Where is the line between genuine development and pointless construction? How to use concrete reasonably rather than wastefully? In what form should concrete figure in contemporary architecture?
Air and its composition concern every field of spatial design, both at the micro and macro levels. The way in which airflows are controlled reveals how a built space relates to its surrounding environment. Hence, in this issue we ask: how does your house breathe?
Thinking through stone opens up a fresh perspective on construction culture (and the lack thereof), availability of local building materials and their untapped (economic) potential, and, ultimately, on building truly long-lasting buildings.
This issue of Maja takes the call for a moratorium on all new construction as its starting point.
In the UK, a number of councils have adopted the passive house method in order to realise their growing ambitions in the housing sector. Could this also lead to an increase in spatial quality?
In 2016, a group of women moved into a building in the borough of Barnet on the outskirts of London—a building that had been developed and built in collaboration with them and specially for them. Thus culminated a process that had begun in 1998, when some of these women founded the Older Women’s Co-Housing (OWCH) group.
In talking to Rein Einasto, interdisciplinarity shows itself to be something more than calculated collaboration between experts of different fields. It has a cultural rather than project-based meaning, consisting of commonly shared social responsibility, making sense of collective action, or, to use Einasto’s own expression, being in a common spirit.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, collectively known as the Baltics, are three small countries that most of the world finds pretty much indistinguishable. As a geopolitical term, ‘the Baltics’ took root only in the 20th century. The more distant past and cultural history of the three countries differ on several levels.
Perhaps it is namely in defiance against externally imposed homogenising simplifications that we tend to turn to more distant places for inspiration and view local trends and tendencies as something confined only to national borders. However, anxious times encourage unity, urging us to discover and interpret our identities ourselves instead of letting others define us. In order to be carried and consolidated not only by fear, but also joy, pleasure, and curiosity we invite to discover commonalities and peculiarities of the Baltic countries!
Wide breadth, blurred boundaries, ambiguous endings and beginnings—the charm of the Baltic condition is not easy to grasp. But as Latvians say, per Reinis Salins: ‘Katram savs stūrītis’ (‘Everyone has their own corner’).
When a certain building technology or material is sidelined for an extended period, one is bound to get the impression that it is intrinsically obsolete. This has happened with natural stone, which architects, when asked about its potential for use, describe only as being too expensive, too labour-intensive, incompatible with the public procurement system and, as can be witnessed in renovation projects, simply too complicated to build with. The inability to imagine a future different from the present is typical to the 21st century, and hence, the main use of limestone in Estonia remains blasting it into rubble that can be utilised as landfill and concrete aggregate.
