uudet rakennusta Tallinnissa

Some buildings of more recent construction from Estonia's capitol.

Intricate detailing on a triangular brick building from 1903.


The heroic Soviet-era (1964) Kosmos cinema, with its heroic fire stair.


Tallinn has more flower markets, and more people carrying bouquets, than any other city I have been in.

Despite its efforts to remain neutral during World War II, Estonia was occupied first by the Soviets and later by the Nazis. After the war, the country remained under the control of the Soviet Union until 1991. All three periods of occupation are addressed in the Museum of Occupations. The building, designed by Indrek Peil and Siiri Vallner, is square in plan; however, one corner has been eroded at the base. The entrance is through this corner, via a small paved courtyard which contains several small birches and three basins for rainwater.

The courtyard promotes a contemplative mood despite its small size and the absence of any seating. This has been achieved by making the building withdraw from the adjacent streets (one of which is quite busy) with a centripetal focus. The entrance corner is not the most obvious one; it faces the somewhat quieter side street. The courtyard's design is not a a naturalistic mimesis, but is suggestive of landscapes in the manner of a Zen garden or medieval cloister. The reflective surfaces of the glazing, and the rhythm of its mullions which echo the spacing of several planted birches, seem to enlarge the space, while the dripping of rainwater into three catch basins distracts the ear from the sound of traffic passing outside.

Architects often seek to control the experience of a user of a building (through a singular directed circulation path), or even the review of the building's design (through digital presentations that allow for only a single image or motion clip to be viewed at any one time). The hubris of this approach is that no single person, no matter how clever or careful, can fully anticipate all the ways in which a work will be used or understood. When W. B. Yeats wrote, "if an author interprets a poem of his own, he limits its suggestibility," he understood that a work can become enriched by layers of individual understanding. In an article in the Estonian Architectural Review, the building's designers acknowledge this fact, and also point out the political implications of architectural control:

"All space that someone has somehow organised is in some way controlled. While there were particular authorities for this and relatively direct means during the Soviet era, now the objectives and means are simply different. In contemporary society driven by advertising and consumption, we move ever more in space that is intended to have a certain pre-planned effect on us...To a certain extent as a reaction, we wanted to build a building that would be ideologically neutral, that would not forbid or command, where the user would not be looked after to excess and his thoughts would not thought for him in advance."

A department store building in steel and wood. Wood cladding is surprisingly rare in contemporary Finnish building, but is prevalent in Tallinn.

"Better"? Well, perhaps - it is cheese-flavored...

(posted 21 September)