Word: finlandized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MOTHER told me about a Popular Front meeting of socialists and communists at Brooklyn College in 1940, where the communists advanced a resolution that the USSR had not invaded Finland, but that in fact it had been Finland which had committed acts of aggression upon the people of Russia. As preposterous as the platform was, it passed after a long meeting, because, my mother explained, "The communists were much better sitters than we were--they never slept...
...Moscow. A dapper, moonfaced charmer, Anglophile Maisky interpreted Stalin's often twisting policies to the British through the 1930s, forging friendly relations but no alliances with Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill. Under a cloud after the Nazi-Soviet pact and Stalin's 1939 invasion of Finland, he rebounded to become one of London's social lions when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941. A superb p.r. man, Maisky donated the Soviet embassy's iron railing to Britain's wartime scrap drive and was once serenaded with the Internationale by British armament workers. Returning...
...leading architects would certainly include such globally known powers as Japan's Kenzo Tange, Italy's Pier Luigi Nervi, England's James Stirling, and I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson, among some others, in the U.S. Another entry, however, would have to be Alvar Aalto of Finland, who, at 77, may well still be the most original designer building anywhere. Aalto? He is scarcely a household name in the U.S., because he has done little work in America.* But "the maestro," as he is often called in his native land, remains a seer with a special transnational influence...
Aalto once described to some students his approach to a tuberculosis sanatorium he had designed in 1929 at Paimio, in southern Finland's pine forests. Aalto considered how each occupant, from the director on down, not only would use the building but also might feel about it. The janitor, he decided, should have his own closet, not just an impersonal clothes hook. When it came to the hospital rooms, Aalto put himself in the place of the patients. The result: designs for windows that would admit fresh air but not drafts, wash basins that would not splash, and chairs...
...create forms that are based on real human values." The bold, simple form of the Paimio sanatorium thrust Aalto into the vanguard of European functionalism in the 1930s. But that straightforwardness gradually changed as he won other commissions for everything from furniture to factories to whole towns, mostly in Finland. Over the years, his buildings have grown ever more intricate and idiosyncratic, taking odd, seemingly arbitrary shapes. But their genesis-profound thoughtfulness leavened by the free play of emotion-has never changed...