Admissions

In autumn 2023, the open architectural lectures will take place under the title Mobile Masters. The theme brings architects and theorists to Tallinn, who analyse architecture’s flexibility and the mobile practices of architects, spatial designers and artists.

Gregor Taul, the curator of the autumn lectures, introduces the program with the following words: “Architecture stands at a significant crossroads. Ten-year-old buildings are demolished and taken to the landfill. The lifespan of an interior design project is five years at best, if that. These bleak facts do not inspire confidence in a discipline that requires so many resources in light of such a short time perspective. What does ‘better not do anything’ mean for spatial design? What might ‘mobile architecture’ refer to or who is a ‘mobile designer’? How can moving people or things be a positive spatial practice?”

On December 7, Brussels-based Laurens Bekemans and co-founder of Brussels-based BC architects & studies, will be on the EKA main hall stage in Tallinn with the lecture The Act of Building.

BC is BC architects, studies and materials. BC stands for Brussels Cooperation and points to how BC grew – embedded within place and people. Started in 2012 as a hybrid office, BC is manoeuvring the boundaries of architecture in a doers manner. With three different legal entities, the team engages in a variety of experimental projects through which it designs bioregional and circular architecture, researches educational and construction processes and produces new building materials using local waste streams such as excavated earth

Laurens introduces his lecture in the following words:

From the first fieldtrips for the design of a library in Burundi to involving over 150 workshop participants in the construction of a public building in Belgium, these stories tell how BC engages in acts of building. The act of building is act and discourse.It is the complex effort of a temporary association to create an infrastructure of its own. In order to have a positive impact on our society, BC believes that architects need to intervene beyond the narrow definition of the professional who designs and controls the execution of buildings. 

Hence, BC ventures into material production, contracting, storytelling, knowledge transfer, community organization, which all influence BC’s design approach. The act of building has an impact and is at the same time a manifestation of values and ideas, which grew out of a broad network around a specific project. Building has a transformative power, driven by action, narrative and result. The lecture will guide you through key moments and key projects, which helped transform BC into the hybrid practice it is today. 

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The open lectures are intended for students and professionals of all disciplines, not just the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties. Be there!

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA brings to the audience in Tallinn every academic year about a dozen unique practitioners and valued theoreticians of the field. You can watch lectures from previous years on YouTube or www.avatudloengud.ee

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Curator: Gregor Taul

In connection with the Delft University of Technology architecture course in Tallinn and EKA, Dr. Willemijn Wilms Floet gives an open lecture about Hofje – the type of building common in the Dutch cultural space, on October 12th at 18:00 in the hall of EKA.

The lecture unravels the secrets of the Dutch Hofje: how to direct the urban atmosphere; what can we learn about collectivity; how is this tradition taken forward by architects reflecting on the archetype and contemporary societal conditions?

The Dutch Hofje – a hidden green intimate courtyard enclosed by repetitive houses for singles – is a very inspirational typology for those working on sustainable social inclusive and green urban living environments.

In contrast to courtyards that were part of, for example, monasteries or speculative exploitation buildings, which were only built in a certain period, the architecture of charity hofjes effortlessly survived the late Middle Ages, the early capitalist era, the Enlightenment and the era from the industrialization period to the development of the post-modern service society. Up to the present time, dominated as it is by neoliberal ideas and market forces, the hofje remains a source of inspiration for (social) housing.

The hofje is deeply rooted in Dutch culture and therefore in Dutch collective memory. Time and again, it is put on the table by not only architects and policymakers, but also socially committed property developers or developers of luxury projects, because of all the positive connotations that surround it.

Dr. Willemijn Wilms Floet, assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology is teaching and researching how to make city out of buildings.

She developed her expertise in the documentation and analysis of architectural projects, notably: A Hundred Years of Dutch Architecture (Dutch 1999, English 2002, Chinese 2009). In 2009 she was involved in the organization of the exhibition ‘ From Berlage to Koolhaas_ a hundred years of Dutch Architecture’ in the CAFA Art Museum Beijing. Willemijn is the co-author of the Zakboek voor de Woonomgeving (2001) and editor of Het ontwerp van het kleine woonhuis (2005) and Architectuurgids Delft (2011).

Willemijn obtained a joint PhD degree Villard d’Honnecourt from Venice Faculty of Architecture (IUAV) in 2012 and TU Delft 2014. This architectural study on the Dutch almshouse typology reveals the secrets of green courtyards hidden within the perimeter block, by means of drawing. This resulted in two books ‘Het Hofje Bouwsteen van de Hollandse stad, 1400-2000’ (2016) and Urban Oases; Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems (2021).

Within the global community of the Faculty of Architecture Delft University of Technology she is a leading figure in carrying on the Delft method of plan analysis in-form-ing design, relating knowledge and creativity.

Since 2021 she is initiator and leader of the research programme Architectural Pedagogies at the department of architecture, building a broad platform to reflect upon design education.

The open lectures are intended for students and professionals of all disciplines, not just the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties. Be there!

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA brings to the audience in Tallinn every academic year about a dozen unique practitioners and valued theoreticians of the field. You can watch lectures from previous years on YouTube or www.avatudloengud.ee

We are happy to announce that the EKA Back-to-School Sale will take place from 4–8 September in the EKA foyer. You can find EKA merch, including sustainably produced sweatshirts, T-shirts, DiMa hats, woollen socks, caps, erasers, pens and pencils, but also professional art supplies, such as paints, pens, sketching paper etc. from G-Gallery and Skizze Vunder shops. Our good partner, Bradley Paper will provide notebooks, some of which were designed by our alumnus Mathias Väärsi during his graphic design studies in EKA.

The EKA Back-to-School Sale is open from Monday to Friday from 10am to 4pm.

Payments by card or cash welcome!

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Film Screening

Title: Zum Vergleich / In Comparison 

Harun Farocki (2009)

x  Project Presentation Building Information: Kadambari Baxi, Klaus Platzgummer, Lennart Wolff (2022-)

Description

Bricks are the resonating foundations of society. Bricks are simply very long-playing records. Like records, they appear in series, but every brick is slightly different – not just another brick in the wall. Bricks create spaces, organise social relations and store knowledge about social structures. They resonate in a way that tells us if they are any good. Bricks form the basic sound of our societies, but we haven’t yet learned to listen to them.

Farocki’s film lets our eyes and ears consider different traditions of brick production in comparison – and not in competition, not as a clash of cultures. Farocki shows us various brick production sites in their colours, movements and sounds.

Farocki shows sites of brick production in their colours, movements and sounds. Brick burning, brick carrying, bricklaying, bricks on bricks, no voice-over. 20 inter-titles in 60 minutes tell us something about the temporality of brickmaking processes. The film shows us that certain modes of production require their own duration and that differences between cultures can be shown in brick time.

(Ute Holl)

Credits

Original title: Zum Vergleich. Director Harun Farocki; Script Harun Farocki, Matthias Rajmann; Cinematographer Ingo Kratisch; Sound Matthias Rajmann; Editor Meggie Schneider; Drawings Andreas Siekmann; Collaboration Antje Ehmann, Anand Narayan Damle, Michael Knauss, Regina Krotil, Iyamperumal Mannankatti, Mamta Murthy, Markus Nechleba, Jan Ralske, Yukara Shimizu, Isabelle Verreet.

Format 16mm, col. Length 61 min. Year 2009

“Bricks create spaces, organise social relations and store knowledge about social structures. […] Bricks form the basic sound of our societies, but we haven’t yet learned to listen to them. Farocki’s film lets our eyes and ears consider different traditions of brick production in comparison […]” (Ute Holl)

Harun Farocki’s film In Comparison (2009) opens up a global perspective on the conditions of the production of bricks and compares their modes, ranging from full automation to manual labour. The film screening serves as a point of departure for a discussion on today’s labour processes in architecture.

It will be introduced by Kadambari Baxi, Klaus Platzgummer, and Lennart Wolff, and accompanied by a presentation of their ongoing research and exhibition project Building Information (2022 -). Their project addresses labour processes in architecture in the context of digital ecosystems, structuring relationships among human and non-human actors. It was exhibited at the Architekturmuseum of the TU Berlin and led to a series of events in collaboration with ARCH+.

A series of open architectural lectures will be held this 2023 spring under the title “Triggers of Architecture”. The theme brings architects and theoreticians to Tallinn, who analyze the root causes of architecture and the means of making it.

On May 25 at 6 p.m., Kadambari Baxi will explore the connections between architecture and activism, geopolitics, and propaganda with the lecture “Building Activism: A New Agenda for Architecture”.

She will share her collaborative projects where concerns for human rights and climate futures spur different forms of architectural activism. Examining migrant labor exploitation on construction sites, reproductive rights politics, transnational air pollution and climate resilience, she links architecture to geopolitics and advocacy. The lecture discusses how local building sites expand unequal global processes; climate models reconstruct transnational air pollution to depict new zones of toxic responsibility; a plant-installation advocates for abortion rights, and a stalled climate resilience construction evokes imminent climate futures. Collectively, these projects aim to outline a new agenda for activism in architecture.

Kadambari Baxi, architect and educator based in New York, works collaboratively forming interdisciplinary partnerships on project basis. Her design, research and media projects circulate widely in international forums. As Professor of Practice in the Undergraduate Architecture Department at Barnard College, Columbia University, she teaches design studios and environmental visualization seminars. Recent advocacy includes cofounding the group “Who Builds Your Architecture?” and serving on the advisory board of “The Architecture Lobby.”

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English and free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curated by Andres Ojari.

www.avatudloengud.ee

Event in Facebook

Additional information:

Tiina Tammet

E-post: arhitektuur@artun.ee

Tel. +372 642 0071

The evening begins with a lecture on Socially involved design by Michał Stefanowski. He will be talking about the practice of social design and showing examples from the world and projects realized at the Design Department in Warsaw. The lecture is followed by a conversation with a focus on the impact and layers of meaning of social design. We will discuss intervention options of social design and what makes it different from other design solutions. In other words, why it is or is not important to deal with social design.

REGISTER HERE

Speakers:

Michał Stefanowski has an active design practice. As a professional, he is a member of the INNO+NPD design team. He has created designs for products, street furniture, packaging, wayfinding systems and visual communication. He is the co-author of the City Information System for Warsaw, the Information System for the Royal Castle in Warsaw and the visual identity of the National Bank of Poland, among others. He is a professor and Head of the Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. 

Ruth-Helene Melioranski is the Dean of Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has a background in design research, practice and education, focussing on exploring how design can tackle societal challenges. She conceptualises new and emerging design practices in higher educational and professional contexts through her research-through-design projects. Her research focuses on relational design and its qualities. In her professional practice, she leads several strategic, service and co-design projects to help partners envision their future possibilities and build scenarios in healthcare and well-being.
Before her deanship, she developed the Design & Technology Futures MSc and supervised students’ teams with their design-driven innovation projects at Tallinn University of Technology. She was the founding head of the Estonian Design Centre (2008-2011) and, prior to that, the leader of the Estonian Design Year (2006-2007).

Daniel Kotsjuba is a designer working in Estonian Public Sector Innovation Team, part of Estonian Government Office. Their task is to help ministries and their sub-organisations design their services, process and strategies more user-centered. They base their work on design process, with an attention on behavioural sciences and experimentation framework.

Eva Liisa Kubinyi is a designer and creative researcher fascinated by the opportunities for children and young people to participate in society, the principles of open play and care models that support mental well-being. In her design practice, she relies parallelly on the theories of social design, service design and children’s culture.

A series of open architectural lectures will be held this 2023 spring under the title “Triggers of Architecture”. The theme brings architects and theoreticians to Tallinn, who analyze the root causes of architecture and the means of making it.

On May 4, at 6 pm, Klaske Havik will analyze the connections between literature and architecture with the lecture “Between the lines. Poetic imagination in architecture”. Creative imagination is one of the most important tools of every creator, including an architect. Using examples, Klaske Havik examines how poetic imagination works, how some key thinkers and architects conceptualize it.

Klaske Havik is an architect, scholar and writer. She is professor of Architecture at TU Delft, holding the chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination. Advocating a literary approach to architecture to address societal issues, Havik published, among many other edited books and articles, Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (2014). She was editor of architecture journals de Architect and OASE, and initiated the Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature. Havik’s literary work appeared in poetry collections and literary magazines.  She is Chair of the EU COST Action Writing Urban Places. New Narratives for the European City – an international and interdisciplinary network that seeks for more socially inclusive and locally specific urban places through the investigation of local narratives. In Estonia, Klaske has written for Maja and Ehituskunst, and been part of the thesis board at EKA.

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curated by Andres Ojari

www.avatudloengud.ee

https://www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

Additional information:

Tiina Tammet

E-post: arhitektuur@artun.ee

Tel. +372 642 0071

On March 9 at 6 pm, Marcel Smets will give the first lecture of the lecture series – The modern landscape of infrastructure.

As primary public investments in our societies are devoted to infrastructure, we need to consider roads, canals, railways, trams, cycle paths, etc., not merely as means of transport but rather as prime urban/ public spaces. For this reason, the lecture intends to sketch out how infrastructure design initially transformed from an architectural to an engineering project, and to clarify why this evolution is reversed today. Reviewing significant projects worldwide of recently implemented projects in transport infrastructure, it advances four important paradigms that dominate the landscape of infrastructure design today: 1. hiding its presence; 2. beautifying its form; 3. appreciating it as vehicle for urban improvement; 4. deploying it as the driving force for urbanization.

On Friday, March 10, at 11:30 am, will be Marcel Smets’ book “Foundations of Urban Design” (2022) launch and an open seminar with 4th-year architecture and urban planning students on the 4th floor of the atrium (A400) in EKA.

Everyone is welcome!

Marcel Smets is an architect and urbanist and emeritus professor of urban design at the University of Leuven. As academic, he taught urban design at the University of Leuven (B) and Harvard GSD. As urbanist, he was the head designer for certain important conversions: the Leuven Railway Station area, the Isle of Nantes, three complex nodes of the Antwerp Ring coverage project – and he directed fundamental projects for Brussels, Rouen, Genoa, Oporto, Conegliano. As scholar he published many articles (Archis, Casabella, Lotus, Planning Perspectives, Storia Urbana, Topos, Urbanisme and Urbanistica Etc.) and books: most recently The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (2010–2016, with K. Shannon) and Foundations of Urban Design (2022). As public servant, he acted as spatial Advisor for the City of Leuven (1995–2001) and as Flemish State Architect (2005–2010).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curated by Andres Ojari

www.avatudloengud.ee

https://www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

EKA Contemporary Art MA program invites prospective students to join the Online Open House on Monday, January 30, 2023 at 18.00 EET (local Estonian time). This will be an opportunity to hear more about the program, to meet and ask questions directly from the faculty. 

The Online Open House will be hosted on Zoom, the link will be e-mailed to all registrants 2 hours before the start of the event.

Register HERE