Topology of the intermediate space. The work of landscape architect Jussi Jännes in Tapiola

Abstract

Between 1955 and 1967, Jussi Jännes had the opportunity to design and build most of the public space of Tapiola, a new Finnish town that was conceived as a laboratory in which experimental solutions susceptible to being extrapolated to other urban interventions could be studied. This experimental condition allowed him to elaborate a delicate sequence of intermediate spaces that could articulate the different scales and spheres of the city, from the territorial to the domestic, thus favoring environmental connectivity and social inclusiveness as qualitative values of the urbanscape. The present article addresses an analysis of this experience with the aim of contributing to the identification and assessment of the role played by mediation spaces, in this case arising from the overlapping and intertwining of multiple realities, in the life of the public space of our cities. The critical review of the proposed case is relevant at a time like the present, in which the practices of urban planning and design are being reoriented on the basis of the previous definition of interconnected networks of spaces of high social, environmental and cultural value that are now known as green and blue infrastructures.