Service and light in Jyvaskyla: as Rogelio Salmona received the Alvar Aalto Award, speakers at the Jyvaskyla symposium pondered on the morality and politics of light and space - Outrage

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2003

Columbian architect Rogelio Salmona was awarded the Alvar Aalto Award at a ceremony during the Aalto Symposium held at Jyvaskyla in central Finland last month. Given periodically, the award (unlike, for instance, the Pritzker, which started by premiating Philip Johnson) has never celebrated the second rate or those who made their reputations through marketing; previous recipients of the Aalto prize include James Stirling, Jorn Utzon and Alvaro Siza.

In his acceptance speech. Salmona touched on conditions in his own country but 'not even in her worst moments has Columbia lost the ability to sing, dance, write, paint and build'. Architecture, he stressed, is 'the most useful of the trades and the most humane of the arts'. In Latin America today 'practising architecture ... besides being an aesthetic and cultural activity is a political act'--a 'service to the community we live in'.

Salmona, who worked for Le Corbusier for years, urged that 'We must endow our conscience with memory ... We should make an enormous effort to create, weave and prepare space, not only to withhold time, but to make it perceptible and feel it as it elapses. A human being has only his life ... It is squandered when he is offered insulting spaces'.

'Architecture is the art of space and time because it allows the senses to filter and throb while feeling the passing of time. As with music, it reveals itself little by little, through reason and dreams.'

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American light and land artist, James Turrell, was another of the speakers in the brilliantly kaleidoscopic symposium. He was also concerned with dreams, in which our most intimate feelings are revealed in space. 'Waking is leaving' he said, but in his Arizona crater (AR February 2003), he is trying with enormous effort and expense to capture dreams on earth. He derided architects for 'making forms that you were always going to make and stick lights in the ceilings. I wish you would all stop that. You don't teach how to design with light'.

Art and architecture for Turrell involve political and moral choices, as they do for Salmona. As a Quaker, the American was jailed during the Vietnam War for flying draft dodgers to Canada and Mexico. In solitary confinement, Turrell discovered the powers of light and silence which have informed his work ever since.