As part of its Open Lecture Series, the EKA Faculty of Architecture presents around ten distinctive practitioners and renowned theorists in the field each academic year. Running since 2012, the lecture series is free and open to students and professionals in the field of spatial practice, as well as anyone with an interest in spatial culture.
The fall 2026 lecture series is curated by Mira Samonig, a doctoral student at the EKA Faculty of Architecture and one of the curators of this year’s Tallinn Architecture Biennale. The lectures are brought together under the title Standby.
Standby
Just as reactionary spatial politics advance across different historical periods and geographical contexts, spatial practices grounded in conviviality, attentiveness and solidarity, too, work in a continuum. Yet in the present moment of escalating climate breakdown, social injustices, imperialist invasions and the rise of the far-right, these continuous parallel histories of resistant built space can easily slip from view. What can we stand by these days? The fall 2026 open lecture series at the Faculty of Architecture brings together practitioners and scholars attentive to public agency and to the way standardised spaces of power and capital can be pixelated. Standby considers how space and architecture are never fully revolutionary in themselves, just as they are neither merely static backdrops. Rather, the series looks at spaces in which social, political and material capacities are maintained in suspended readiness and not exhausted by programmed function. The invited lecturers speak to what these practices are and what they might become across architecture, urbanism, design and theory.
Mira Samonig (she/her) is an urban researcher based between Vienna (AT) and Tallinn (EE). She is a PhD candidate and tutor at the Estonian Academy of Arts since 2024, working on space, capitalism, complicity and far-right politics. Active across academic, curatorial and activist contexts, Mira is part of the Arquiteturas Film Festival in Porto since 2022, affiliated with the postgraduate program /ecm – on engaged curatorial theory & practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2023, and board member of Westbahnpark since 2020, a civic activist initiative advocating for public space justice through performative and utopian interventions. In 2026, she conducts a one-year SIT-PLU Residency at Lungomare in Bolzano as part of the collective WOOPS (Work On Outrageous Public Spaces) and is a co-curator of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2026, alongside Kertu Johanna Jõeste, Ra Martin Puhkan, Siim Tanel Tõnisson and Mark Aleksander Fischer. Across these different capacities, Mira has contributed to publications, exhibitions, talks, conferences and performances.
The open lectures take place on Thursdays at 6 pm throughout the fall semester 2026 at the main hall of EKA. All lectures are held in English and can be attended free of charge. The lectures will be made available on the website www.avatudloengud.ee after the event.
Fall Semester 2026 Program Standby:
1.October 2026, Alejandro Aravena (Santiago, Chile)
15. October, Gabu Heindl (Vienna, Austria)
5. November, tba
26. November, Mireia Luzárraga (Barcelona, Spain)
The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.