Tapiola - Urban Planning

Urban Planning

Tapiola bought world-wide fame for Finnish urban planning. From its first stages it gained both a national and international reputation for its high class architecture and landscaping, as well as an ideological experiment. Tapiola's planners aimed at demonstrating a new direction for Finnish town planning and housing. The aim of the Housing Foundation was to create a garden city which would be a microcosm of Finnish society: all social classes would live there and there would be different types of buildings, ranging from detached houses to terraced and multi-storey blocks. The slogan of the project was: "we do not want to build houses or dwellings but socially healthful surroundings for contemporary man and his family". Tapiola provided a utopian vision of society and an alternative to what was seen at the time as an oppressive urban environment. In this sense, Tapiola was both an experiment and a model.

Tapiola was built on the principles of Ebenezar Howard's garden city. The founder of Tapiola, Heikki von Hertzen, believed that it was not possible to create a satisfactory residential centre if the population density exceeds a certain figure. Hertzen's vision for Tapiola, which was originally planned for an area of 600 acres, was to have only 26 residents per acre, and a total of 15,000 people. The ground was divided into four neighbourhood units, separated by green belts, and in the middle was built a main shopping and cultural centre to meet the needs of 30,000 inhabitants (including those of surrounding districts) (Hertzen 1959). An important feature of the Tapiola and garden cities is the development of a self-contained community. This meant that as many jobs as possible had to be provided – as many as could be at a distance of less than 10 km from Helsinki.

The architects commissioned to plan Tapiola had also been influenced by Le Corbusier and other propagandists of Modernism, and thus their urban ideals also included tower blocks forming impressive silhouettes, as well as a dense method of building. The various residential units which made up Tapiola compromise multi-storey blocks and individual homes, either detached or in rows, introducing a note of variety in the neighbourhood and allowing for the mixing of residents. Combining the architecture of modernism and the ideology of the garden city movement is credited for the huge interest in Tapiola's planning history.

The main planning features on which Tapiola was built, as synthesised from Von Hertzen's writings, are summarised below:

• The starting point of planning is the individuality of man and closeness to nature, and the aesthetic value of nature and use of natural contours of the landscape are retained wherever possible.
• Nature dominates, architecture is secondary. All buildings must harmonise with the natural setting.
• To be a working town, not a dormitory or nursery, providing as many jobs as possible to its inhabitants.
• The town should provide for a range of income levels – "a community of everyman, where the ordinary worker, successful businessman and university professor can live side-by-side".
• Consistent placing of multi-story buildings with alternatively low housing, resulting in a feeling of spaciousness and variety.