OUTSET
Br(e)aking Ground 〉Ulla Alla
PROJECT
Reviving the Historical City Centre of Narva 〉Madis Tuuder, Gregor Jürna
VillÆ: A House of Existing Substance〉Dagnija Smilga
ESSAY
Drafting a Mine 〉Roland Reemaa
Why Don’t We Demolish These Dreadful Pre-Fab Buildings Already? 〉Anni Martin, Simo Ilomets
IN PRACTICE
Jazz Architecture that cannot be Notated 〉Maria Helena Luiga, Hannes Praks
Neringa Forest Architecture 〉Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule, Jonas Žukauskas
REVISIT
Radio. Riches. Repository 〉Madli Kaljuste
PROFILE
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes 〉Helena Rummo, Elina Liiva
Moratorium
This issue of Maja takes the call for a moratorium on all new construction as its starting point.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, who in 2022 as an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design powerfully instigated this idea in architecture circles, has said that even a momentary pause in new construction could create a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative1.
A similar idea was present in Ulla Alla’s master thesis ’30 Years of Pause. Research about doing not’, that she defended at the Estonian Academy of Arts Architecture Department in 2021. Rather than building anew, the project proposes the architect to focus on caring for and about what already exists, as well as to consider not-doing at all.
Why? ‘The design developed in the architect’s head or on his desk is already a substance extracted from the Earth, ready to be transformed into concrete aggregate or a roofing sheet’s finish’, writes Roland Reemaa. He emphasises architects’ shared responsibility in excessive resource mining. The work of an architect can create added value, but it also extracts and leaves scars. In recent years in Estonia, we have witnessed the tearing down of 40-year-old and younger buildings, and their indiscriminate crushing into landfill. This attitude towards built matter is similar to the disposition affiliated with fast fashion.
Would a moratorium on new construction mean that the construction sector no longer needs workers? That architects can shut down their computers and give up their creative self-realisation? On top of the opportunities for reconsidering large numbers of already existing buildings that is brought about by the fivefold growth in the need to reconstruct buildings in Estonia in the next 20 years, there are also enchanting and challenging architecture projects to be found in, for example, material-driven approaches. These are the focus of kuidas.works, Forest Parts, as well as of TalTech researchers who as part of the BuildEST programme conduct applied research on using demolition waste in the production of new building materials. All projects in this issue construct on previously existing built matter.
Like Ulla Alla writes, ‘The concept of a clean slate in spatial design should be left behind’.
Editor-in-chief Laura Linsi
1 From the website introducing Charlotte Malterre-Barthes’ forthcoming book A Moratorium on New Construction (Sternberg Press).
