Tapiola (; ) is a district of the municipality of Espoo on the south coast of Finland, and is one of the major urban centres of Espoo. It is located in the western part of Helsinki capital region. The name Tapiola is derived from Tapio, who is the forest god of Finnish mythology, especially as expressed in the Kalevala.
Tapiola was largely constructed in the 1950s and 1960s by the Finnish housing foundation and was designed as a garden city. It is the location of the Espoo cultural centre, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA), the Espoo city museum, and the Espoo City Theatre.
According to the Finnish National Board of Antiquities, Tapiola was the largest and most valuable example of the 1960s construction ideologies in Finland.Valuable construction areas in Finland Finnish National Board of Antiquities Its architecture and landscaping that combine urban living with nature have attracted tourists ever since.Sies, M. C., Gournay, I., & Freestone, R. (Eds.). (2019). Iconic planned communities and the challenge of change. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Name The original name for the Tapiola area was Björnvik, based on a bay with the same name, currently called Otsolahti (both names mean "Bay of bears", in Swedish and Finnish respectively), and the island of Björnholm on the southeastern side of the bay and the Björnholm croft located on the island. A mansion called Hagalund was built on the lands of the Björnvik village in the 19th century, giving rise to the Swedish name for Tapiola, Hagalund. The Finnish name Tapiola was the result of a competition held for the name of a new garden city in the 1950s. The name is based on the god Tapio in the ancient Finnish religion, which also has a connection to the traditional bear motive.Ukskoski, Laura: Tapiolan nimistö, City of Espoo 2016. Accessed on 1 October 2024.
History
As car traffic in Finland started increasing in the 1920s, planning for a southern road connection westwards from Helsinki started. The city of Helsinki bought the island of Lauttasaari in the 1930s and a decision to construct a road from Lauttasaari to the village of Jorvas (presently located in the municipality of Kirkkonummi) was made. The road Jorvaksentie (now known as the Länsiväylä highway) running on the southern border of Tapiola was opened for traffic in 1937. When the Soviet Union returned the Porkkala area to Finland in 1956, this road became an important connection to the western part of Uusimaa. Turning the road into a motorway started in 1961 and the road reached Espoonlahti in 1969. At this point the road was officially named Länsiväylä.Maatilojen Espoo, pp. 23-24. The traditional foundation of Espoo, 2020.
The part of the Kehä I beltway from Länsiväylä to Leppävaara, forming the eastern border of Tapiola, was built in the 1960s as a public road.
After the Continuation War had ended in 1944 the entire country of Finland suffered from shortage of housing. In the Moscow Armistice, Finland had been forced to reinstate all the areas it had ceded from the Soviet Union, which meant that the evacuees from Finnish Karelia had to be settled in Finland. Already during the Continuation War, the Finnish Family Federation had decided that action had to be taken to relieve the shortage of housing.Manninen, Antti: Tapiolan idealistinen mallikaupunki täyttää syksyllä 50 vuotta, Helsingin Sanomat 2 August 2003. Accessed on 9 January 2021.
Tapiola was one of the first post-war "new town" projects in Continental Europe. It was created by a private non-profit enterprise called Asuntosäätiö (the Housing Foundation), which was established in 1951 by six social trade organisations including the Confederation of Finnish Trade Unions, the Central Organisation of Tenants, the Mannerheim Child Welfare Federation, the Finnish Federation of Civilian and Military Invalids and the Civil Servants' Federation.Tuomi, T., & Paatero, K. (2003). Tapiola: Life and architecture. Espoo: Housing Foundation in cooperation with the City of Espoo.Merlin, P. (1980). The new town movement in Europe. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 451, 76-85.
The project was conceived, built and managed by Heikki von Hertzen, the executive of the Asuntosäätiö and garden city advocate.Tapiola, Finnish Museum of Architecture. Accessed on 9 January 2021. Von Hertzen was a lawyer, who had worked as a branch manager for a bank in Tampere before becoming the director of the Finnish Family Federation.
Under von Hertzen's leadership, the Housing Foundation bought 660 acres (267 ha) of forest land, six miles (9.65km) from the centre of Helsinki, and set out to create an ideal garden city.Heideman, M. Lawrence Jr: Tapiola: Model, myth, or happenstance? A personal investigation, Urban Ecology Volume 1, Issue #1/1975, pp. 5-47. The role of the Housing Foundation included financing the project and overseeing the planning and building process so as to ensure consistency within different areas of the town.Armen, G. (1976). The programming of social provision in new communities: Part II some case studies and conclusions. The Town Planning Review, 47, 269-288. The Housing Foundation's unique combination of various socio-political organisations facilitated the negotiation of funds with governmental bodies.Lahti, J. (2008). The Helsinki suburbs of Tapiola and Vantaanpuisto: Post-war planning by the architect Aarne Ervi. Planning Perspectives, 23, 147-169. Von Hertzen set out to create a modern urban environment that would address the housing shortage in Helsinki while also being economically viable and beautiful.Tuomi, T. (1992). Tapiola: A history and architectural guide. Espoo: Espoo City Museum. Tapiola did not form part of any wider plan for Finland's development other than von Hertzen's Seven Towns Plan, a response to urban sprawl in Helsinki.
In 1946 von Hertzen explained his thoughts about urban planning in his pamphlet Koti vaiko kasarmi lapsillemme ("A home or a barracks for our children?"), where he strongly criticised the cramped and gloomy closed city blocks of Helsinki and defended the importance of nature in a built environment. This idea of a garden city movement was inspired by the garden design principles of the British Ebenezer Howard. New residential areas in Sweden also served as inspiration for Tapiola.
The original city plans for Tapiola were made by Otto-Iivari Meurman.Hertzen, H.V., & Spreiregen, P.D. (1971). Building a new town: Finland's new garden city: Tapiola. Cambridge: MIT Press. . Later, the Housing Foundation made significant changes to the plans, and handed planning of Tapiola over to a group of prominent Finnish architects, including Aarne Ervi, Alvar Aalto, and Kaija Siren.Hertzen 1959 Each member of the group designed their own part of the area and its buildings, including social housing blocks (80% of all dwellings) and individual houses.
The planners of Tapiola were convinced that no one professional group could solve the manifold problems of modern community planning; planning has to be highly skilled and strictly directed teamwork at all levels. Tapiola is a result of close teamwork in the fields of architecture, sociology, civil engineering, landscape gardening, domestic science, and youth welfare.
The name of the garden city itself was chosen through a public competition in 1953. The winning name, which in Finnish means the home of the Tapio, the forest god from the Kalevala, was suggested by eleven different people. The prominent difference between the Finnish and Swedish names is explained by different etymologies. The Swedish name Hagalund comes from Hagalund manor, whose lands originally included the site of present-day Tapiola, even though the main building of the manor is actually located in nearby Otaniemi, separated from Tapiola by the Kehä I beltway. The original northernmost part of Tapiola was separated to its own district called Pohjois-Tapiola ("Northern Tapiola").
Tapiola is also the cultural centre of Espoo, as it houses the Espoo cultural centre (home of the Tapiola Sinfonietta), the city museum (in the WeeGee house), and the Espoo City Theatre. The Tapiola library is located in the cultural centre.
Future
The business centre of Tapiola has been significantly renovated by building business and office buildings deviating from the original design of Tapiola and based on the principles of dismantling and expanding construction. The development of the business centre is still ongoing. New space for residence, culture and services will be available when parking and maintenance will be moved to an underground parking garage with space for three thousand cars. The Espoo City Theatre will also move to new premises in connection to the business centre. This renovation is connected to the Länsimetro expansion including the Tapiola metro station taken into use in 2017, which is located underneath the parking garage dug into the rock.
The residential buildings and their environments in Tapiola will also be renovated. The most important renovation projects include the improvement of the appearance of the Mäntyviita urban space and renovating the current residential buildings.
Urban planning Tapiola brought worldwide 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 using some of the principles of Ebenezer 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 exceeded 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 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 proponents 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 comprise 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.