MEDIATION
Six educators and practitioners from all over the world who specialise in interior architecture joined me for a discussion about how they conceptualise the role of the interior architect in spatial design, what the challenges of the specialisation are and what kind of education would help meet those challenges.
Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) master’s theses in interior architecture demonstrate an ability to raise serious global issues, and a polemical search for what interior architecture could contribute to their resolution.
In the past years we have seen the state’s increased interest in and expectations for interior design solutions as a conceptual whole. In order to discuss what we have achieved and where to proceed, the chairman of the management board of the Estonian Association of Interior Architects Pille Lausmäe-Lõoke was joined by the State Real Estate architect and former vice-president of the Estonian Association of Architects Kalle Komissarov and the spatial design project manager Kristiina Vasar.
Photo Essay: interior architect Aulo Padar 80.
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.
‘Rhizopia’ stands for an environment that stimulates the senses to enable losing boundaries between oneself and the rest, introspection and testing different ways of togetherness.
On a July evening, interior architects of various generations Taevo Gans, Kadri Pärtelpoeg, Eero Jürgenson, Pille Lausmäe, Priit Põldme, Marje Karu and Tarmo Piirmets came together at the association’s office in Rüütli Street to discuss the establishment, needs and current issues of the organisation.
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.
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.
