Healthy Streets in Tartu is a guideline providing help for city officials or specialists working on spatial design.
Thinking of design as a service means bringing into focus the user and user needs. The impact of user-specificity is steadily increasing in how the processes of spatial design are approached. Ave Habakuk from the Living Street movement writes about how to think of the street as a service.
Paide State Secondary School is an excellent example of the mutually complementary dialogue between a historical space and contemporary architecture.
How can built heritage help with modern challenges?
After the slow-burning and partly contestable success stories of Rotermann Quarter and Telliskivi Creative City, the eyes of Tallinners interested in urban design or just longing for a better urban space turned to Noblessner—the privately developed waterfront set to become one of the first chapters on the road to open the coastal areas of Tallinn to its citizens. Though far from complete, the lively quarter already offers a chance for a status report and an insight into the entrenchment of certain spatio-social tendencies in the Estonian real estate landscape.
Discussions about how to plan a good city and what kind of buildings to construct are becoming increasingly relevant as mankind has reached a fundamental milestone: the majority of the society lives in cities. At the time of climate change, the issue of a sustainable city is more pressing than ever before also in Estonia, where motorisation is fast and local centres are subjected to urban sprawl. In this context, it is worth recalling the ideological principles of two urban design theories – New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism – in order to set goals for the kind of space we want to move towards and the pitfalls to avoid on the way.
Against the backdrop of these phenomena, the wasteland paradigm shifted for us: the derelict and polluted areas around the city were like symbols of negative change in the environment with traces og bygone natural habitats or normal human activity, remains of stratified time, soul from different periods of Estonian life
Last year the Estonian Association of Landscape Architects annual award and the Estonian Cultural Endowment landscape architecture award in the category of architecture were given to the new city centre of Elva. ‘Between the Currant Bushes’ (by Ülle Maiste, Diana Taalfeld, Anne Saarniit, Roomet Helbre, and Taavi Kuningas from the architectural offices AT HOME, NU, ubin pluss, and TEMPT) was recognised as the winner of the architecture competition for the best solution for Elva main street and urban space in the framework of the ‘Good Public Space’ project.
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Several competition entries captured quintessential characteristics of Tartu. How to plan future competitions so that these characteristics could be more systemically written into competition briefs and implemented in 21st century projects?
I have failed to notice, in all those nostalgic reminiscences about the old Baltic Station market, has anyone shown any interest in whether the sellers themselves actually enjoyed spending time in this environment?
For Veronika Valk-Siska, architecture neither begins nor ends with a design or a building. Her career in architecture until now can be read as a reflection of an increasingly expansive understanding of what architecture could be.
Several competition entries captured quintessential characteristics of Tartu. How to plan future competitions so that these characteristics could be more systemically written into competition briefs and implemented in 21st century projects?
