Events

On November 3 at 3 pm, the results of the three-year Unfinished City research project will be presented in the form of a thorough 400-page publication of articles, interviews, maps and projects, titled “Unfinished City. Tallinn’s urban visions”. The parties who have contributed to the completion of both the research project and the book, will gather for event at the lobby of EKA, where you will also see a selection of scaled models and an animation which were prepared for the Unfinished City exhibition at the Estonian Museum of Architecture this spring. Both the research project and the book were completed with the support of the real estate company Kapitel.

The publication summarizes the discussions held during the three-year research project and is intended for everyone interested in thinking about Tallinn’s potential as a city of the future – what we expect from Tallinn in the future, what the city needs and what problems it has to overcome in order to be attractive both as a place to live and work.

25 authors from Estonia and elsewhere look at Tallinn’s potential from the perspective of architects and urban planners, dissecting the city as a whole and paying attention to key places. Separate chapters deal with the spatial future of Lasnamäe and other similar residential areas of the Soviet era, the potential of the bastion belt area surrounding the Old Town, the green areas of Tallinn and the blue/water network. In more detail, it is examined in which background system of rules, permits and statistics urban planning in Tallinn takes place, in comparison with other cities in Europe with a similar profile and size – Vilnius, Helsinki, Zurich, Copenhagen, Prague and Riga. In addition, it is asked how we could plan a better Tallinn using all the numerical data that can be collected about the city today with the help of technology.

In cooperation with Garage48, EAA, TSENTER and the Estonian Science Council, the fifth Garage48 Future of Wood will take place in 2021. It calls for the development of innovative and climate-friendly solutions in architecture, wood processing and forestry.

In November 26-28, FoW will take place again in Väimela, TSENTER competence center, where Garage48 Future of Wood started.

The prize fund is over 10,000 €. In addition, catering, TSENTRI fleet and materials, mentor support and spacious workspaces that support intensive creative teamwork and prototyping for 48 hours. All this with the aim of bringing together the Estonian wood industry in one room and looking to the future. How to manage forests more sustainably? How to use production residues and value wood?

More information on the event website

Facebook event

Register HERE

See you in Väimela!

EKA Fox Party will take place on November 4, in EKA atrium, where this year’s crazier first-year students will perform.

Doors at 6 p.m.

Main act Arg Part

DJs are EKA’s own CT Venom and Alexandra BB (Karin Nahkur & Sandra Mäesepp team)

Performances at 7 p.m.

EKA Fox Party on Facebook

EKA Fox Party is organized by the Student Council of the Estonian Academy of Arts

As part of the design theory course at the Faculty of Design, professor Alison J. Clarke will give a public lecture The Politics of Design on Tuesday, 19 October at 9:30AM at the EKA hall.

This lecture draws on the themes of the speaker’s recent publication Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press 2021) and the co-curated exhibition The Politics of Design (with Vitra Design Museum, Germany) exploring the origins of the social design movement and its attempts to consciously decolonise design. Unpicking the contradictions of designers’ gestures to transform the material and social worlds of the ‘excluded’ and ‘under-represented’ – the talk casts a critical eye on how attempts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to build cultural difference into design practice and theory.

The lecture will be held at the EKA hall. EKA students and staff are asked to follow the general EKA COVID-19 safety rules. Guests are kindly asked to follow all COVID-19 rules and prove their infection safety. There is no on-site testing. The lecture will be held in English, and it will be streamed on EKA TV platform live, however, the lecture will not be recorded.

Professor Alison J. Clarke, author of Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design (MIT Press 2021) and Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition (Bloomsbury 2018), explores the intersection of design, material culture and anthropology. A design historian (Royal College of Art London) and trained social anthropologist (University College London), she joined the University of Applied Arts Vienna from the Royal College of Art, London to become chair of the department of Design History and Theory and founding director of the Papanek Foundation: she is convener of the biennial Papanek Symposium exploring the ethics and futures of contemporary design. Recipient of major international grants and fellowships (including the Smithsonian; Arts and Humanities Research Council; Austrian Science Fund; Graham Foundation), she acts as an expert advisor and jury member for numerous academic bodies including the Danish Independent Research Council and the German Research Foundation (DfG) program, Clusters of Excellence.

Clarke is a regular media broadcaster, curator and international speaker in the field of design; her monograph Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s American was optioned for an Emmy-nominated documentary. She is co-editor of the anthology Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture and co-founder of the leading academic journal Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space. She has recently curated, with Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the international travelling exhibition Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design (2017-2020). Her latest book project, for MIT Press, explores the historical origins and legacies of the intertwining of social science and industrial design.

As part of the Open Lectures series of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA, architectural critic and urbanist Konstantin Budarin will take the stage in the hall of EKA on October 14, 6 pm with a lecture “Infrastructure of Care: The Past, Present, and Future of Soviet Leisure Heritage”.

This fall, all the lectures in the series revolve around the issue of healing in one way or another. Let’s look at whether architecture as a process can be therapeutic and in what way inhabiting space could be restorative, Simultaneously, whether and how architects can contribute to the healing of the construction world. However, some of the lectures in the series – as well as the October 14 lecture – look directly at the architecture created especially for landscape of care.

Konstantin Budarin is a member of the architectural collective Kultura and one of the initiators of the research project Sanatorium Premium – the focus of the latter is on the Soviet-era recreational infrastructure and the development of its possible uses today. The sanatorium architecture of the so-called Eastern Bloc has become a social media hit in recent years, viewed as an archaic curiosity with aesthetic pleasure, without delving into the role of sanatoriums in the operation of large-scale industry, or how a recreational machine worked to oil the human cogs of a production machine. The spatial programme of any sanatorium was led by prescription procedures, and Budarin asks – what procedures and what space would we need today to stimulate exhausted bodies and burned out minds? Do we have anything to learn from the sanatorium system in the Eastern Bloc?

Konstantin Budarin is the author of numerous publications on architecture and urbanism published in Strelka Mag, Calvert Journal, Project Baltia, and others. He is an alumnus of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design 2014/15.

In order to minimize the risk of the virus spreading, we will broadcast the lecture on EKA TV and it can be viewed along with all previous lectures at www.avatudloengud.ee. However, the lecture can also be attended in-person – we do ask you to carry your COVID vaccination certificate or proof of having had COVID; there will be no on-site testing. Academy students are subject to the usual in-house rules. NB! You can’t ask questions via EKA TV, so it’s worth coming to the hall to participate in the discussion! The lecture is free and in English.

This lecture takes place in cooperation with the Estonian Museum of Architecture and is part of the Future Architecture programme 2021. Future Architecture is the first pan-European platform uniting architectural museums, festivals and other development organisations in the field, bringing the public closer to both the cities and the future of architecture. The lecture is supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe Programme.

Curators: Sille Pihlak and Johan Tali.

The season of open lectures is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Event in Facebook

Read more about the project: https://futurearchitectureplatform.org/projects/fb47b9a7-2d22-44fb-ae41-c292af573953/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanatorium_premium/?igshid=2vsox2u8jewe

The Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of EKA will bring a number of exciting architects and urban planners, both theoreticians and practitioners from all over the world, to the Open Lectures series in Tallinn this autumn. This semester lecture series will be opened by Erika Henriksson, who will take the stage in the hall of EAA on Thursday, September 30 at 6 pm with a lecture “Architherapy”.

The lecture will be broadcast on EKA TV and it can be watched later together with all previous lectures on the website www.avatudloengud.ee.

Guests of EAA are asked to follow all Covid safety rules and be prepared to prove their infection safety. There is no on-site testing.

Erika Henriksson is a building architect and practice-based researcher working in an intersection between architecture, craft and art.

Her field is altering practices of architecture and reoccurring themes in her work are social and material relations, ethics of care and ways to spatially engage with speculations of life itself.

During the lecture Erika will be presenting the practice and concept of Architherapy which been given form through a four year long explorative and performative process of transforming an old and abandoned building standing next to a rehabilitation clinic in a small rural locality called Järvsö in Sweden

At the moment Erika is finalising her practice based PhD-thesis, Performing Architherapy – About crafting a building practice for caring relations and working on a site-specific spatial installation in the forest of Rena, Norway

The Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts has curated the Open Lectures on Architecture series since 2012 – each year, a dozen architects, urbanists, both practicing as well as academics, introduce their work and field of research to the audience in Tallinn.

All lectures are in English and free

https://www.erikahenriksson.com

Curators: Sille Pihlak, Johan Tali

The lecture takes place in cooperation with the Estonian Museum of Architecture and is part of the Future Architecture platform 2021. Future Architecture is the first pan-European platform of architecture museums, festivals and producers, bringing ideas on the future of cities and architecture closer to the wider public.

Funded by European Union Creative Europe Programme.

The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Together with our Transform4Europe Alliance partner universities, we are celebrating the 20th European Day of Languages. An online event will take place on Friday, September 24, during which you can learn more about Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish or Spanish.

EKA will be represented at the event by Matthias Jost, lecturer at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, and Nesli Hazal Akbulut, guest lecturer at the Interaction Design Department. Their presentations will take place between 10.30 and 11.30.

Jost is from Germany, but he has lived in Estonia for 21 years. He speaks, thinks and translates in Estonian. Sometimes he gives lectures and seminars in Estonian.

Akbulut moved to Estonia four years ago. For her, some dotted and dashed letters, which usually are hard to pronounce for foreigners, are for her really easy, because also in Turkish they use Õ an Ü.

In addition, the event will be attended by speakers from international companies who will share personal experiences of intercultural and multilingual communication, its challenges and good practices.

Registration is required to participate. You can register until September 22 (inclusive).

Click here for more information and registration.

Join us for the opening of “Glass Struggle”, a solo exhibition by Sten Eltermaa on September 28, at 5.30 PM at EKA Gallery! 

Glass Struggle is an ongoing artistic research project based on glass as material, paradoxically fragile and extremely resilient at the same time. Glass is used in high-security buildings, and even the Pope drives around in a vehicle protected by bulletproof glass. The semantic field of glass plays an increasingly pervasive role: these days, we are all transparent, constantly looking at our own reflections on our screens, while having virtually no access to our own delicate data, which in many ways is used to control and even enslave us.

In the context of institutions and corporations we can also talk about glass as a symbol of democracy – a reference to open and equal dialogue between the people and those in power. Likewise, it refers to corporate totalitarianism and divergence of social strata. Glass Struggle is based on the semiosis of the viewer and the seen. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the online publication www.struggle.glass, which is also seen as part of one of the sculptures (“A Satellite Deviated from the Orbit”, in collaboration with Maria Lee).

Texts: Maria Lee, Sten Eltermaa

Exhibition design: Arvi Anderson, Sten Eltermaa

Graphic design: Maria Muuk

Website: Maria Muuk, Patrick Zavadskis

Translation: Madis Kuuse (ENG), Olesja Semenkova (RUS)

Thanks: Maria Lee, Arvi Anderson, Krista Loorits, Lauri Eltermaa, Sten-Erik Toos, Tõnis Vassar, Urmo Mets, Madli Ehasalu, Roman-Sten Tõnissoo, Pire Sova & EKA gallery, b210 architects, Kauss Architecture, KUU architects, Kolm Koma Architects, Ilmamaa Publishing House

Special thanks: Karmo Migur, Maria Muuk, Kadi Meriluht, Mary Magdalene

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, MEISTRI, Salibar, Klaasissepa, joogipood.ee, nanoPruul, ÕIE, 3DLaser

The exhibition is part of the satellite programme of the Tallinn Photomonth contemporary art biennial.

Mark Gottdiener’s public lecture “Postmodern semiotics” will take place on September 15th as part of the Training School seminar “Local Stories and Visual Narratives”.

The lecture will take place 15.09.2021 at 18.00–20.00 via Zoom and is open to the public in the lobby (A101).

Mark Gottdiener (b 1943) is a professor of sociology at University at Buffalo, specialising in urban sociology. He is called one of the most important Urban Sociologist in U.S.

Training School Local Stories and Visual Narratives for international PhD students will take place on September 15th – 16th in Estonian Academy of Arts. It is organised by EU COST action CA18126 Writing Urban Places.

The action proposes an innovative investigation and implementation of a process for developing human understanding of communities, their society, and their situatedness by narrative methods. It particularly focuses on the potential of narrative methods for urban development in European medium-sized cities. This COST action has 35 European countries as participants.

The Training School in EAA will focus on local urban stories, taking the city of Tallinn as an example. Participants will engage in site visits, analysis workshops, discussions and lectures. Participants will discuss historical, semantical and archetypal settings of the narratives.

Organising team:

Klaske Havik (TU Delft), Panu Lehtovuori (Tampere University), Jüri Soolep, Andres Ojari, Irene Hütsi, Tiina Tammet (EAA Tallinn)

The event is supported by the European Regional Development Fund