YALE UNION

With the publication of this book, Yale Union completes the evolution of a project that began in 2012 with an event held at the Mount Angel Abbey library in St. Benedict, Oregon.

This book publishes correspondence between the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and the monks of Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon, where Aalto designed the abbey’s library building. Tracing the back story of the library, it reproduces letters, telegrams, memos, and ephemera from 1963 to the building’s completion in 1970. Rather than represent the building or its architect in monographic fashion, this book uses primary documents to chart the course of this architectural commission in order to investigate the social relations and global conditions that made the building possible. Like much architectural production the result of happenstance and good timing, Mount Angel also must be understood as the product of centuries of deliberate geopolitical maneuvering that precipitated the colonization of the land, its possession by Catholic monks, their importation of a prestigious architect in their quest for cultural capital, and the reliance on a benefactor enriched by the military industrial complex. In an effort to make sense of the layered complexities of the built environment, this book uses the archive of letters as a starting point to approach the question: Why is there a library designed by Alvar Aalto at a Benedictine monastery in rural Oregon?

Edited by Hope Svenson
Designed by Scott Ponik
Printed and bound by Gary Robbins

208 pages
8 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches
Casebound
Edition of 150

Available July 2021

$20.00 + shipping
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All proceeds from the book were divided evenly, with 50% donated to the Chúush Fund at Warm Springs and 50% donated to the Chinook Indian Nation.

 

Click HERE for a free PDF of the book