Bringing Modernism to life

This year, professor of architecture Harry Charrington leads tours to the US, Finland and Italy, based on the lives and works of three exceptional architects at the forefront of modernism: Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and Carlo Scarpa.

The architects Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) and Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978) form a fascinating triumvirate, linked by mutual admiration and actual meetings. Aalto met Wright in New York, with the latter describing Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as a “work of genius”. Meanwhile, Scarpa famously declared, “Other people imitate Gropius. I copy Wright.” Each took international modernism and reinterpreted it for their own locality: Wright in America, Aalto in Finland and Scarpa in Venice.

What ties the three together is their witness to an extraordinary trajectory of change. There’s an early photograph of Aalto aged two in 1900, sitting in a little sledge – a pram on runners in the snow, with a horse and cart beside it, like something from Doctor Zhivago. He died seven years after men walked on the moon. This compression of transformation, this speed of remaking how we live on the planet, makes the modern era uniquely vivid to visit. If you were transported to 1825, you would immediately feel you were in a radically different world. But drop into 1925, and much would feel recognisably modern, from the cars, to the emerging social fabric. Modernism marks the settings of our own lives.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the domestic revolution

Wright’s work offers something different to that of European modernists focused on postwar institutional reconstruction and social housing that sets him apart from the others: a journey through changing American domesticity. Most of his buildings are private houses. My tour reveals how he responded to evolving technologies, changing lifestyles, and dramatically different clients and budgets.

The contrasts are vivid. In the Edwardian-era Robie House in Oak Park, we see a world with servants and a particular social decorum that Wright gently subverts. By the postwar period, at Jacobs House in Madison, a three-bedroom house with what Wright called a “time and motion kitchen”, servants have vanished, and life centres around efficient domestic spaces. It’s the trajectory of America itself, from a class-structured society to a democratised, available-to-all dwelling culture.

Fallingwater, built in 1936 for the Kaufmann family (whose son was an early curator at the Museum of Modern Art), remains breathtaking, a house impossibly cantilevered over a waterfall. And then there’s Taliesin, Wright’s own house, which burned down three times and which he continually evolved over 60 years, a place where you feel not just the presence of Wright himself, but his third wife Olgivanna and the whole valley of his Welsh Unitarian ancestors who settled there in the 19th century. You feel this is where the 20th century came from.

Frank Lloyd Wright departs from 4–14 September 2026, including visits to Fallingwater, Robie and Taliesin houses, Johnson Wax Building and numerous other of Wright’s works, many with private access for MRT clients.

Carlo Scarpa: The art of intervention in Venice

Scarpa’s genius lay in his ability to intervene in historic fabric without destroying it. After training and working for 20 years as a glass designer in Murano, he brought a craftsman’s sensibility to architecture. At the Castelvecchio in Verona he transformed a dusty monument into a living museum for citizens, carefully negotiating between old and new. Here, his approach to lighting was revolutionary – almost all exhibition pieces are naturally lit. For Scarpa, the risk of minor UV damage was worth giving extraordinary art back to the people.

The Querini Stampalia Foundation offers another striking example. This palazzo on the Grand Canal has a poignant backstory: the Querini family’s son, the young architect Angelo Masieri, went to meet his hero Frank Lloyd Wright in America, but was killed in a road accident shortly after his arrival. Wright designed a memorial building for the family, but the Venetian authorities rejected it – they didn’t want a modern villa on the Grand Canal. Scarpa, a devoted admirer of Wright, was then invited to convert the dilapidated palazzo into a foundation and exhibition space, creating a series of precise interventions that reanimate the historic structure.

Venice, often dismissed as a city frozen in the past, through Scarpa’s lens becomes a model for the future: a walkable city with local neighbourhoods and a local food economy, living sustainably on the edge of its relationship with water. This approach feels remarkably timely. Where early 20th-century futurists like Marinetti wanted to fill in the Grand Canal and build a motorway, Scarpa showed how you could evolve things through careful intervention and evolution, adding layers to existing fabric.

See Carlo Scarpa’s most acclaimed work alongside lesser-known projects, many visited by special arrangement. 'Venice: Scarpa & Others' runs 19–24 May 2026

Alvar Aalto: in balance with society and nature

Aalto’s work embodies a particular vision of architecture as stewardship, for building a better society in balance with nature.

The National Pensions Institute in Helsinki demonstrates Aalto’s social democratic principles in built form. His Ministry of Social Affairs from the early 1950s sits within a park and brings the park into its own three-sided garden. Originally, you could walk from the park through the ministry and out the other side – the building deferred to citizens, contributed to the cityscape and added an amenity. Even the canteen was open to the public. It is exquisitely detailed; Scarpa knew and drew inspiration from it.

What makes the Aalto tour especially moving is the presence of partnership. Aalto worked for 25 years with his first wife Aino, then married Elissa Aalto, who outlived him and died in 1994. These women have only recently been properly restored to the story, and their presence is palpable in the house and studio where they lived and worked together.

Their house, built in the 1930s, is remarkably modest – a deliberate choice. A sliding door connects the living room to the studio, where at times as many as 20 people worked. It’s an intimate vision of life and work intertwined, of collective endeavour in service to an idea.

Survey the works of Alvar Aalto, ‘the poet of International Modernism’ as well as major buildings by other 20th-century Finnish architects on 'Finland: Aalto & Others', 24 June–2 July 2027.

A non-linear understanding

My tours don’t follow a chronology. You don’t start with the architect at birth and progress through early to late works. Instead, you see projects that cut across each other in time, which creates its own revelation. You begin to see patterns; how these architects absorbed influences and reacted to events, how they made things specific to climate, culture and circumstance. You understand the contingencies behind creativity.

And most crucially, you see it all in place, in three dimensions. That is what transforms understanding; not just reading about buildings, but walking through them, feeling them, seeing how they sit in their landscapes and cities, how they respond to light and use and the lives of those who made and inhabited them.

Harry Charrington worked in Alvar Aalto’s atelier in the late 1980s under Elissa Aalto. Currently. He is an architect and Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster.