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...architect Alvar Aalto, bless him, was always slightly out of it. He never lingered at the hothouse of Germany's Bauhaus; instead he spent the '20s in provincial Finland, designing for towns. His buildings are modern all right, sleek and sensible and just a bit Martian, but Aalto never took the final vows of modernism. Strict symmetry and monoliths left him cold. Rather, an Aalto building is apt to swell or zigzag confoundingly, to have lines and textures that seem more botanical and geological than geometrical. Ahead of his time, he declined to enforce the brittlest dogmas...
Aalto's first great work of architecture, a tuberculosis hospital built near Paimio, Finland, during the late '20s and early '30s, accounted for his most original and visually powerful piece of furniture. The main wing of the sanitorium resembles an airy ocean liner, and the Paimio Loungechair could pass for a rarefied deck chair...
Aalto's furniture was never again so dashing and hard-edged. He spent the '30s making cantilevered chairs, each a reworking of an idea that the Bauhaus stars Breuer and Mart Stam had established using tubular steel in the '20s. The cantilever is springy, like an athlete's crouch. Indeed, Aalto's cantilevered chairs have a cheerfully anthropomorphic profile. His most splendid variations on the theme also seem the most characteristically Scandinavian: after he had tried seats and backs of plain plywood and boxy upholstery, Aalto designed birch frames crisscrossed with black linen webbing...
Motilal Nehru, the father of one of the founding fathers of modern India, was a prosperous and prominent lawyer. In the early '20s, however, Motilal shed his princely habits and anglophile tastes to become a leader in the Congress Party, which was lobbying for Indian independence. In 1929 Motilal passed the mantle to his only son, and together they joined Gandhi's crusade for social justice. By 1947, when the country finally won independence, Gandhi had hand-picked his superstar pupil, Jawaharlal, to become the nation's first Prime Minister...
Abel and the friends he cites in this amiably prescriptive work were major importers of mandarin goods. Coming of age in the '20s and '30s, these apprentice high brows were influenced by two intoxicating concepts from Europe: the power of the subconscious as expressed through psychoanalysis, and the possibilities for political change as revealed by Marxism...