It was surprising to many that Robert Venturi, in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which 'moved the goalposts' of acceptable modern architecture, allowed Aalto through the gates. Perhaps it was Aalto's affinity with materials that permitted this relaxation - it cannot have been his formal affiliation to the humanist criteria of Modernism itself. Nicholas Ray, himself an architect (unlike many contemporary commentators), teaching at Cambridge University School of Architecture and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, is well able to steer Aalto through the shallows of Postmodernist critique. Aalto's long-standing propensity for understanding natural forms and the materials for the expression of such a formal vocabulary made him unique in his time. How Aalto became a mainspring of the first revision of Modernism (see: The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project by Colin St John Wilson) is clearly understood by Ray and appropriately pointed up, and argues still for 'a more central position for Aalto's work in the history of Modernism'. Major critics such as Colin Rowe, following the revision of opinion on Le Corbusier, experienced a latter day conversion to Aalto, which is significant. And today, where the twin obsessions of the contemporary vernacular world cover both sustainability and building engagement with landscape, Aalto still has much to teach current students in a revisionary age; one as Nicholas Ray specifically points out, of 'creative scepticism'.

It is significant that this work on Aalto, published so close to Roger Connah's officially supported book (also reviewed on this site), emerges as a kind of academic and critical corrective; a perfect prescription against any unwarranted downgrading of Aalto's historic standpoint and rating, in Finland or outside. In that respect, it is timely and will be available for students simultaneously, and at a similar price. In the event, both books need to be readily available as essential to an understanding both of the tumultuous 20th-century world of architecture and of Finland's unique contribution to that world.

Michael Spens