Many of Aalto’s ideas, originally unsuccessful, became appreciated later. His experiments with new ideas, however, were best demonstrated in those projects that extended the problems of housing to specific contexts, such as a hospital room or an artist’s home. Aalto adopted it but also tried to develop personal solutions. One of the most important motifs of early modernism was the strip window.

At first the principles of electric light were most important to Aalto, but gradually he became increasingly interested in daylight.

Aalto’s ideas were drawn from various sources, including illuminating engineering. The goal of this essay is to demonstrate how architect Alvar Aalto, one of the leading Finnish ‘functionalists’, studied the problem of daylight and electric light in his housing designs between years 19. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.By the end of the 1920s, European architectural modernism had become interested in two important but basically independent issues: the problem of housing and the use of light. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze.

Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity.

Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness.

The life of forms focillon