Twelve respondents—offices, architects, and collectives—describe what they take to be the result of an architect’s work. Their answers are accompanied by images of workplaces and moments in which the result is most clearly seen.
Garbage Kids is a collective of architects-turned-carpenters. The driving force behind their work is their frustration with a society that prioritises growth over sustainability and encourages overconsumption in a world with limited resources. In response, they use traditional craftsmanship and folk wisdom to create objects from found materials such as broken branches, scrap metal, and stones from abandoned quarries. Their practice strives to be intuitive, explorative, and free. Luka Abashidze, Ulla Alla, and Nika Gabiskiria share their thoughts.
One spot offering coffee, pastries, and tables to sit at has set up shop on Pärnu Road, between a New Age shop and Reval Café. It is situated on the commercial floor of a six-story residential building designed in 1937 by architect Boris Chernov. Entering through a modestly recessed door- way, I find a simple, three-toned interior: grey, walnut brown, and Isabella white. Concrete, wood, plaster, and a bit of metal.
From the largest covered produce markets to scattered street stalls, Riga offers a potent architectural feast when it comes to food markets, writes Ieva Zībārte.
Hanna Eliise Kitter and Saskia Krautman discuss with Elke Krasny why we need a critical care lens in architecture.
Anni Martin writes about the Spatialist Studio designed Kopli 93 community courtyard, which received the New European Bauhaus Rising Star Award from the European Commission.
Restaurant Tummo in Vilnius is housed in an old industrial building, which has been reconstructed following the principle of material reuse.
What follows is an eclectic tribute to Tallinn’s Central Market (Keskturg)—a place where the criminal and corrupt shadow of a murky past intertwines with everyday market news and daily gossip about potatoes, sugar, and coffee.
Henri Kopra, Iiris Tähti Toom, and Bianka Plüschke-Altof write about apparently modest urban gardening sites that comprise a wealth of ecological, spatial, and social infrastructure.
I have long waited for bread-focused restaurants or kiosks to appear in Tallinn, since good, fresh bread—whether sourdough, baguette, or brioche—is one of my greatest weaknesses. Happily enough, two such places sprang up almost at the same time. In the summer of 2024, the red-and-white Sai! opened on the edge of the Old Town, serving kurja koera võikus (literally ‘angry dog sandwiches’ in Estonian); at the end of the year, it was followed by the predominantly blue-toned Sanga in the Rotermann Quarter.
Editors' choice
What kind of relationship between a space and its surroundings would help to avoid the objectification of space—i.e., treating buildings or areas as sculptures or fully controllable objects?
Paide State Secondary School is an excellent example of the mutually complementary dialogue between a historical space and contemporary architecture.
Little was built following the re-establishment of Estonian independence in the early 1990s, however, the debates held and practices established largely came to set the foundations for the dominant issues in the architectural field in the past decades.
What kind of relationship between a space and its surroundings would help to avoid the objectification of space—i.e., treating buildings or areas as sculptures or fully controllable objects?
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The role of greenery as a climate hero cannot be measured only by the size of green areas or the number of trees. The Green Area Factor is the ability of the plot or area as a whole to balance the built environment’s climate impact.
The responsibility of the architect in sustainable use of natural resources should not be underestimated as construction is directly related to the transformation of the material taken from the ground according to the design drawn by the architect. Architecture from the perspective of limited resources, writes Roland Reemaa, will be faced with several challenges that are directly related to the origin of raw materials.
Elering’s new office building is technically a reconstruction, an extension. Although everything is new, the small remaining part of the former structural frame came to define the building’s location as well as its overall height and width. It is actually the old building extended by three times, a simple rectangle with two particular islands in the middle of the office spaces located along the perimeter. The former atrium has become a secluded inner courtyard balanced by the second enclosed and highly secured control centre in the middle part of the extension.
The competition was won by Sfäär Planeeringud (Kerttu Kõll, Lauri Läänelaid, Triin Kampus and Alvin Kanarbik) with their proposal ‘Displacement’. The work caught the jury’s eye with its comprehensive solution that offered not only a design idea for the park, but also ideas on how to tie the urban space around the park with the new green movement trajectory, and how to reduce noise and air pollution in the city.
A building may use its own words to speak its own truth, despite the utterings of the system it belongs to. As such, a building may also be quite quiet, in a pleasant way. Calm and unintrusive.
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.
A TV show called Restaurant 0 recently aired on Estonian Television, which focused on an experiment conceived by the Põhjaka chefs Ott Tomik and Märt Metsallik to open a conceptual restaurant in Viljandi within a single week. A question was raised on how it is possible to live sustainably and peacefully in a time when ecological catastrophe is imminent. Is it possible to establish a restaurant on zero budget and with zero footprint? The chosen location was an idle, rather deserted-looking 18th-century building in Viljandi. Studio kuidas.works was summoned to devise a spatial solution for the project.
Kõigepealt tuleb arutleda selle üle, mida saab üldse tühermaaks pidada. Kindel on see, et tühermaa on linnalooduse osa, kus inimese mõju on väga selgelt näha ja tunda. Võiks ehk isegi öelda, et tühermaa on inimtekkeline. Seal võib kohata varemeid, lagunenud taristut, ehitusjäätmeid ja muud. Kui püüame sõnastada definitsiooni, siis saame öelda, et tühermaa on inimese kasutatud ala, mis on seisnud aastaid kasutuseta ja mille loodus on aastatega üle võtnud. Kindlat piiri, mis on tühermaa, mis mitte, on siiski üsna raske tõmmata. Tallinna Ülikoolis oleme põhjalikumalt uurinud Lasnamäe tühermaid ja järgnevad suuremad üldistused teen just nende põhjal.