Viinikka-Nekalan pientaloalue

English translation (from the Finnish)

The text above is the record as published by the Finnish Heritage Agency (Museovirasto), in Finnish. The English below is a machine translation made by TreeAlive, not by the Finnish Heritage Agency (Museovirasto); it has not been checked by a person. Where the two differ, the original is the record. Report a translation error: privacy@treealive.com

Description

The Viinikka and Nekala detached house and low-rise apartment block areas are high-standard residential districts from the early 20th century and the post-war reconstruction period, partly realised with the help of municipal housing production.

Viinikka church is the first Finnish church building in which a church hall, parish work centre and parsonage were united under the same roof.

The building stock of the Viinikka detached house area consists of gable-roofed houses for one or more families, tightly built along the street, and two surviving municipal terraced houses. (Birger Federley 1919) At least some of the buildings were constructed according to the prize-winning proposals in the design competition for workers' housing to be built in the Lappi and Viinikka districts. The other public building in the area is Nekala school, designed by city architect Bertel Strömmer in 1932.

On the southern edge of the area stands Viinikka church, a building in the decorative classicism of the 1930s, plastered in light colour and rectangular in plan. A tall bell tower is attached beside the main entrance. The parish hall and other parish premises are grouped around an enclosed inner courtyard. The corners of the sharp-sided, triangular building complex are emphasised by low octagonal towers. In the atmospheric church hall, attention is drawn to the semicircular choir apse, which contains a large gilded Christ sculpture made by sculptor V.R. Rautalin. In the four small domes of the high interior ceiling are stylised paintings on evangelist themes by decorative artists Eino Rapp and Eino Kauria.

The Nekala detached house area was given a town plan after the Viinikka detached house area had been filled. After the Winter War, detached houses were built in the area with so-called Swedish aid, as well as the Nekala asevelikylä, which was built using the type drawings of architect Alvar Aalto. The asevelikylä consists of small, timber-built, gable-roofed two-family detached houses, 14 of them in two rows. The houses share a sauna, laundry and mangle building. The architect's hand is visible in the details of the buildings, such as the wooden railings and latticework.

History

The so-called Hatanpää board of management began planning a workers' detached house area on the south side of Viinikanjoki river after the city of Tampere had bought the Hatanpää manor area in 1913. The town plan for the area was drawn up in 1914, and the first detached houses were completed on the city's leasehold plots in 1915. Tampere's first fully municipal dwellings, 48 dwellings each comprising a kitchen and a living room, were built in 1919 in three terraced houses in Viinikka designed by architect Birger Federley. Two of these remain, the third having been destroyed in a fire in 1933. Settlement in Viinikka expanded steadily in the following decades, and by the end of the 1940s Viinikka was fully built up.

Viinikka Church, work centre and parsonage were built to a proposal by architect Yrjö Vaskinen, who had won a general architectural competition in 1927. The buildings were completed in 1932. From the outset the aim had been a coherent and unified whole dominating the Viinikka suburb.

The Viinikka town plan was extended as early as 1923 to Nekala. The area was further extended in 1927, 1935 and 1939. After the Winter War, with aid received from Sweden, houses known as the so-called Ruotsalaiskylä were placed in the Nekala area. The construction of the Nekala asevelikylä was overseen by Tampere aseveliyhdistys. The drawings for the houses were commissioned from architect Alvar Aalto, and A. Ahlström Oy's Varkaus house factory manufactured the timber components of the buildings. The consecration of the asevelikylä, built with voluntary communal labour, was celebrated in 1943.