The greatest challenge for Estonian towns and rural municipalities is to move from governing to enabling. An enabling locality facilitates its residents’ initiative and cooperation between local actors .
Bathology is an example of a possible artistic method which attempts to take into account the object’s perspective, the object as is. The budding bathology was inspired by the Lithuanian artist Marija Baranauskaitė and her exploration of sofanity. Namely, in 2018 she started developing the Sofa Project, a conceptual clowning performance where the target audience is not sentient, not even human but a sofa. In addition to being entertaining to human audiences as well as object-audiences (hopefully), it is also compelling for theoretical reasons, evoking among other things musings in the vein of Philosophy of Technology, Critical Posthumanism and Object-Oriented Ontology as well as exercises in non-anthropocentric thinking, and attempts to place something other than a human in the position of a subject.
This issue of Maja is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Estonian Association of Interior Architects.
A TV show called Restaurant 0 recently aired on Estonian Television, which focused on an experiment conceived by the Põhjaka chefs Ott Tomik and Märt Metsallik to open a conceptual restaurant in Viljandi within a single week. A question was raised on how it is possible to live sustainably and peacefully in a time when ecological catastrophe is imminent. Is it possible to establish a restaurant on zero budget and with zero footprint? The chosen location was an idle, rather deserted-looking 18th-century building in Viljandi. Studio kuidas.works was summoned to devise a spatial solution for the project.
The exhibition ‘The City Unfinished. Urban Visions of Tallinn’ at the Museum of Estonian Architecture 22.01–16.05.2021. Curated by Johan Tali, design Raul Kalvo, graphic design Stuudio Stuudio, translation and proofreading Kaja Randam, Kaisa Kaer, Mirel Püss and Johan Tali. The research project ‘The City Unfinished’ conducted at the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts takes a look at the big picture in the city of Tallinn and the concerns and opportunities of modern urban planning.
In the building reconstructed by Salto, the space definitely does not compete with the content as it tends to happen in the exhibition venues built during the so-called museum boom in the 1990s, such as Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim art museum. The adjustments here are highly refined and tasteful. It might be even said that a little boring, surprisingly neutral for Salto’s work. The red building is still red with the characteristic red brick kind of retained but in an ornately polished way.
