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.
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.
The second lecture will be on Thursday, 15th October at 6 pm by Gabu Heindl: “Radical democracy in thinking, building, maintaining”.
Gabu Heindl is an Austrian architect and urban planner, and head of the Department ARCHITECTURE CITIES ECONOMIES at Universität Kassel. She heads the practice GABU Heindl Architecture, which is internationally recognised through scholarships, awards and numerous competition wins. Her practice and research are situated in the fields of housing and public space with a focus on affordability, social justice, climate justice and feminist urbanism. In her lecture, Heindl discusses architecture and urbanism as practices of permanent political readiness within urban space, where design, activism, and critique sustain the ongoing possibility of more just and inclusive futures rather than responding only to moments of crisis.
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 series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.
NB! 17th October, 3pm, TAB Shop (Sadama 1, Tallinn)
Together with Drehli Robnik, they will also present their book Nonsolutions: Disputed Closures in the Politics of Architecture, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer and post-Marxist concepts of democratic struggles to discuss nonsolution as a mode of thinking political action in planning under conditions of its impossibility.