In zoning, scale and style must be maintained and not succumb to speed blindness.
In the year 2010 Playwright Juha Jokela’s successful play was performed at the Espoo City Theatre Performance economy. One of the central characters of the play is a real Finnish real estate investor whose utopian goal is to transform Tapiola, originally created as a garden city, into a skyscraper city, a grinder’s dream.
The idea seemed so absurd at the time that the role played by actor Martti Suosalo got the loudest laughs from the Espoo audience. It didn’t take less than a decade when the vision, which seemed alien to the reality of the play, became completely true.
The end result is that only a memory remained of the core of the previously internationally known garden city. It was replaced in an inconsolable way by the shopping center apartment buildings that reflect the soulscape of today’s Finnish urban architecture and the maze-like corridors to the metro stop.
Espoo is pulling and its population is growing. Along the new subway and brand-new light rail line, it is meaningful and reasonable to densify urban living. However, the scale and style should be preserved, and not allow speed blindness to strike. Even though Espoo is still a young city, the existing distinctiveness of the neighborhoods, cultural environments and proximity to nature should be respected.
In Otaniemi, significant new construction has been achieved, which has reached the spirit of culturally and historically valuable buildings designed by Alvar Aalto. The key to success has been that the scale has not been inflated unreasonably, but the buildings blend elegantly into the older red brick architecture and the surrounding park areas.
The city of Espoo’s plans to zone up to 16-story residential buildings in the southern part of Otaniemi unfortunately seem to be closer to an architectural fiasco like Tapiola than to the successful new construction that has been implemented so far.
Temperance regarding the number of floors and square meters would really be an asset when the city planning board deals with the site plan proposal on November 22.
Olli Nurmi
Otaniemi, Espoo
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