Category: Architecture and Urban Design

On Monday, November 29, at 4 pm, Dr. Kadri Ukrainski, Professor of Research and Innovation Policy and Head of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tartu, will give a public lecture on “Basic Concepts of Innovation: Theory and Practice” in the hall of EKA (A-101).

Innovation is a word that runs through all walks of life today, ambitiously encompassing the readiness to innovate, the creation of new values ​​and the management of these processes. In the Academy of Arts, too, innovation is something we encounter on a daily basis, but can we also make sense of its various aspects and the conscious orientation of its possibilities?

Kadri Ukrainski is an Estonian economist and professor of research and innovation policy at the University of Tartu. With her research on innovation policy, she has supported the development of research policy both in Estonia and in international organisations.

The lecture is open to anyone on presentation of a valid Covid digital certificate.
It is mandatory to wear a mask in the EKA building.
The lecture will be in Estonian.

The lecture is organised by the Estonian Association of Architects.

Alphabetizing the Matrix of Discomfort. The Open Lecture Series presents: Matteo Cainer

As part of the Open Lectures series of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA, practising architect, curator and educator Matteo Cainer will take the stage in the hall of EKA on November 4th, 6 pm with lecture “Alphabetizing the Matrix of Discomfort”.

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 – and simultaneously, whether and how architects can contribute to the healing of the construction world. On November 4th, we’ll kick off by discussing how to approach architecture in a now changing world – what kind of a vocabulary might architects need for the emerging future. Matteo Cainer will be walking us through three architectural / research projects, from their inception, in relation to their concept and environmental, architectural and social aims, as a means of proving a sort of evidence and support to the three lines of research/interests that he and his practice share: converging ecologies, resilient adaptive re-use and social weaving.

Prior to opening his own practice MCA in 2010 in London, Cainer worked and collaborated with a number of celebrated international practices including Eisenman Architects in New York City, Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna, and Arata Isozaki Associati in Milan. In 2004 he was Assistant Director for the 9th International Architecture Biennale METAMORPH, in 2006 Curator of the London Architecture Biennale CHANGE and in 2018 curator of the Dark Side Club in Venezia. 

In 2011, Cainer moved to Paris where he was Associate professor and HMONP director at the École Spéciale d’Architecture and it was there that he created and directed the “Pavillon Spéciale” series. It was also in Paris that he conceived and hosted “Architecture Whispers” and in 2013 co-founded and co-directed with Odile Decq the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture in Lyon. In 2018, Cainer moved back to London and was nominated curator for the 7th Edition of the Dark Side Club for the International Architecture Biennale in Venezia. Today, he remains a regular visiting critic at both Westminster and the AA. In March 2020, to respond to the pandemic, Cainer launched MCA Online, a free educational initiative to provide lectures, teaching, and support to home-bound students, and at the end of the year, he opened MCA in Milan, Italy.

The work of Matteo Cainer and his practice has won various awards and has been published in numerous books and international magazines; it has also been featured in various international exhibitions among which the Royal Academy in London and the Pisa Architecture Biennale. Matteo has also lectured and written and edited a number of books and articles in the field of architecture and design, and his studio featured in numerous books, international magazines and was selected as one of the 25 significant emerging international practices at the London Architecture Festival.

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.

Curators: Sille Pihlak and Johan Tali.

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

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!

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.

Training School Local Stories and Visual Narratives for international PhD students will take place on September 15th – 17th in Estonian Academy of Arts.

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.

Mark Gottdiener’s public lecture “Postmodern semiotics” will take place on 15th September as part of the Training School seminar “Local Stories and Visual Narratives”.
The lecture will take place 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, specializing in urban sociology. He is called one of the most important Urban Sociologist in U.S.

The Training School in EKA 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, Tiina Tammet, Irene Hütsi (EAA Tallinn)

The event is supported by the European Regional Development Fund

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

On April 15, a special issue of Ehituskunst #60: Jan Verwijnen will be presented and a memorial conference will be held.

The access to the conference will be on the Zoom channel from 2 to 6 pm (Times CET+1, Estonia). Pre-registration is not required, presentations are in English.

All are welcome!

The special issue of Ehituskunst focuses on the legacy of the deceased architect and lecturer Jan Verwijnen (1949–2005) in interpreting urban space. The authors of the publication and former colleagues exchange views on the development of urban planning, architectural thought and education, and Jan Verwijnen’s contribution to it.

EHITUSKUNST #60 JAN VERWIJNEN. CREATIVE THOUGHT AND URBAN CHANGE

Link to the event April 15, 2 to 6 pm (Times CET+1, Estonia):

https://zoom.us/j/99727563770

PROGRAM

14:00 Opening

            Andres Ojari, Dean Faculty of Architecture EKA Tallinn

14:10 Introduction to Ehituskunst journal

            Eik Hermann, Editor-in-chief Ehituskunst, EKA Tallinn

14:20 Ehituskunst #60 Jan Verwijnen: Creative Thought and Urban Change

Introduction by the editors of the issue

            Panu Lehtovuori, Professor of Urban Theory Tampere University

            Klaske Havik, Professor Methods of Analysis and Imagination, TU Delft

14:45 Session 1 Creative thought

Talks by authors of the issue and discussion

            Toni Kauppilla, Professor and  Head of the Interior Architecture and Furniture Design at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway.

            Verena von Beckerath, Heide&Von Beckerath architects Berlin, professor Design and Housing, Bauhaus-University, Weimar.

15:45 break

16:00 Session 2 Urban Change

Talks by authors of the issue and discussion

            Pia Ilonen, architect, ILO architects, Helsinki

            Steve McAdam & Christina Norton, Fluid architecture, urbanism, participation, London / Soundings, London

17:00 About the Urban Studies program at EKA

            Maros Krivy, Professor of Urban Studies, EKA

17:30 Discussion and celebration

JAN VERWIJNEN (1949–2005) graduated as an architect from ETH Zürich in 1976. After work in Switzerland and the Netherlands, including a period in Rem Koolhaas’ OMA in Rotterdam, he moved to Helsinki at the turn of the 1990s. In the quickly evolving Nordic and Baltic context, Jan Verwijnen took active academic and societal positions. He reshaped the education and research of interior architecture at the University of Art and Design (UIAH), today part of Aalto University, and initiated the Urban Studies programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2004

ELEMENTerial — materialisation of the metagrid
EKA algorithmic timber architecture research group exhibition
Authors: dr Sille Pihlak, dr Siim Tuksam

The exhibition “ELEMENTerial” looks at the elements of architecture. What does a house consist of? In an increasingly digital world, a list of materials alone is not enough. In addition to materials and construction methods, the principles of building construction are increasingly influenced by digital tools and sustainability.

With the exhibition we draw parallels between physical and virtual modularity. The digital world is also built from puzzle pieces – algorithms. Algorithms are rule sets that control digital processes. There are also rules in construction, where, what,t and how something can be built – plans and standards. Different materials and technologies, in turn, set geometric constraints. Looking at all these components as algorithmic modules, creates parallels that are easier to understand.

The exhibition describes alternative creative solutions in factory-produced modular wooden architecture developed in collaboration with engineers and wooden house manufacturers over four years of research, and introduces the ideas and methods behind them.

Dr Sille Pihlak is practicing architect, researcher, tutor and co-founder of the algorithmic timber architecture research group in Estonian Academy of Arts, Faculty of Architecture. Sille has studied interior architecture in Estonian Academy of Arts, architecture in Southern California Institute of Architecture and completed her masters in the University of Applied Arts Vienna. After her studies she practiced as design architect in Morphosis Architects in Los Angeles and in Coophimmelb(l)au Vienna. In 2015, together with Siim Tuksam, they started their own office PART–Practice for Architecture, Research and Theory. PART constructed designs have been awarded for their innovative construction techniques, methods of designing and geometry studies, with latest recognition on high voltage electricity pylon Bog Fox. In past five years, Sille has been an active participant in forestry and timber architecture related discussions, as a believer of inevitable sustainability in construction, her work deals with combining algorithmic techniques with local timber industry.

Dr Siim Tuksam is a practicing architect, co-founder of PART – Practice for Architecture, Research and Theory, and a researcher at EKA faculty of architecture, co-founder of the algorithmic timber architecture research group. Siim completed his master studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2013 having spent a visiting semester at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. During his studies he gained experience at various architecture offices, most notably Gehry Technologies in Paris and Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna. Since graduation he has been developing his own practice through exhibitions, installations, writings, and architectural projects. Together with Johanna Jõekalda and Johan Tali, he was the curator of the Estonian pavilion Interspace at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. In 2015, together with Sille Pihlak, he founded PART to curate the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2015 main exhibition Body Building. As a researcher and partner at PART he’s been devoted to developing algorithmic tools for the design and delivery of pre-fabricated architecture and the critical discourse of digital architecture.

Graphic design: Robi Jõeleht (Polaar)

Support by: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts Faculty of Architecture, Union of Estonian Architects, Arcwood, Rothoblaas.