Elephant & Butterfly: Permanence and Chance in Architecture is the proceedings of the 9th international Alvar Aalto Symposium, which was held on 1–3 August 2003 in Jyväskylä, Finland. The book contains edited versions of the keynote speeches delivered at the Symposium; the authors are Peter von Bagh, Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk, Rick Joy, Anne Lacaton, Luis M. Mansilla, Hiroshi Naito, Pekka Pitkänen, Rogelio Salmona, and James Turrell.
The book also contains the brunch discussion comments by William J.R. Curtis and James Turrell, as well as Raymund Ryan’s article Thinking in the Wake of Aalto about the event. There are two CDs, in sleeves attached to the book’s front and back panels, that contain the complete conference coverage. The book has been edited by Mikko Heikkinen, the Symposium’s chair at the time.
Elephants live a long time and never forget – unlike a butterfly which lives only a day and knows nothing of yesterday. What else is left as a testimony of past empires and cultures, if not their architecture? Today, those same old walls seem good enough again as the settings for new uses of all sorts: a 19th-century railway station becomes a museum of art, or a dockside warehouse is turned into a luxury hotel (…) It has been said that a butterfly can change the world with one flap of its wings (…) Chance has two meanings in English: possibility and coincidence. In Alvar Aalto’s works, tradition and revolution live in symbiosis but they often reveal a desire to surprise and amaze – the merest touch can change everything.
— Mikko Heikkinen in Elephant & Butterfly: Permanence and Chance in Architecture, p. 8.
The copy in stock is in very good condition, with only some slight shelf wear on the covers. The CDs have not been tested.
