Modernism and Good Health: Architecture, Nature and Wellbeing

Scandinavian Modern — Newsletter 02

This article was originally written during the coronavirus lockdown, when questions about health, domestic life and the future of shared spaces acquired a new urgency.

As countries made tentative steps out of lockdown, people began to reflect on a “new normal”. It was too early to know what that might mean, but many of us had re-engaged with life at a very human level: home-schooling, nature walks, baking and online art classes.

Natural materials can provide a visceral connection to the world we inhabit. That connection felt especially important when so many of the ordinary rhythms of daily life had been interrupted.

What were the precedents for this new normal, and which changes would endure?

Modernism confronted related questions a century earlier. Tuberculosis, rather than Covid-19, and overcrowded housing, rather than social distancing, helped generate a different vision of healthy living. Designers, architects and reformers asked what a new world might look like.

Many of their practical responses became part of the mid-twentieth-century landscape: social housing, garden cities, health services, clinics and sanatoriums, as well as the furniture and products used within them.

Patients with tuberculosis were prescribed fresh air, sunlight, gentle exercise and nutrition. Cleanliness, nature and wellbeing became both practical concerns and visual metaphors, appearing in advertising, textiles, product design and architecture.

Scandinavian design, in particular, looked to the natural environment. Through timber, pattern and colour, it brought something of the outside world into the home. White became closely associated with modernist aesthetics, although modernism was never simply colourless. Colour, form and function were all enlisted in the pursuit of wellbeing.

At Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, completed at Poissy in 1931, a freestanding washbasin greets the visitor in the entrance hall. Handwashing was incorporated into the architectural promenade: cleanliness made visible.

These ideas were not confined to private country houses. Social housing, medical buildings and even places of worship incorporated light, hygiene and wellbeing into their plans.

Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium, completed in 1933 near Turku, Finland, was designed for patients with tuberculosis. Alvar Aalto described the building as a “medical instrument”. Its orientation, colour, furniture, washbasins and access to fresh air were considered in relation to the patient’s physical and psychological needs.

Le Corbusier also treated architecture as an instrument for modern life. The roof terrace of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille incorporated facilities for exercise and communal activity, bringing health and social life into the building itself.

In Britain, Berthold Lubetkin carried forward the belief that architecture could improve daily life. At Spa Green Estate in Finsbury, London, housing was combined with landscaped space, generous light and communal facilities. The roof structure was shaped to create air movement around a covered clothes-drying area—an elegant piece of environmental problem-solving.

British modernist housing later suffered from inconsistent policy and reduced investment. The social and cultural support systems integral to many schemes were often cut as economics displaced idealism. The failures associated with some projects left a mistrust of modernism that remains visible today.

During lockdown, architecture returned to the centre of public discussion. How would buildings accommodate home-working, changed patterns of commuting and a renewed awareness of physical and mental wellbeing?

Even at the smallest scale, modernist design offers useful precedents. Consider the vase: in a flat without a garden, it can become a mobile landscape, bringing a fragment of nature into the most compact urban setting.

The Aalto vase, first shown in the 1930s and produced by Iittala, uses an undulating organic form often compared with waves or the contours of the Finnish landscape. Tapio Wirkkala likewise drew on bark, rain and ice. His Avena vase appears almost riven from a block of ice, its surface sculptural, organic and tactile.

As society asked which changes might endure beyond lockdown, modernist design offered a collection of precedents: light, air, nature and good materials as ballast for re-entering the world.