Resumen de El bosque habitable. La experiencia de construir ciudad paisaje en Finlandia
The myth of an ideal relationship between the city and nature is recurrent throughout history and especially debated around the middle of the twentieth century, when the reconstruction of European cities intensifies. Many of the housing developments built under the ideas of the Modern Movement apply the block and single-family homes as a banal mechanism, which simply releases land and improves green-space standards. This has meant that no special attention is paid to the rules of the modern city as an effective alternative to create residential neighborhoods more integrated in nature. The research draws attention to the new town of Tapiola and the sets of Viitaniemi and Kokalorinne, three projects developed in the mid-twentieth century in Finland. From the recognized sensitivity to develop architecture in this unique geography, it is investigated in the scale of the landscape as a frame of reference and determining factor in the characteristics of these urban projects and their design guidelines.
The first of these issues is addressed in Part I. The chronological review of some proposals and projects representative of Finnish urbanism helps us to recognize the magnetism that the landscape exerts in the conception of the natural space as a propitious area where to develop the city. The proposals of Tapiola, Viitaniemi and Korkalorinne specify this process and consolidate a type of residential project of its own in which the urban is subordinated to the surrounding landscape and rebuilds it. We call it the habitable forest and we emphasize the effect that imposes the imprint of the large scale in three aspects: green areas, streets and what built to become components of the landscape; ideas of urban structure are replaced by the objectives of organizing a place in the territory; and the intention of creating an urban image is oriented to introduce variations in an habitat that pretends to be natural.
These three features are deepened in Part II, seeking to reveal their implicit guidelines. The influence of the landscape tradition of Northern Europe on the work of Modern Urbanism, and therefore in this Finnish experience, serves as an argument for analysis. First, we study the character with which the urban elements are worked, reinterpreting them as a new register of materials or catalog with which the habitable forest is projected. Second, in examining project structures, we note that the formal freedom they express is due to a balance between a general logic that responds to site conditions and the organization of each fragment that makes up the projects. In spite of the differences in size and location matrixes of the projects, we recorded the same structuring operation. Finally, we deepen the disposition of the constructed pieces and the work with the vegetation, revealing the use of perceptual rules that enhance the natural qualities of the place. This makes it possible for the habitable forest to regain the vernacular tradition of conceiving residential life in the native atmosphere of the Finnish landscape.
Therefore, the results of the analyzes allow us to first affirm that the habitable forest represents a third way to the paradigmatic models of the single-family garden city and the polygons of large blocks. Second, in the modus operandi we distil a certain projectual technique with contents that are more scenic than urban. This leads us to a propositional corollary that we formulate as the conception of "other nature", more active and protagonist for the construction of the city. The fruitful synthesis expressed by the three cases studied, connects with the contemporary tendencies that seek the commitment of the residential urban project in the territorial articulation. The re-reading of these episodes can serve as antecedent and stimulus for these new project attitudes.
