international conference on the research of modern architecture
30 august - 1 september 2002 jyväskylä, finland
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JUHANA LAHTI MA, doctoral student, University of Helsinki, Institute for Art Research, Department of Art History email juhana.lahti @ helsinki.fi Formation of Planning and Design Principles in Tapiola Commercial Center by Architect Aarne Ervi Tapiola “Garden City” Tapiola is a suburban town in the City of Espoo situated next to Otaniemi Campus near City of Helsinki. Built by the private developer Asuntosäätiö (The Housing Foundation) it is a unique example of new large scale suburban development in Finland realized by an independent foundation whose activities are not based strictly on federal funding. Asuntosäätiö was founded in 1951 for the purpose of overseeing the Tapiola project. In the following year, five architects were assigned for the housing design. Architect Aarne Ervi (1910-77) was one of them. The key player behind the realization of the project was lawyer Heikki von Hertzen. He had supervised the pre-planning of Tapiola in the mid 1940´s together with Otto-Iivari Meurman, the Professor of City Planning, who had drawn the first plan for the area. The area was divided to a central area and three residential neighbourhoods (Eastern, Western and Northern) with retail services. Competition for the Tapiola Center A planning competition for the Tapiola Center was announced in November 1953. It called proposals for the building of an administrative, commercial and cultural center in Tapiola. The competition program emphasized innovative solutions for traffic arrangements as well as high quality architectural design. There was also an outline for a commercial space comprising 60-70 shops in a floor area of 4 500 square meters and office spaces located on the second floor or above totalling 4 000-5 000 square meters. When the competition was first launched the Eastern neighbourhood was already under construction. Aarne Ervi´s design for the neighbourhood center consisted of a strip-model shopping center, a cinema building and Mäntytorni, a ten-storey residential block, all along a pedestrian walkway. Thanks to this, he was well prepared for the competition and had already formed a close relationship with von Hertzen. Seventeen proposals were received by the competition deadline. The results were published in June 1954. Ervi and his assistants Tapani Nironen and Olli Kuusi won with their modernistic proposal “Don Hertzenin kylä” (The Village of Don Hertzen). In their critique the jury drew particular attention to the placement of the commerial buildings. The composing idea of the winning plan was a pedestrian street/mall that would serve as the axis for the whole center. The focus of the plan was a U-shaped shopping center and an office block in the core of this center. Situated at the edge of a small hill they formed a major visual theme and stood as a landmark for the community. After the competition Ervi continued to work on the plan with Olli Kuusi and Swiss architect Edi Bürgin. Tapani Nironen had left the office after the competition and was employed shortly afterwards by Asuntosäätiö becoming the architect responsible for the coordination of the building process. In January 1955 Ervi´s office was assigned to design the shopping center and the office block. The Helsinki Chamber of Commerce had established a Regional Planning Committee in 1954. In 1955-56 chamber surveyed the need for commercial space in Tapiola. In the survey the plan was heavily criticised for over-estimating the number of customers that could be attracted to the area in order to guarantee the profitability of such a commercial center. International phenomenon – Finnish adaptation The Anglo-American concept of a city, consisting of: a residential unit, a neighbourhood unit and a community, was first introduced in Finland by Otto-Iivari Meurman (asumasolu, asumalähiö and asumakunta) in his Asemakaavaoppi (“Principles of town planning”) textbook for students of architecture. Leading themes in the book were the concept of decentralisation and the principle of central composition. Meurman saw the center as a visual theme dominating the whole townscape and forming the transportational and commercial core for the surrounding area. The international concept and terminology of a shopping center, closely related to the principles of community building influenced the planning and design of the Tapiola commercial center during the almost twenty-year-long process. In the early 1950´s models were found in international professional journals and through studies from Scandinavia while towards the 1960´s foreign books and manuals became more and more popular as sources for design. In the American post-war classification, shopping centers were divided into three main categories on the basis of town planning principles: neighbourhood shopping centers, community shopping centers and regional shopping centers. Towards the late 1950´s these classifications were modified in the United States and in Scandinavia when market research became a designing factor in the planning of shopping centers. In 1958 the Helsinki Chamber of Commerce administrated a survey of the need for shopping facilities in new residential neighbourhoods respective to their population. The survey was commissioned by the Helsinki City Planning Agency, a subdivision of City Housing Department. In the survey shopping centers were devided into three categories derived largely on Swedish research: neighbourhood shopping centers for areas of 5 000 and 12 000-13 000 inhabitants and large centers (Swedish “stor center”) for 20 000 customers and more. In 1958 Ervi participated by invitation in the competition for the Northern neighbourhood. Tapiontori Shopping Center and Central Tower Construction of the commercial center started in the middle of recession in Finland in the summer of 1958 from the shopping center Tapiontori. The policy of the Asuntosäätiö was to develop and build the town in stages based on the need, on the ideology of Meurman and on the financial situation. Even the relatively small Tapiontori shopping center was built in several different phases. Olli Kuusi left the office in the same year. Olavi Kantele and Tuomo Kuukka continued working on the shopping center and Antero Markelin and Mauri Liedenpohja started working on the Central Tower. At the beginning of the year 1960, when the center was already under construction, the building program was revised on the basis of comparisons between new shopping centers in Helsinki metropolitan area. The complex was completed during the year 1961. The architecture of the Tapiontori shopping center was typical of the time: a low U-shaped building with display windows surrounding a covered pedestrian area with trees and lawn in the middle; service road was located behind the building mass. A thirteen storey office block and sight seeing tower, Keskustorni, was a true suburban landmark with a lit roof construction Tapiolan kruunu (“The Crown of Tapiola”). Together these two buildings formed a unified core for the new community under construction. When completed in 1961 this complex was a community shopping center serving exclusively the 16 000 inhabitants of Tapiola due to the fact that the traffic connections to the surrounding areas were still rather limited. After the completion of the shopping center and the central tower, construction focused on the Western and Northern residential neighbourhoods. The Heikintori Department store The idea of a larger commercial center was already included in Ervi´s winning entry for the 1954 competition. During the early 1960´s Ervi proposed different options for future construction and development, but the actual planning process did not begin until 1965. At that time Ervi served as the Head of the newly organized Helsinki City Planning Department (1965-69). Pertti Solla and Lasse Ollinkari were the architects responsible for the construction of the Heikintori department store that began in 1967. The department store was viewed as crucial in the attempt to promote Tapiola as a New Town instead of a regular community. During the late 1960´s von Hertzen was in correspondence with American shopping center developers. As a result of that the builders started to talk about “Regional enclosed mall”. The American based inside-out approach and overall design principle increasingly determined the building during the process. New services were concentrated in a three storey commercial multi-purpose building located on the Tapionraitti axis as the older shopping center. When opened in the end of October 1968 the Heikintori Cooperative Group of Independent Traders was the first indoor shopping mall in Finland. At this stage of the development of the community, the unified commercial core of Tapiola started to serve as a district shopping center or “stor center” for the fast growing population in the western Helsinki metropolitan area. Today the extended and continuously developing Tapiola is a major regional center in Espoo city. In Finland the Tapiola commercial center was a unique combination of CIAM based ideology of the modern city center architecture and the new community center planning based on commercial facilities. During the Tapiola Commercial Center building process the planning principles of Meurman that formed the base for the design had changed towards a more modernistic and traffic regulated town and site planning. In the building design, a pragmatic shopping center concept took the lead over the CIAM based modern architecture. How to analyse the Post-War Modernism? Writers of the history of modern architecture have tried to find an alternative for the Canonized (terms of the) Modern Movement and International Style. The recent critique against this selective and formalistic adaptation of the modern movement can be seen as ambivalent. The “Other tradition of Modern Architecture” is an alternative path within the movement itself, which means that it still takes the movement as the base for the historical interpretation. The more pluralistic approach questions the concept of modern movement in its search for reinterpretation. Sarah Williams Goldhagen proposes a sketched framework to be used as a tool for interpreting the diversity of (post-war) modern architecture. She divides modernism into three dimensions: cultural, political and social. I will now analyse briefly the Ervi´s work on the Tapiola Commercial Center by using the categories of proposed by Goldhagen. The cultural dimension is most of all used to classify who is a modern architect and who is an anti-modern or non-modern architect i.e. what is modern architecture and what is not. It is obvious that Ervi can be classified as a modern architect. The political dimension serves primarily for locating the architect´s approach towards conventions. In this Goldhagen divides the positions of architects to three strains: consensualists, negative critics and reformists on the basis of their position toward existing political and economic systems as well as the role of architecture in social progress. Ervi was certainly not a negative critic and can be seen mainly as a reformist. His innovative ambitions were not in the formal language of architecture but in the technological part of building. He was a major advancer of standardization and pre-fabricated building technology in Finland. Ervi was among the first in Finland to adopt the five-day workweek and he established one of the largest offices in the country. As a modern architect Ervi was a consensualist in the sense that he took the role of a genius-architect and worked hard in order to achieve that. He actively photographed his own buildings in order to get them published in international journals. Ervi´s position in the office hierarchy was inevitable, though not necessarily especially pragmatic. He negotiated with clients without the architect in charge and signed the major works alone. In the third, social dimension Goldhagen classifies architects either of a machine oriented strain, who can be seen as a sort of predecessors of International Style, or of a strain of situated modernist´s who can be seen as relatives to the path of the “Other Tradition”. Ervi´s architecture clearly oscillated between the strains of machine oriented and situated modernism. When analysing Tapiola Commercial Center the sense of place is inevitable: the pine trees on the market yard of the shopping center are original, the pool next to the Central Tower is located on the gravel pit that existed on the spot and the Tapionraitti mall is located on top of an old artillery road. The sense of humanity is also inevitable. Ervi had a strongly user based approach to design. Human figure of a customer was the basic unit in the design of shopping centers. The scale Tapiola center is designed for pedestrians. On the other hand the architecture of the center recalls clearly the CIAM influenced International Style and the principles of shopping center design at the time of flat roofs, steel column arcades, large windows, the massing of freestanding forms, the inside-out approach and finally the overall site planning and design. Although Goldhagen emphasizes the oscillation between the dimensions and strains she takes a position where the situated modernists are automatically seen as reformers. Indeed a dynamic interplay among these dimensions created some of the movement´s core problematics as she mentions but it can be asked whether these kinds of frameworks are relevant. The factors that Goldhagen´s framework lacks are: The dimension of time: the difference between the historical situation before and after the WWII. The role of an architect and that of architecture changed along with the society. The architect worked more closely as a member of team of professionals. The rise of popular culture and globalisation offered a variety of examples and sources for architectural innovation. Technological advantages in building and construction networks, standardization as well as the related handbooks formed a different field of action. For the new generation of architects modernism was an already existing architectural culture. The dimension of communication: the pragmatic position of the architect as a person cooperating with other persons and interest groups. Goldhagen argues that stylism is not the way to approach architecture because motivation and position differs among architects and sees modern architecture as a complex network of relationships. She hardly makes any reference on the pragmatic positions of the architects in the communication network. Ironically, in her essay on Alison and Peter Smithson in the same book, she gives the majority of attention to questions of the post-war situation and the position of Smithson´s in it. Again, the usefulness of this kind of a framework is questionable, if it forms a gap between architecture historical theory (framework) and practice (writing). My argument is that although it is not relevant to approach modern architecture as a narrative of heroic and progressive individuals, the persons (and the communication network they form) behind the production of architecture must not be left without discussion in order to produce critical historical research; and when analysing the post-war period, the historian has to take the post-war situation as a basis for the interpretation in order to produce relevant theory on the modern architecture of the era. As an active architect Ervi had several roles in the professional field: manager of architectural office, teacher of students of architecture, writer, city officer and member of different interest groups, among others. In his role as a manager of the office, he can be seen to have subroles of: a businessman, a (artistic) leader of a group of architects, a chief of all the employees, a main negotiator with the clients and other professionals related to projects. In a sense Ervi had a dualistic relationship to the profession: one formed by the tradition of an idea of the modern genius-architect and other formed by the realities of the contemporary society in which he worked. Above all modernism formed the background for his work: as a living history, as a form of education and as a contemporary influence and ideology for design. Joan Ockman points out that modernism, as reinterpreted after the WWII, largely meant a frame with repetitive components. By using psychological terminology, modern architecture can be described as a professional short-term memory or a working memory for post-war architects. Their approach towards the history of (modern) architecture can be seen as a selection of different possibilities for an architect to use or not to use. « CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS |
