This autumn’s Open Architecture Lecture Series is curated by Mira Samonig, a doctoral student at the EKA Faculty of Architecture and one of the curators of the 2026 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, under the overarching title Standby.
This autumn open lecture series brings together practitioners and scholars attentive to public agency and to the way standardised spaces of power and capital can be pixelated. Standby considers how space and architecture are never fully revolutionary in themselves, just as they are neither merely static backdrops. The series looks at spaces in which social, political and material capacities are maintained in suspended readiness and not exhausted by programmed function; invited lecturers speak to what these practices are and what they might become across architecture, urbanism, design and theory.
World-renowned architect Alejandro Aravena will open this autumn’s lecture series on 1 October at 6 pm in the EKA Auditorium with his lecture “Elemental’s Toolkit”.
Alejandro Aravena is a Chilean architect, co-founder and partner of the Santiago-based studio Elemental. In 2016, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize and appointed Director of the Venice Biennale the same year, previously he taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design. His architectural work is particularly defined by socially engaged and incremental housing approaches that address economic inequality in urban spaces. Elemental is internationally recognised for their design of structurally complete “half a good houses” as a strategy that enables low-cost housing to be built on more expensive land closer to economic opportunity. Drawing from a wide portfolio of completed projects, Aravena will introduce his architectural practice and emphasise architecture as an enabling framework for collective agency.
The lecture is free of charge and will be held in English.
Previous Open Architecture Lectures are available to watch at www.avatudloengud.ee.
The lecture is a collaboration between the EKA Faculty of Architecture and TAB 2026, kindly supported by the Embassy of Chile to Finland and Estonia. The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.