PARA DIAS MAIORES | UMA VISITA AO SITE DA POETRY FOUNDATION ACRESCENTA |«It is easy to pretend the world stops careening forward in a place like this. The air smells like birch, oak, and pine.»

 

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«(...)The Paimio Lounger is bentwood and not metal for a number of reasons, or we can tell ourselves a number of stories. Bentwood was then a fairly new industrialized technology, pioneered in furniture by the German-Austrian maker Michael Thonet, but Aalto wanted something softer and more natural than metal. We are told this by labels at MoMA, for example, which in 1938 gave Aalto his first museum exhibition, just three years after its show of Le Corbusier’s recent work. We need to imagine the Finnish timber industry and the splayed wings of the Paimio Sanatorium sitting in the forest mean something—that they result in softness of form, bent wood instead of metal, but also in a national character. We tell ourselves that in the Finnish forest where Paimio Loungers are, whether you live or you die, there’s a sort of gentle modernity to it, something linked to Finnish design in the American imagination.

Bentwood warms to the touch. The patient’s back against the chair lets them rest and breathe. Tangere me, touch me, says the modern-yet-pliable chair back for the end of breathing. Noli me tangere, touch me not, says tuberculosis, says sanatorium, says Paimio, 148 kilometers from Helsinki. Plagues are historically a sign of the end of the world. We all remember 2020 and not breathing. I think of W.H. Auden, who writes about the dog days of the Roman Empire in his poem “Under Sirius,” which takes as its subject the sixth century Merovingian court poet Venantius Fortunatus, who was not especially fortunate. Here are the first two verses: (...)

 Bertolt Brecht, you were right: we sing about the dark times, in at least two languages, sprawled on the white wood floors of the kind of planned, tidy little apartments for which this furniture of exquisite proportion was made. The neighborhood is half functionalist, bright apartment towers, half postcard-perfect wooden cottages initially built for laborers, nudged against housing thrown up for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. It is easy to pretend the world stops careening forward in a place like this. The air smells like birch, oak, and pine. (...)».