Category: Faculty of Architecture

EKA Arh Conference 2026 is titled To Be Continued….From Scattered Facts to Shared Concerns, and takes place as Day 1 of the two-day Tallinn Architecture Biennial TAB Symposium.

Tickets for the EKA Architecture Conference and the entire TAB Symposium — available at an early-bird price until 31 July — can be purchased on Fienta.

The 2026 EKA Arh Conference focuses on one of the central questions facing architecture and urban development today: how do we move forward when starting from scratch is no longer a viable option? While knowledge about climate transition, resource limits, and the built environment is abundant, translating that knowledge into collective action remains a challenge. Rather than asking only what comes next, the conference asks what can and should continue.

Across urban, building, and material scales, international speakers and researchers explore adaptation, reuse, and transformation in the built environment. The programme brings together perspectives from architecture, planning, construction, and research to discuss how existing places, buildings, and resources can support meaningful change, and how scattered knowledge can become shared concerns capable of shaping long-term action.

Programme

09:30–09:45
Opening Words

09:45–10:30
Transformation Keynote
Aleksi Neuvonen (Demos Helsinki, Finland)
Finnish futures thinker and co-founder of Demos Helsinki, whose work explores societal transformation, post-growth futures, and new models of collective action.

10:30–10:45
Coffee Break

10:45–12:15 | Parallel Sessions

Main Hall – Session I: Spatial and Architectural Transformation

This session explores processes of spatial transformation across urban and architectural scales, examining how cities, landscapes, and built environments adapt to changing social, ecological, and cultural conditions. Contributions address themes such as urban restructuring, adaptive reuse, spatial continuity, and the relationship between territorial systems, public space, and architectural intervention.

Monumental studio – Session I: Prefabrication, Retrofit, and Adaptive Reuse

This session examines prefabricated and industrialized approaches to the transformation of existing buildings and urban fabric. Contributions explore themes such as adaptive reuse, modular retrofit systems, circular renovation strategies, and the extension of building lifecycles, addressing how contemporary construction methods can support more sustainable and resource-conscious forms of spatial transformation.

12:15–13:15
Lunch

13:15–14:00
Adaptation Keynote
Hiroto Kobayashi (Keio University, Tokyo, Japan)

Japanese architect, professor at Keio University, and founder of Kobayashi Maki Design Workshop, known for his work on adaptive reuse, post-disaster reconstruction, and resource-conscious architecture.

14:00–14:15
Coffee Break

14:15–15:45 | Parallel Sessions

Main Hall – Session II: Material Systems and Circular Construction

This session focuses on material systems, construction processes, and circular approaches to the built environment. Contributions examine themes such as material reuse, prefabrication, tectonics, fabrication methods, and resource-aware design strategies, addressing how construction systems can support more adaptive and sustainable spatial practices.

Monumental studio – Parallel Session II: Participatory Planning and Urban Transformation

This session explores participatory approaches to urban transformation through digital mapping, GIS-based spatial analysis, and collaborative planning tools. Contributions address themes such as tactical urban interventions, community engagement, and urban greening strategies, examining how localized actions and participatory processes can inform broader spatial and policy frameworks and vice versa.

15:45–16:00
Coffee Break

16:00–16:45
Panel Discussion

16:45–17:00
Closing Words

TASE DAY on Saturday, June 6th:

1–9 pm TASE exhibition open
1–3 pm guided tours of the Faculty of Design, in Estonian
3–3.30pm guided tours of the Faculty of Art and Culture, in Estonian
3–6 pm burning ritual at Kail Timusk’s installation “Requiem Larium” on the sea terrace of the main building
3.45–4.30pm Jaak Juske’s historical tour around EKA, in Estonian
5 pm TASE Anima ’26 screening at the cinema Sõprus
7 pm TASE Anima ’26 Q&A in the lobby of the main building of the Estonian Academy of
Arts, moderated by Lyza Karoly Jarvis and Kaur Järve, in English

Keithy Kuuspu’s durational performance in the yard of Kotzebue 4

– “Indirect Performativity” on Wednesday, June 17 at 7 pm

Burning rituals at Kail Timusk’s installation “Requiem Larium” on the sea terrace of the main building of EKA

– Sat 6.06 at 3–6 pm
– Sun 14.06 at 4–7 pm
– Fri 19.06 at 1–4 pm

Margaret Tilk’s study club “Girls, In Theory”

Tuesday, June 9 at 6 pm at EKA Gallery, with pre-registration, in Estonian

GUIDED TOURS

All tours start in the lobby of the EKA main building and participation is free of charge.

Historical tour

Saturday, June 6 at 3.45–4.30 pm historical tour around EKA, led by Jaak Juske, in Estonian, donations are welcome

Guided tours of the Faculty of Architecture

– Thursday, June 11 at 2–3 pm guided tour of the Department of Interior Architecture led by Gregor Taul, in Estonian
– Thursday, June 11 at 3.30–5 pm guided tour of the Departments of Architecture and Urbanism led by Roland Reemaa, in Estonian
– Monday, June 15 at 5–6 pm guided tour of the Faculty of Architecture led by Sille Pihlak, in Estonian
– Tuesday, June 16 at 1–2 pm guided tour of the Department of Interior Architecture led by students of the faculty, in Estonian

Guided tours of the Faculty of Design

– Saturday, June 6 at 1–3 pm, guided tour by Kätlin Leokin and students of the faculty, in Estonian
– Sunday, June 14 at 1–3 pm, guided tour by Kätlin Leokin and students of the faculty, in Estonian

Guided tours of the Faculty of Arts and Culture

– Saturday, June 6 at 3–3.30 pm, guided tour by Valve Saarma, in Estonian
– Sunday, June 14 at 3–3.30 pm, guided tour by Valve Saarma, in Estonian

Guided tour of the Faculty of Fine Arts

– Sunday, June 14 at 4–5 pm, guided tour by Elo Vahtrik, in Estonian

More info at: https://tase.artun.ee/

Everyone’s warmly invited to Master’s thesis presentations by EKA Urban Studies students.

May 25, 2026, 09:30

EKA, A-501

09:30–10:20 Melissa Lee

The Uneven Grounds of Publicness: Community and Control in Singapore’s Void Decks

10:20–11:10 Maria Kazlovskaya

Making Space, Finding Meaning: Youth and the Use of Urban Space in Tallinn, Estonia11:20–12:10 Adeolu Jeremiah Afolabi

Island Urbanism: Power and Spaces of Exceptions

12:10–13:00 Annabel Pops
The Startup City: Entrepreneurial Governance and Growth-Oriented Planning in Contemporary Northern Tallinn

14:00–14:50 Laman Mammadli

Green Displacement: Phased Construction of Baku Central Park and its Impact on the Sovetsky and Bayırşəhər Neighbourhoods (Baku, Azerbaijan)

14:50–15:40 Marta Bodnar

Grassroots Memorial at Maidan Nezalezhnosti at the Crossroads: Documenting the History of Now and the Risk of Institutionalisation

15:40–16:30 Yiğithan Akçay
It Doesn’t Disappear, It Moves: European Plastic Waste and the Governance of Displacement to Türkiye

16:40–17:30 Verdha Anjum

The Urban Political Ecology of River Ravi Transformation: Unpacking the Institutional Mechanisms Behind Manufactured Flood Risk in Lahore, Pakistan

17:30–18:20 Lion Herrmann

Artful Perfection: An Examination of the Instrumentalisation of Culture and Art in the Context of the New City Quarter, Am Tacheles, in Berlin’s Centre.

Supervisors: Nabeel Imtiaz, Maroš Krivý, Kaija-Luisa Kurik, Leonard Ma, Mattias Malk, Agáta Marzec, Karlis Ratnieks, Mira Samonig, Sean Tyler, Karina Vabson 

Reviewers: Kush Badhwar, Sinan Erensü, Tahl Kaminer, Daria Khrystych, Madita Kümmeringer, Anton Küünal, Lily Song, Tauri Tuvikene, Aro Velmet 

Evaluation committee: Sergio Davila, Maroš Krivý (non-voting), Maria Lindmäe, Andres Ojari (chairman), Helen Runting, Sean Tyler (non-voting)

We are happy to announce the Urban Studies Exhibition at 18.04 in Logi Sauna. 

Exhibition “Ebbs and Flows, Perspectives on Baltic Sea and Beyond”
Opening: May 18, 6pm
Open: May 19–20, 12am–7pm
Location: Logi Saun  

This exhibition presents work from Urban Studies Studio 2, developed through a semester-long inquiry into the Baltic Sea and its wider urban, socio-political and ecological relations. Rather than treating the sea as a blank blue void beyond the urban, the works invite us to look again at what remains unseen: the seabed and the inbetween, the information and goods that travels across, the ruins, the privatised territories and the labour. What appears distant or abstract becomes close, material and lived.

The exhibition brings together works by Catherine Lavrik, Claudia Jung, Emely Bobsien, Giacomo Alberto Rescia, Kadri Haugas, Mihkel Uku Karindi, Muhamudul Hasan, Nabid Hasan Shovon, Nika Khalus, Shariful Islam and Zsofia Helka Molnar, developed within the studio led by Miina Pohjolainen and Nabeel Imtiaz.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On May 1that 6 pm Iulia Statica will give a lecture “Landscapes of care with wildflowers: Women, plants and domesticity in (post)socialist Romania”.

This research project examines the ways in which women’s domestic and ecological labour under state socialism reshaped urban landscapes in Romania, revealing care as an environmental and gendered spatial practice. It focuses on two semi-domestic spaces of housing blocks—balconies and urban courtyards—tracing how generational knowledge of plants and flowers enabled women to reimagine these spaces in ways that contradicted state planning and pronatalist regulation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the talk explores the ways in which “care” was redefined within this repressive context, mediated in women’s everyday practices linking natality to landscape-making through the intimacies of what we might term “clandestine care”. The project experiments with multiple media, including installation, video and photography, to document and explore the multiple layers of these gendered networks of care.

Iulia Statica is Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK and the 2025/26 Mellon Fellow in Democracy and Landscape at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Institute in Washington DC. She previously held postdoctoral positions at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and Cornell University. Her research focuses on the legacies of socialist-built environments in Eastern Europe, particularly mass housing, and the gendered experiences of these spaces. Statica uses documentary film in her research; her film My Socialist Home premiered in her exhibition Archiving the Home in London in 2021. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production, and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

The lecture series is supported by:

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

New Date!

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

Architecture will be addressed from the perspective of the ethics of care: how does architecture take care of people’s physical, emotional and social needs, both today and in a historical perspective?

On April 3oth at 6 pm Dr Emma Cheatle will give a lecture “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”.

This research, and my book of the same name, studies the spatial, architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity (lying in) spaces and buildings and a creative exploration of those that we use today.

Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the book presents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking, which travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The research assesses the transformation of maternity spaces—from the female bedchamber of the eighteenth-century marital home, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purpose built by man-midwives, to the late-twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wing—and the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spaces are not treated as mute or neutral backdrops to maternal history, but as a series of vital, entangled atmospheres, materials, practices and objects that are produced by, and, in turn, produce particular social and political conditions, gendered structures and experiences.

Moving across spaces, systems, protagonists and their subjectivities, I show how historic hospital design and protocol altered ordinary birth at home and continues to shape maternal spatial experience today.

Dr Emma Cheatle is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at University of Sheffield. She trained as an architect in the UK and has a PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett, UCL which was awarded RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis, 2014. Her research is interdisciplinary and examines the political, cultural and social implications of architecture, art and urban space, with a particular interest in addressing health, gender, race and disability inequalities. Her monograph Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (Routledge 2017) is a complex architectural humanities project, which engages critical and creative writing and drawing to analyse the building the Maison de Verre and the artwork “the Large Glass”, placing new primary and archival material in the context of social, sexual and medical histories of 1920s and 30s Paris. Her second book, Lying in the Dark Room: the Architectures of British Maternity (Routledge 2024), examines how the spatial histories of lying-in and maternal practices continue to shape the maternal body today. Emma is the UK Editor for the Bloomsbury Global Encyclopaedia of Women in Architecture 1960–2015 (Bloomsbury 2025), and part of several feminist projects including the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC). Her collaboration with Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne, led to a major edited collection of articles on the feminist theorist Jennifer Bloomer, for the Journal of Architecture (2024).

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

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

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On April 9 at 6 pm Katarina Bonnevier will give a lecture “Living Organisms – Queerying Architecture with Trolls and Clay” at EKA lecture hall A-101.

She says: Let’s go on a date with my Heartlands. The talk will depart from a Pit of Clay, wander through the Secret Garden and into the Living Legend of the former casino in Malmö. A site that me and my pack MYCKET are courting right now. In my practice I engage with folklore, legends, and the unhuman to imagine relational futures – because the visions of trolls are sometimes helpful to overcome the technocrats’ devastating business as usual.  

Dr. Katarina Bonnevier practices through the art and architecture collective MYCKET working with co-creation across species, across disciplines, and across realities. Their practice blends artistic research (supported by Swedish Research Council and Linnaeus University) with hands-on making of public places, installations, and social situations. An architect by training, Bonnevier connects queer and feminist perspectives with ecological care and spatial justice through storytelling and hands-on crafting.

MYCKETs work has received national and international recognition, including the Ganneviksstipendiet (2021), and Architectural Review’s and the Architects’ Journal’s joint W-award (2024) for Heaven by MYCKET at Oslo National Museum. Her dissertation Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, is available open access (DiVA portal, more than 35 000 downloads). In her early career she was engaged in Kalamaja, Tallinn, and was awarded the National Endowment of Estonia’s Cultural Prize for Young Architects (1995).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture 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.

Spring programme:

• 26.02 at 18:00 in A-101 Kaisa Karvinen “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”
• 26.03 at 18:00 in A-101  Jos Boys “Doing Disability Differently in Architecture”
• 9.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Katarina Bonnevier (Stockholm)
• 30.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Emma Cheatle (The University of Sheffield) “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
• 14.05 at 18:00 in A-101 Iulia Statica (The University of Sheffield)

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

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

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

Nairobi, a city of close to five million people, congregates many hopes, experiences and struggles. Yet, across the colonial archive, its challenges have been defined primarily as those concerning ‘vagrants’ and ‘squatters,’ for instance; identities that congregate in the figure of the African. Following independence, the targets of formal city management lament and destruction remain similar: the ‘slum,’ ‘informality’ and urban ‘vice,’ whose geographies map onto the homes and bodies of those long targeted by colonial authorities. Informed by the “abolition ecology” community work of many of this city’s residents, and long-term research in its ontological margins, in this presentation I think about Nairobi’s dynamics through water. Ultimately, my argument is that while the “problem” of the “native,” squatter, vagrant or slum is seen to be defining of this urban agglomeration across the years, when Nairobi is thought from its experiences of water, coloniality and disobedience emerge as its primary dialectical currents, allowing for more (un)just histories to come into view that can allow us to vision more equal belongings and materialities in this East African city.

The Open lecture is being organized by EKA Urban Studies and TLU School of Humanities. 

Wangui Kimari is an anthropologist based at the American University Nairobi Abroad Program. She is also a research associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), University of Cape Town. Her work draws on many local histories and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches – including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology and the black radical tradition – to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. Wangui is also a regional editor of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC), an Urban Studies Foundation (USF) trustee, on the editorial collective of Antipode and Urban Political Ecology journals, and a co-organizer of the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On March 26 at 6 pm Jos Boys will give a lecture “Doing Disability Differently in Architecture” at room A-501.

Disabled people are almost always treated as an afterthought in built environment education and practice. But what if we instead start from disability, valuing our rich bio- and neurodiversity as a creative generator for design and as a critical means of challenging normative building and urban design? In this talk, Jos will explore how, over the last 18 years, DisOrdinary Architecture has been collaborating internationally with disabled artists, designers and architects to co-develop innovative and even radical ways of thinking and doing architecture.

Dr. Jos Boys is co-founder and co-director, with disabled artist Zoe Partington, of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, a UK-based platform which brings disabled artists into built environment education and practice to critically and creatively re-think access and inclusion. Originally trained in architecture, she was co-founder of Matrix feminist architecture and research collective in London UK in the 1980s, and currently leads on the development of the Matrix Open online archive. Always a design activist, Jos has also been a journalist, critic, researcher, consultant, educator, photographer and artist; and has published many books and articles. These include authoring Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability, and designing for everyday life (Routledge 2014); editing Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017) and co-editing Neurodivergence and Architecture (Elsevier 2022).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture 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.

Spring programme:

• 26.02 at 18:00 in A-101 Kaisa Karvinen “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”
• 26.03 at 18:00 in A-501  Jos Boys (London)
• 9.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Katarina Bonnevier (Stockholm)
• 30.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Emma Cheatle (The University of Sheffield) “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
• 14.05 at 18:00 in A-101 Iulia Statica (The University of Sheffield)

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

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

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

On March 12 at 6 pm, Finnish engineer, scientist and environmental researcher Eero Paloheimo will give a special lecture “Ecological city planning” in the EKA auditorium.

Eero Kalervo Paloheimo has defended his doctoral theses at the University of Munich and the University of Helsinki.

He worked at the company Eero Paloheimo & Matti Ollila from 1965 to 1994, and then was a professor (timber construction) at the Helsinki University of Technology from 1995 to 2000. In 2009, Paloheimo founded Eero Paloheimo EcoCity Ltd., a company specializing in the research and construction of eco-cities.

As a researcher of environmental problems and sustainable development opportunities, Paloheimo has traveled throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Since 2007, he has consulted on the establishment of eco-cities in China, based on the ideas he originally presented in his book “Syntymättötien sukupolvien Eurooppa” (1996, in Estonian 2004 ). He has also repeatedly introduced the possibilities of establishing eco-cities in Estonia.

Paloheimo served as a representative of the Green Party Vihreä Liitto in the Finnish Parliament from 1987 to 1995 and has been a member of several authoritative international committees dealing with environmental problems.

He is the author of more than ten books on the nature and state of the world.

The lecture will be held in English and is free and open to all interested parties.