FRENCH AND ITALIAN IMAGE OF ALVAR AALTO
PRESS RELEASE
André Bellequie (b. 1946), a French graphic designer based in Paris, offers his own perspective on Alvar Aalto, having photographed the architectural relationships between the Finlandia House in Helsinki, the Alvar Aalto Museum in Jyväskylä and the Lappia Hall in Rovaniemi. Bellequie has used photography to highlight the visual similarities between the three buildings, which are located in different parts of Finland. The black and white series of images are accompanied by small colour images of the landscape to show the position of the buildings in their surroundings.
André Bellequie graduated from the National School of Graphic Arts and Graphic Industries in 1966 and has organised several exhibitions since 1977. He is currently the artistic director of a Parisian publishing house.
Leonardo Mosso, an Italian who has spent twenty years studying Alvar Aalto’s entire oeuvre, presents his own vision of it through several hundred black and white photographs. The exhibition is visually very interesting and based on Mosso’s own classification system: he approaches Aalto’s architecture from the inside in a systematic and structural way. The viewing angle of the images is deliberately controlled – some are placed on the floor, some on the ceiling.
Leonardo Mosso calls Alvar Aalto “the architect of the communication of society and culture”. This communication must be understood in terms of social relations between people, the historical, social and cultural recombination of a fragmented urban environment, and the relationship between nature and the cultural environment. The exhibition’s overarching themes are thus housing, the city and the environment.
Architect Leonardo Mosso is a professor at the Turin University of Technology and founder of the Alvar Aalto Institute, which has been operating in Turin for a decade. The aim of the institute is to build up a large library on architecture in general and to record as accurately as possible all the material on Alvar Aalto.
A selection of Finnish and foreign literature on Alvar Aalto has been collected to accompany the photographic exhibitions on Alvar Aalto.
Translated with DeepL