Open today 11–18
Collection’s diary

Eugen Sacharias, 1936. EAM 2.2.320

Office and Residential Building at Pärnu Road

The seven-storey building on the corner of Pärnu Road and Väike-Karja Street is one of the most representative rental houses built in the second half of the 1930s in the center of Tallinn. The project was commissioned from Eugen Sacharias (1906–2002) by the association “Elamu”. On the ground floor there were and still are business premises, on the first floor offices and on the higher floors there were multi-room apartments with all amenities, bathrooms and maid’s rooms. As there were several doctors among the tenants at that time, this house has also been called the so-called doctors’ house. On the seventh floor of the building were the offices of the architect Sacharias.

The Baltic-German architect Eugen Sacharias was born on April 21, 1906, who studied at the Technical University of Prague in 1925–1931. As a talented and enterprising young architect, he first helped Eugen Habermann design the so-called Urla House on 10 Pärnu Road, after which he founded his own office. In the following ten years almost 40 apartment building projects were completed. That shaped the representative visual of Tallinn as the capital. In 1941, Sacharias left to Germany with his family and ended up in Australia, where he continued to work as an architect in a construction company. In April 1991, Eugen Sacharias’ 85th birthday was celebrated with an exhibition in the lobby of the Library of the Academy of Sciences (now the Tallinn University Library). The exhibition was curated by art historian Mart Kalm. This was the first exhibition of the Estonian Museum of Architecture, founded three months earlier.
Text: Anne Lass

 

The model of the Cultural Centre in Paide, 1986. EAM MK 91

EMA 30 / Tiny tour of models: Cultural Centre in Paide

The Paide Cultural Centre was designed in the Estonian Rural Construction Project in 1984–85. The architect Hans Kõll and the designer Rein Üts are the authors of the project. The stained glass window of the façade was designed by the artist Kaarel Kurismaa. The unique interiors of the cultural centre are the work of interior architects Tiiu Pai and Taimi Rõugu, stained glass windows are designed by the artist Kalev Roomet. The representative building on the corner of Pärnu and Tööstuse streets – where the new social center of Paide was to come – was completed on 1987. On January 1, 1988, the magazine “Sirp and Vasar” (The Hammer and the Sickle) published photos of the new culture house on the front page and wrote:

“The dream of the people of Järva County has come true – on December 27, the cultural house of Paide district was opened. The biggest in Estonia, the best in Estonia. Quickly and well-built, given to the customer half a year before the deadline – this should be the perestroika momentum for other constructions as well, especially for cultural objects.”

Despite this and the building being criticized at the time for its scalability and restless façade design it was named the best building of 1988. The Paide Cultural Centre (now the Paide Music and Theater House) has so far functioned in its original use and preserved its authentic appearance and interiors. In 2016, the building was declared as a cultural monument. The 1:100 model of the Paide Cultural Centre was made by Rein Koster and Ants Anari, it was added to the museum’s collection in 2001. Text: Anne Lass

Paul Mielberg, 1913. EAM K 37

Kellomäki Motif

Paul Mielberg, architect and lecturer at the University of Tartu 1922–1940, was born on March 18, 1881 in Tbilisi (Georgia). His father, Johannes Mielberg from Viljandi County, was the director of the Physics Observatory in Tbilisi. From 1899 to 1901, Paul Mielberg studied at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, afterwards at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he received a diploma of Artist-Architect in 1910. After graduating, Mielberg worked for several well-known St. Petersburg architects. From 1911 to 1918, he was the chief architect of the Swedish architect Fredrik Lidval (Karl Burman also worked as Lidval’s assistant a few years before), participating in the design and construction of St. Petersburg Art Nouveau landmarks such as the Azov-Don Bank and Count Tolstoy’s tenement house. In 1922, Mielberg came to Tartu and became an associate professor of construction studies at the University of Tartu and also an architect of the university. More than a dozen buildings belonging to the university were built or reconstructed according to his design or supervision. On December 18, 1996, art historian Andres Kurg wrote a review article about Paul Mielberg’s role as an architect of the university in Postimees “About the Architect who designed the university and the Tähtvere district”.

Paul Mielberg left Estonia in 1941 and died in 1942 in Germany.
In 2010, the architect’s daughter Olga Kompus donated her father’s watercolors from 1911–1913 to the museum. Kellomäki, a popular summer resort and excursion destination in Karelia on the Gulf of Finland, about 40 km from St. Petersburg, is a sketchy romantic landscape with Art Nouveau handwriting. For moody views of the Kellomäki, see the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ACNcIEXRIM

Text: Anne Lass

Mart Port, 1946 EAM 52.1.8

Weekend house project

The term ‘weekend house’ (Estonian nädalalõpumaja) was introduced in the 1930s, when recreation and the new types of premises related to it started to gain wider popularity. Small cottage-type houses came to be built in Merivälja near Tallinn, but also in Vääna, Vasalemma and other places. These light one-storey summer houses with a couple of rooms meant as a quick weekend getaway for working people were fundamentally different from the large summer villas of wealthier people at the beginning of the 20th century. Recreation became part of the daily lives of the progressive Estonian middle class. Mart Port already designed his weekend house as a student project shortly after the war, borrowing both the name of the project and its generous spatial structure (the floor area of 70m2 is more than luxurious considering the era) from the first period of Estonian independence, adding load-bearing stone walls boldly visible on the facade and a strange female form in stone on the terrace almost as if greeting a man arriving at the property. Approximately ten more years passed before recreation and cottages actually became an important part of the Soviet ideology and the inalienable right of every working person. Moscow ordered the development of the first standard designs for summer houses – cheap wooden buildings with a floor area of just over 20m2, which could be erected both in gardens and the forest. Mart Port and Ülo Elland also designed one of these, which, like Port’s former student work, had a one-sided sloping roof and a front terrace, yet the house itself already consisted of prefabricated elements. The spread of the cottage culture to the masses had begun. Text: Triin Ojari

Ethel Brafmann, 1964. EAM 35.1.105

Pavilion at Nigula bog

The pavilion is located close to the Latvian border in Pärnu County in Nigula Nature Reserve, which was established in 1957. Ethel Brafmann, a young and promising landscape architect at the time, made the design for the pavilion on the territory of the nature reserve. The purpose of the pavilion is to allow travellers to rest and prepare food while in the middle of a display dedicated to the nature reserve. The wooden pavilion is equipped with a stove and consists of a single 27 m2 room, a kitchen and a small hall with windows with shutters. The drawings originated from the collections that were donated to the museum at 2006 by Inga Tõnissar. Text: Sandra Mälk

(klick on the image to see more pictures)

Sirje Runge, 1975. EAM 4.17.1

A new environment of Tallinn

The images show different visions for enlivening the urban space of Tallinn. Designer Sirje Runge (Lapin 1969–82) submitted this design as her diploma work at the Estonian State Art Institute. The goal was to propose new ideas to bring citizens and contemporary city closer together in an artistic manner by integrating new technical landscape forms into the urban space. Upgrading the monotonous city became an unlimited field of work for young creatives against the backdrop of the official Soviet architecture that favoured repetitive environments. In her vision, new elements were introduced to the city and the colour schemes added to the housing. The visions were of three types: the first (p. 1 and 2), supergraphics for the façades; secondly, audiovisual communication centres – the artist saw in those open and accessible spaces a new meeting places for the community and where advertisement also plays its role. The latter (p. 8 and 9) introduced conceptual objects such as steel box that governs a natural object and a clock mechanism situated at the main square in Tallinn. In that sense, such irrational objects placed in the industrial city would bring human and city closer together. Sirje Runge gave the works to the museum as a gift in 2003. Text: Sandra Mälk

Andres Alver, Leonhard Lapin, 1982. EAM.5.4.70

Competition entry for the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi

Eight countries in the northern hemisphere, including the Soviet Union with three entries from Estonia, took part in the international architectural competition the purpose of which was to introduce Arctic nature, history and culture. The designers for the entry “CDF” drew inspiration from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Sea of Ice. The shape of the building, which houses two different museums – the Arctic Museum and the Provincial Museum of Lapland – bears direct resemblance to ridged ice. The idea of being dominated by Nordic nature is further emphasised by the complex being situated on the steep riverbank that follows the natural relief of the plot. Nine large-format drawings altogether with the axonometric projection shown here were brought to the museum by the authors in 2008. Text: Sandra Mälk