SPATIAL DESIGN
Limestone in Estonian Construction and Architecture in the 20th Century.
Acting as material broker, Amaya Hernandez writes about saving more than 100 million years old stone from being ground into aggregate for a concrete planter.
Designing in close collaboration with what the material provides, ’Working Stone’ summer school uncovered some interesting alternative approaches to productive reuse.
Geologist Helle Perens emphasises that instead of worrying about the environmental impact of quarrying building stone, we should worry that there are plans for the near future to extract senseless amounts of it, including very high-quality stone, only to crush it into aggregate.
Architect Madli Kaljuste takes a look at Linnahall that hides traces of 400-million-years-old life in its walls.
The essay 'Sedimentary Flows and Creative Geologies' by Galaad Van Daele was commissioned for the publication Reset Materials--Towards Sustainable Architecture, edited by Chrissie Muhr and published by the Danish Architectural Press (Arkitektens Forlag, September 2023).
Humankind is transforming the planet into a vast infrastructural project serving its economic system. Landscape architect Hannes Aava explores how this development is reflected in critical theory and discusses what must be done to prevent the metabolism of humankind from becoming a metastasis.
All new hard infrastructure should be engineered to double as social infrastructure, writes Mattias Malk.
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.
One of the ways to alleviate environmental problems might lie in architecture that brings people closer to their environment again. Estonia as a maritime nation has plenty of opportunities for this.
