Kotka was born as harbour
town for the wood and paper industry. The actual urban configuration has
grown around this productive activity, with two main centres; Kotkansaari
and Karhula. Nowadays the town’s main character is still strictly connected
with the sea and harbour activity.
The big emptyness in the competition’s area gives the opportunity of designing
a proper ‘city’s piece’, on which we can express and realize a contemporary
idea of living.
Some issues are always present and definitely relevant in the recent
contemporary debates on urban design: the role that urban planning has in urban
strategies, the connection’s meaning between scales and constant relevant
themes and how it responds to the necessity of fast changes conciliating local
expectations and international motives.
The project proposes a way of designing the city not as a succeding or
overlapping of single objects or architectural episodes, but instauring complex
spatial and architectural relations according to a “systemic” proportion of the
city.
In this “systemic” idea, the vary architectural and landscaping elements
integrate themselves in a proper idea of net, as alternative of a hierarchical
and centripetal city or only made of architectural emergencies.
The built forms and spaces proposed by the project present themselves as
‘suitable’ completions of the landscape, urban or not, colloquial but mimetic
inserts in the contest.
The project promotes the accessibility to any space and
function,underlining the connections and free routes between the
different parts and the rest of the city, and above all a new urban interface
between land and sea.
The entire project is concentrated on this dialectic concept’s reality of the
limit betweeen land and water: the cost line is contemporarely the start and
the end point of the city’s territory.
It is the place where the limit of the vastness of the Nature and the sense of
the anthropology’s made up order imposes itself.
This city’s part marks a mediation between the nature’s infinity and the that
basic human will of building ‘inside’ spaces.
architects_
gianluca evels & stefania papitto - b4architects
with: lorenza giavarini, matteo rossetti, luigi valente
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