Maunulan asuntoalue (Bostadsområdet Månsas)

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

Maunula is a residential suburb planned and built to alleviate the housing shortage of the post-war reconstruction period, in which the goals of “valuable everyday life” have been exemplarily realised: the area has a human-scale dimension, in a park-like setting the various types of apartment and residential buildings are placed naturally in the terrain, the architecture and building materials are simple and of high quality, and even the floor areas of the smallest apartments have been used efficiently.

Maunula, planned on commission from the Helsinki housing production committee and built in the 1950s, is a uniform area whose edges are lined with terraced houses bordering the public forest park, further inside slab blocks of varying lengths, and point blocks taller than these. The schools are in the centre of the area. The area has no unified coordinate system; buildings placed freely in relation to their plots and the street form a composition within the block, whose parts are the landforms and park-like open courtyards. The street network is free-form and the scale of the streets is small. Housing design is based on precise and efficient dimensioning, and the buildings and apartments have split-level solutions following the terrain. Public parks are near the schools and the nursery school.

In the western part of Maunula is the oldest area, dating from the early 1950s. The Maunula kansanasunnot, predominantly red-brick in appearance, comprise over 250 apartments in 12 slab blocks. Near the pond of Sorsapuisto are the nursery school, a service building and the sauna-laundry building (so-called saunabaari). The buildings were designed by architects Keijo Petäjä and Viljo Revell.

In the eastern part of Maunula is Sahanmäki, designed by architect Hilding Ekelund, with over 20 terraced houses built as split-level solutions on the sloping terrain, four angular point blocks based on a central staircase solution, and, highest on the slope, curved slab blocks. The Sahanmäki area belongs to the selection of masterpieces of Finnish modernism from the late 1920s to the 1970s accepted by the international DOCOMOMO organisation. The dense structure of the area, with its varied street views, realises the vision of good suburban planning held by Ekelund, who from 1950 was the holder of the first professorship of housing design.

Between these two areas lie fine courtyard blocks designed by various architects, of which may be mentioned the Vesakkotie–Töyrytie houses by Esko Toiviainen, the houses on Männikkötie by Kaj Englund, and the houses on Rajametsäntie by Bertel Saarnio. On the edge of Keskuspuisto, along Koivikkotie, are terraced houses by various designers.

The Maunula schools were designed by the skilled school architects Hilding Ekelund and Jorma Järvi. The extension of Maunula elementary school is by Toivo Löyskä. The shops designed to serve the area are on the ground floors of the apartment blocks on Metsäpurontie.

History

The Maunula residential area was built in the 1950s, partly to solve the housing shortage in the capital caused by the war and migration. Already in the 1940s, a quickly built wooden area of several hundred dwellings was built in Maunula because of the housing shortage; it was later demolished in its entirety.

The Maunula area was annexed to Helsinki in the large boundary extension of 1946. At that time, town planning began in the annexed areas as well, and Maunula's first town plan was drawn up. The stone-built residential area of Maunula, which is remarkably well preserved, was built according to the plan, although the plan was not confirmed until 1958.

New residential areas planned for the annexed areas of Helsinki were called asumalähiöt. Early Finnish suburb theories are connected with this period. In 1947, the architect Otto-Iivari Meurman published Asemakaavaopin, in which he divides the urban structure into asumakunnat, the asumakunnat into asumalähiöt with the extent of a school district, and the asumalähiöt into asumasolut. Maunula has also been seen as an application of early suburb theory.

In 1948 the City of Helsinki established a housing production committee to direct the use of appropriations for non-profit construction. The Aravalainsäädäntö came into force in 1949, and housing construction accelerated partly because of it. Plots were leased to the Maunulan Kansanasunnot II company, and the housing production committee had masonry houses built in Maunula from 1949 into the 1950s, to ease the housing shortage for families with children, with the support of state housing loans. In stages, hundreds of rental and owner-occupied dwellings came into being on land owned by the city.

In his work as city architect from 1941 to 1949, Hilding Ekelund's main field was municipal housing production and planning. Ekelund became the first professor of housing design at the Teknillinen korkeakoulu in 1950. Ekelund wanted to create for the suburban areas a denser structure than the spacious forest town of Tapiola. He implemented this in Maunula. He fitted construction into the natural landscape so that varied street spaces and views arose, as well as pleasant and sheltered courtyards. Ekelund had long developed terraced-house ideas, and Maunula was the breakthrough of this building type.

Planting plans for the courtyards of Maunula were prepared separately by, among others, Paul Olsson and Elisabeth Koch.