ABSTRACT
Martti Paalanen's fine functionalist church for Varkaus was reviewed for the first time in Arkitekten-Arkkitehti, adding support to Alvar Aalto's earlier functionalist work in that city. Alvar Aalto's lecture, 'The reconstruction of Europe is the central problem of our time', therefore offered a timely and poignant note of reality. Aalto's long involvement with the United States began in the summer of 1937 when the West Coast architect William Wilson Wurster and the American landscape theorist Richard Church visited him at his Munkkiniemi home. Aalto's design for the irregular, undulating box of the Lapua Pavilion created a completely plastic expression. Through the movement of its sculptural form, the external wall of natural tree trunks, complete with their bark, simulated the rhythms of a dense forest. In the autumn of 1940 Aalto was appointed as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
