EVENT

On the morning of August 29th in 2017, freshmen of the Department of Interior Architecture were waiting for a train at Baltic railway station at 7.44 am to head to Pärnu. What lay ahead was a three-day trip, followed by a three-year-journey into the unknown. Yet, these students were not completely caught off guard by these successive events as they had been admitted to the Department of Interior Architecture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, run by Hannes Praks.
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.
Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) "Beauty Matters: The Resurgence of Beauty“, 11.09–15.09 2019. Although architecture may help to solve (and it does solve) problems, we should not regard it as a primary tool for solving social etc. problems but as a creator of values, novelty and wellbeing. In the 20th century, the creative part of architecture that can also deal with the question of human condition has been undeservedly overshadowed by pragmatics.
The seventh Oslo Architecture Triennale, themed ‘ENOUGH – Architecture of Degrowth’, took place in the autumn of 2019. It was curated by Maria Smith, Matthew Dalziel, Phineas Harper and Cecile Sachs Olsen from the transdisciplinary architecture and engineering practice Interrobang. The triennale focused on architecture that stems from reflecting on social relations rather than the pursuit of profit.
The top-level conference held at the Estonian Academy of Arts during the Tallinn Architecture Biennale dealt with the effect of digitality on architecture, production processes and society.
The curators of 16th Venice Architecture Biennale “Freespace” Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara feature a series of projects highlighting the social and humanistic facets of good architecture.
‘Weak Monument’ examines the effect and significance of architectural elements and pragmatic everyday architecture and describes how weak (and normally not material-intensive) architectural practice may become significant and give rise to something new.
The interview is based on Yael Reisner’s lecture Why Beauty Matters in Architecture; the cultural bias, the enigma, and the Timely pursuit of New Beauties given at the Estonian Academy of Arts in February 2018. She was also chosen to be the head curator of Tallinn Architecture biennale in 2019 with her chosen title Beauty Matters, The Resurgence of (the temporarily dormant) Beauty.