East meets north: Alvar Aalto's endlessly inventive career is seen through the eyes of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban in a major new exhibition at London's Barbican.

'We should be agreed', urged Alvar Aalto in 1935, 'upon the fact that objects that properly can be given the label rational often suffer from a noticeable lack of human qualities.' It is this aspect of the great Finn--the humanist who rebelled against the Neue Sachlichkeit and the International Style--that Shigeru Ban and his colleagues have decided to emphasise in the Aalto/Ban exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. (1)

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At first, the decision to ask Ban to interpret Aalto seems odd. But the Japanese paper and cardboard maestro has long admired the European architect's endless inventiveness and virtuosity with materials. Ban learned to respect the work after he was asked to mount an Aalto exhibition at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo in 1986, when he was able to see some of the buildings in reality and to understand how each one of the great works is a response to individual site and circumstances, and an exploration of material responses to them.

At the Barbican Gallery, the upper level is devoted to 14 key Aalto buildings, while the lower one is given over to his furniture and product design. Here in a middle section, Ban has a more or less separate show surrounded by a stockade-like undulating wall of cardboard tubes reminiscent of Aalto's long demolished Forest Pavilion at the 1938 Lapua Agricultural Exhibition. Similar sinuous partitions for the Axis exhibition were apparently the start of Ban's affection for cardboard tubes, for he realised that throwing away all the timber in which he had originally conceived the show would be immensely wasteful. The substitute was found in the office: the tubes on which tracing paper was wound. Within the stockade, beneath an undulating ceiling of thin tubes, Ban shows some of his furniture in the flesh and some of his buildings in photographs, models and drawings. But his input is properly modest (after all, his career is only half-way through) and he allows Aalto to be seen properly.

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One of the most fascinating elements of the show is a video reconstruction of the Finnish Pavilion for the 1938 New York World's Fair, which was demolished at the end of the expo. Tomas Westerholm's film orchestrates black and white stills to give an impression of what that strange volume, surrounded by undulating, inward-leaning walls must have been like in reality. It is an extraordinary evocation of a heroic, mythic space, though the strange sensation of wandering into the past is rather eroded by the very quick pace of the pavilion tour--so fast that it made me feel queasy.

Of the Aalto buildings shown in detail, only the AA system houses will be unfamiliar to most architects. They were designed during the war, when Aalto had to return to Finland in 1941 from his chair at MIT--as (non Nazi) Finland was allied to Germany to prevent being swamped by the USSR, he became an enemy alien in the USA when that country became a belligerent. You wouldn't recognise an AA house as an Aalto if you passed it on the motorway. They look very like little houses on the prairie, perhaps as a result of the architect's sojourn in America, but they incorporated new, economical ways of using timber, and were made to cope with the needs of a quite poor country further impoverished by war.

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Events ensured that they never took off, but it's clear why Ban wanted to show them, for he too has been much involved with housing proposals for the disaster-stricken poor, schemes which use cheap materials like the paper log housing at Bhuj in India. This, like some of Ban's other key works, is exhibited in photographs, drawings and models. His approach to furniture making, which incorporates many ingenious uses of paper tubes, can be compared to the wealth of surrounding Aalto examples and, though there are few direct stylistic links, Ban clearly draws inspiration from Aalto's experimental '30s work with laminated wood.

Upstairs in the gallery, the Aalto 14 are clearly divided into three groups: white, like the Paimio sanatorium, Viipuri library and Villa Mairea; red, brick, like Baker House, the Pensions building and his marvellous experimental house at Muuratsalo (where he made all those enthralling experiments in brick and tile); the final group includes the Imatra church, the Seinajoki civic centre and the marvellously calm and luminous North Jutland Art Museum. Changes in approach and material were largely dictated by Finland's economy. Aalto apparently believed that the white rendered walls of the '30s buildings were not buildable or maintainable during the war and its aftermath. When the economy was strong again, copper and special glazed tiles could be used with resurrected white-finished masonry to create some of the most powerful works.

A huge amount, particularly about Aalto, can be learned from this exhibition, the biggest on him ever held (the first overseas one was organised by this magazine at Fortnum and Mason's, London in 1933). The show includes many original drawings and photographs and Ban's students have made descriptive models of the 14, which help to relate the fabric and spaces of the work shown on the walls. The brilliant critic, Aalto scholar and architect Juhani Pallasmaa, who was one of the organisers of the show, contributes one of the two excellent introductory essays to the accompanying catalogue. (2) One of his most telling quotations comes from a 1957 lecture given by Aalto in Germany: 'Architecture is not mere decoration; it is a deeply biological, if not a predominantly moral matter'. If anything, the words are more true today than they were then. The exhibition clearly shows how they related to the work of one of the greatest and most thoughtful architects of the twentieth century.

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1 Alvar Aalto through the eyes of Shigeru Ban, Barbican Gallery until 13 May www.barbican.org.uk

2 Alvar Aalto through the eyes of Shigeru Ban, ed Juhani Pallasmaa and Tomoko Sato, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2007. The other essay is by Colin St John Wilson.