Open today 11–18
Collection’s diary

Karl Burman senior, 1922. EAM 2.2.695

Hanko’s house in Tartu County

The drawing depicts a dwelling in a farm in Kambja owned by journalist and entrepreneur August Hanko. At the time, Karl Burman favoured National Romanticism and drew inspiration from traditional Estonian farm architecture, using poetic elements to mitigate its practical nature. Burman’s oeuvre includes repeated elements in the form of bay windows, porches and a high-hipped thatched roof. Small grid windows of different sizes and shapes are also common to his work. As is characteristic to the style, Burman avoided excess practicality in the arrangement of space, placing a spacious hall in the centre of the layout and the living quarters surrounding it. The project was never realised.

Text: Sandra Mälk

Interior architect Aala Buldas, 1970–1980. EAM 4.7.17

Café Neitsitorn (Maiden Tower)

One of the most unique defensive towers of the Tallinn city wall, the quadrilateral Neitsitorn (Maiden Tower) was restored in the 1970s. The Maiden Tower together with Kiek in de Kök were defensive structures of crucial importance in the defense of medieval Tallinn. However, after the loss of the status of Tallinn as a fortress city, the centuries-long defense function of the wall towers changed, and in the 19th century the wall towers were rebuilt into dwellings, as did the Maiden Tower. The two-storey residential building became a home for renowned artists and writers, whose apartments had several studio rooms. In the early 1970s, field research on the Tallitorn (Stable Tower) and the Maiden Tower began in order to find a public function for the building. The work was encouraged by the forthcoming Olympic regatta. During the reconstruction of the Maiden Tower, about half of the structure was rebuilt almost as new. The building was given a new floor, underground utility rooms and an impressive glass wall on the Old Town side. The Café Neitsitorn was situated in the new premises, which opened its doors to the public in 1980 and immediately became a big hit. The authors of the tower’s reconstruction design were an architect Tiina Linna, an art historian Villem Raam, and the café’s interior design was made by Aala Buldas. In 2022, the drawings were donated to the museum by Eva Mölder from the restoration company Vana Tallinn. Text: Sandra Mälk

Aleksandr Wladovsky, 1944. EAM 3.4.56

Lutheran church in Kopli, Tallinn

This church is a special milestone in church architecture, as one of the last designed sacral buildings before the Soviet occupation in 1944, which denied religion on an ideological basis. The construction of the Lutheran church was planned in the Bekker settlement in the late 1930s, when the congregation rooms proved to be too small for the expanding Kopli industrial settlement. Back then the area plan for the entire city district needed to be prepared before the church building could be designed. The location of the church was to be close to the Kopli Cemetery, on the edge of a new garden suburb. The preliminary project in watercolours was donated to the museum in 2012 by Hilja Väravas. Text: Sandra Mälk

Architect Villem Tomiste, AB Kosmos 2004. Model: Paco Ulman. EAM MK 121

EMA 30 / Tiny tour of models: Villa in Hiiumaa

A futuristic-looking villa planned in the seaside village of Õngu on the west coast of Hiiumaa. The private house is characterised by an accentuated artificiality. There are no aligned walls or ceilings parallel to the floor. Variously shaped openings cut into the fractured surfaces, offer views of the surrounding unspoilt nature. The living and dining room on the second floor of the building, designed as a single flowing space, is open to the seafront reeds, with a wedge-shaped staircase leading to it from the terrace. This private house has not been built. The model was donated to the museum in 2005. Text: Anne Lass

 

Vilen Künnapu, Ain Padrik, 1987. EAM 41.1.16

Vanalinnastuudio theatre building in Tallinn

Comedy theatre Vanalinnastuudio, which started out in Tallinn Teachers’ House, became so popular under the leadership of the legendary theatre director Eino Baskin that in the mid-1980s there was an idea of building the theatre its own house in the Old Town. The beginning of Viru Street had a plot that had long been vacant (currently the De la Gardie shopping centre, 1999) and it was considered as one possible location for the building. The theatre house was designed as a black box theatre with seats for 200 people and an attic storey for lowering decorations to the stage below. The postmodernist building was never constructed under the new political regime. The display board together with the section and view was given to the museum in 2005 by architectural historian Liivi Künnapu. In addition to that, last year the architecture office Künnapu&Padrik donated their drawings and digital archive to the museum. The lot, consisting almost 200 projects, is in the final process of adding to the musem’s collection. Text: Sandra Mälk

Mart Port, 1956. EAM 10.4.12

Visit to the Building Ceramics’ Factories in Kyiv

The aim of Mart Port’s creative business trip (1956) was to study whether it would be possible to increase the quality and speed of industrial construction in the field of intensified mass housing construction. During the month-long trip, he passed various cities on his way from Tallinn to Ukraine and back: Riga, Kaunas, Vilnius, Lviv, Ushgorod, Kyiv. In the report of the business trip, the architect concludes that in Latvia and Lithuania, for example, the construction methods related to the construction of mass housing are quite similar here, but the tiles used for the exterior façades, which were produced in Kyiv, deserve special attention. From there he took detailed pictures for the report. He was particularly impressed by the lining of local clay tiles of the “Kabanchyk” type, developed at the Kyiv Academy of Architecture. The “kabanchyks” were light tiles, partly hollow, which were installed on the wall using small and hanging scaffoldings. The architect already knew that in Estonia it is possible to obtain the white clay needed for its production from the Joosu quarry in Võru County. During the trip, he visited the Keramik and Keramblok ceramic tile factories and the red clay mine of the latter. The Ukrainians, who have a long tradition in the clay industry and building ceramics, also introduced him to a experimental ceramics plant under construction at the Kiev Academy of Architecture, where new prototypes used in construction were completed. In the report, he pointed out that knowledge was shared bilaterally. The builders of Kyiv, Minsk, Vilnius and Riga had got acquainted with the method of covering the walls with granite plaster used in Tallinn and praised the innovativeness of this method. Text: Sandra Mälk

Alar Kotli, 1933–1936. EAM 2.11.15

Reconstruction of the Toompea Castle and the castle garden

The aspiration for representability that began in the second half of the 1930s made its way to architecture via state buildings, manifesting in the use of traditional forms and details. The Estonian government, which had centred around Toompea, reconstructed the southern wing of Toompea Castle and the Governor’s Garden in front of it, opting for a Neo-Baroque style that harmonised with the 18th-century Late Baroque look of the front of the castle. The supporting wall of the Governor’s Garden also received a fresh look. The Coloured copy in watercolour technique was added to the museum collection in 1991. Text: Sandra Mälk