappeared.
One of a pair of diazotypes, or whiteprints, that Alvar Aalto prepared for the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brooklyn. Courtesy Kirk Gastinger
Of the over 500 projects designed by Studio Alvar Aalto, some 200 were carried out. The rest were left unrealized but documented, amounting to an immense corpus of could-have-been modernism. Yet there are a handful that occupy a ghostly presence in the architect’s portfolio, their documentation presumed lost to time.
Among the schemes condemned to obscurity is a facade that Aalto designed for a church in a Finnish enclave of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Aalto’s biographer Göran Schildt dated the scheme to his “American years” but offered little else. In Aalto and America, the authoritative 2012 publication on Aalto’s relationship to the United States, the Brooklyn kirkko does not even warrant a footnote.
Details of the project finally surfaced in 2018, nearly seven decades after its inception, when the children of erstwhile Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church minister Rev. Bernhard Hillilä discovered a pair of diazotypes among his papers. The blueprints, published here for the first time, are unexpected additions to the cache of 200,000 original drawings st…
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