ABSTRACT
On January 23, 2008, architect Juhanni Pallasmaa offered a lecture at the University of Dundee titled “Dwelling and Homelessness” where he discussed his eminent disdain for avant-garde approaches to the house derived from self-referential and over-intellectualized architectural strategies, instead of engaging with the phenomenological position of what it means to be human. Supplementing Pallasmaa’s talk were images juxtaposing van Gogh’s bedroom against a minimally designed room by Marcel Breuer, John Wayne’s cowboy persona against his bizarrely designed living room, and various paintings of traditional homes against modern imagery such as Peter Eisenman’s houses. The lecture, attended by a full auditorium of architectural students, faculty, and practitioners, maintains a position Pallasmaa has held for at least the past fifteen years as illustrated by the publishing of a similar lecture in 1992 at the University of Trondheim on the concept of home. Here, Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea is offered by Pallasmaa as an example of a well-designed home that he describes as “archaic and modern, rustic and elegant, regional and universal at the same time. It refers simultaneously to the past and the future; it is abundant in its imagery and, consequently, provides ample soil for individual psychie [sic] attachment.”3 He adds that Aalto’s house is “the expression of a mutually shared utopian vision of a better and more humane world.”4
