RUUMILOOME
Delving into characteristic coastal community places is one option for boosting Estonia’s coastal landscapes. The selected coastal cultural spaces – Liu boat workshop, Kabli bird station and the former polder field with an abandoned pump station – are places on the coast of Pärnu Bay that are worth reviving for the benefit of locals and visitors alike.
The Master’s thesis is concentrated on four Estonian small towns (Mõisaküla, Püssi, Kiviõli and Räpina) implementing three stages: intervention, new programme and planning. The intervention is a small-scale realization of an idea, such as an installation, which functions as a test to initiate a dialogue with the residents of the town. The new programme describes the implementation of the idea in a small town, including a new function for a plot by which both the urban landscape and structure undergo changes.
I sat down with Judith Lösing, Julian Lewis and Dann Jessen, the three directors of East Architecture Landscape Urban Design Ltd., the architecture office I work with in London. As an office it is not uncommon for us to exchange ideas and discuss matters that might not have a direct connection to a project but that are a part of a wider architectural discussion. For this issue, I invited the three directors to discuss the way East’s practice that spans around 20 years relates to the theme of authorship in architecture and how practicing more or less exclusively in London shapes that relationship.
The question is concerned with the unknown and how to give sense to it. As in the end, every unfamiliarity may be given a familiar, perceivable context. However, let us talk about the feeling of unfamiliarity. Could it be something more, something more genuine or even more delicate than the most obvious, for instance, an abandoned building?
The objective of the subjective preference theory founded by the Japanese acoustician Yoichi Ando is to examine the emergence of a satisfying aural experience in a space that supports learning and creative processes.
“We are interested in producing new ideals of beauty, in other words, new poetical images that can renovate our collective assumptions.”
Is EV100 Great Public Space programme revealing or creating the uniqueness of small towns?
‘We had completed our design submission for an architectural design competition. The detailed plan determined the building’s shape, roof pitch, roof height, eave height, the choice of building materials, entrance to the lot, the parking space of its residents and the client also provided us with a specific layout for rooms. We thought we had quite a decent building. Then an architecture student appeared and asked: ‘Well, what is the concept of this building...?’’
In recent years, environmentally sensitive apartment buildings have been constructed in Tartu city centre that timidly yet vigorously test the boundaries of the current way of life.
