PRESS RELEASE

What is the future of Lasnamäe? Students of EKA and Harvard Graduate School of Design offer solutions.

Next Tuesday, May 29, at 6 pm, the annual spring exhibition of the Estonian Academy of Arts Faculty of Architecture titled "Lasnamäe. City Unfinished" will be opened at the Draakon Gallery in Tallinn. The exhibition focuses on the future of Lasnamäe, the largest district of Tallinn. What are the central problems of a mass-housing estate such as Lasnamäe, and how could architects and urban planners improve Lasnamäe and similar areas in other cities? The exhibition combines the work of EKA and Harvard Graduate School of Design architecture students and academic staff, focussing on envisioning the future of Tallinn's largest city district. The exhibition remains open until June 9.

During the current academic year, students from the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Estonian Academy of Arts and its faculty staff focused on Lasnamäe, looking into its past as well as possible future. In cooperation with real estate company Kapitel and the City of Tallinn, the department’s research group for research project “Unfinished City” also participated in the process, leading to cooperation with Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Andres Sevtšuk, an Estonian urban planner, lead an urban construction studio by the same name. The aim of the exhibition is to show the results of this co-operation and try to engage people to think more about urban space surrounding them. On Saturday, June 2, at 11 am, a curatorial tour of the exhibition will take place at the Draakon Gallery.

For fast-growing cities, mass housing estates seemed an efficient and inexpensive construction process that would provide healthy, well-lit living conditions for large numbers of inhabitants, and this is the reason why today, these estates cover large areas of our cities. But – conceptually, spatially and architecturally speaking, these places are often either becoming out-of-date fast, or remain unfinished. Today, Tallinn's "hills" are in dire need of a new perspective and meaning in the substantially changed economic, cultural and technological conditions. Exhibition "Lasnamäe. An unfinished city” explores the values of modernist urban space in present day and its outlook for the future, how the development of the area is affected by changes in everyday transport and mobility and what kind of city we actually expect and want as users.

The work of the three parties involved in the exhibition - architecture students of EKA, the research group for “Unfinished City” research project, and the participants of the studio at Harvard - has been integrated into a comprehensive collection that describes the problems and issues of the city district as well as possible solutions and development trends.

“Unfinished City” is a three-year large-scale research project conducted by the Estonian Academy of Arts Faculty of Architecture in cooperation with the City of Tallinn. The research project asks what could be a good and livable city in the 21st century and how this could be reflected in the urban development of Tallinn. The project focuses on exploring Tallinn's urban design visions and spatial future scenarios. The research will be carried out thanks to the support from the real estate company Kapitel, which contributes almost half a million euros to the project over three years.

Exhibition concept and design: architect and EKA lecturer Johan Tali in cooperation with 2nd year architecture students
Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Kapitel

Additional information:
Pille Epner
Research and Development Coordinator for Faculty of Architecture
arhitektuur@artun.ee 
+372 5554 2824