Forming the Utopia - Venturo house as a part of Tapiola Garden City

Abstract

This thesis examines the Venturo House, part of the garden city of Tapiola. It explores the synergetic relationships that Venturo and Tapiola garden, two significant cultural sites, form with each other. Both Venturo and Tapiola are based on the utopian visions of Modernism, but each ideology deviated from the middle ground in its own way, creating its own vision of the future. The research explores the meaning and impact that the Venturo House can create in Tapiola, and how it can shape the culture and the community of the area through art, design and architecture.

The Venturo House is a part of the story of Finnish architecture and design. Designed by Professor Matti Suuronen as a part of the Casa Finlandia series, Venturo stunned by its futuristic formal language and far-future ideology. The Venturo house, the last one in the series, completed in 1971, is a modular house made of fibre-reinforced plastic, designed to provide an alternative way of living through its mobility and adaptability. On its way to international attention, the Venturo house's journey was unexpectedly interrupted by the onset of the oil crisis. The Tapiola Garden City is an aesthetically and internationally significant area created in the 1950s and 1960s, whose spirit is still recognised today. Located in Espoo, the area has a lot of collective memory and shared ideas, but it aims to remain closely in touch with the times by evolving as an urban city.

The purpose of the thesis is to produce a proposal for a concept plan for Venturo, owned by the City of Espoo, in response to the client's wishes to take into account the characteristics of Venturo and Tapiola and Espoo's objectives. The thesis aims to identify the relevant ideas and culture that will serve as a basis for Venturo's arts and culture-oriented activities. I work on the project as a planner, participating in the process of locating Venturo in Tapiola and in the content production itself.