Lakescape

tuusulan jär vi la ke pro ject Lakescape

Lakescape 2009

Type of project: Landscape and urban design Project: Lakescape Location: Järvenpää, Finland Status: Delivered Handing over date: July, 2009 Client: City of Järvenpää Built up area: 10.000 m2 Project team: Nacho Toribio, Carmelo Zappulla with M. Tepedino Collaborators: C. Gortan, T. Voskresenskaya

Between the urban landscape and LAKESCAPE scales

Urbanism in Finland seems necessary but, what kind of urban project is feasible in a picturesque agricultural landscape with the strong presence of the Tuusulanjärvi Lake? With the belief that every place should be seen as a landscape, either natural or artificial, the proposal considers the landscape no longer as a neutral background in which artificial architectonic objects are placed. Architecture, infrastructure and services are going to integrate all the natural elements and utilizing them in defining a new urban area creating a new landscape in which the boundaries between artificial and natural are blurred.

The landscape is becoming artificial! Finland is a country with many lakes in which water and land live together in harmony. Its structure naturally encompasses the two elements in keeping with the landscape creating the fascinating Lake District which makes Finland unique in the world. Googling Finland; zooming; and zooming again, water seems to be at one with the land in a fractal structure where autosimilarity conditions are repeated continuously. What if we repeat this fractal structure on our site?

Our proposal is to form a territory of coexistence between nature and artificiality. At the same time it incorporates all the natural conditions geometric, topographic and construction aspects, searching for an environmental sustainability and a formal complexity which reacts to the new values of our society.

The proposal is inspired from the interpretation of the basic elements of the site, the water, the field, the trees and from their organization and transformation in urban strips. These unconventional strips generate a complex bundling of waterways, housing, landscape and land-water management. Instead of a deterministic geometric law, this growing pattern has the force of a system of variable relations, of a flexible tissue that manages and adapts itself, but also imposes and changes according to the external conditions. It allows formal coherence, and it is able to configure singularities, variations or declinations.