Von Georg Schöllhammer.
Von Georg Schöllhammer.
From the “limestone functionalism” of the 1930s to Estonian post-modernism in Estonia, like in hardly any other European country, the architecture utopias of the past century are connected with the idea of the Estonian nation.
Anyone who compares the art nouveau building of the Estonian National Theatre in Tallinn, which in aesthetic terms is an embodiment of its time, with the nearby, sedately late historicist Russian Theatre sees more than just examples of two styles and periods beside each other. He sees modern architecture as a historic metaphor that has become an urban figure. But more of this later. It was only this summer that a large exhibition in he young architecture museum in Tallinn enriched this special chapter in the fascinating puzzle about the relationship of architecture, modernism and society with a new reading. This retrospective showed the history of a group of Tallinn architects who in the 1970s with their projects, buildings and utopias inscribed their names in the international history of architecture from a republic that still formed part of the Soviet Union. What was later to be given the name “The School of Tallinn”.
What is told and acquires form in this show in Tallinn is a fascinating historical anomaly, and one that extends down to the present day. Many of the avant-garde of that time by now belong to the busy architects of the transformation period of the 1990s that followed the fall of communism, head large offices and are designing Tallinn in the stylistic spirit of mainstream international architecture. Others such as Leonhard Lapin, who is active in many different genres are seen as the nationally celebrated and equally hotly contested leading figures of a local avant-garde that, even during Soviet times, worked in a highly networked way. So networked that the echo of their utopias sounded in Moscow and as far as the republics of the Soviet Union in the Caucasus or in Central Asia and they were celebrated in western architecture magazines as proof of aesthetic dissidence in the late Cold War era.
This history of this group begins in the late 1960s. This was a complex period. The Moscow nomenklatura had put an end to the cultural relaxations of the modernist Sweet Sixties in the post-Stalinist Soviet empire. The new conservative rigidity of cultural policy after 1970 was, among other things, a means with which an attempt was made to prevent the continued existence of the ideas of the Prague Spring with its pop motifs. Whereas all of the neo-avant gardes that formed here and there were shifted outside public perception and into inner or indeed actual emigration, in Tallinn a loose circle of friends made up of designers and graphic artists, visual artists and architects that rejected the technocratic modernism of Soviet contemporary culture gained influence, a public and even public space in which to present itself. And this took place on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
To trace how this was possible one must recall the role played by “modern building” in the construction of an Estonian national feeling after the declaration of independence from Tsarist Russia in 1918 and the attempts at reconstructing this role during the period of Soviet domination. During Soviet rule modern architecture had the strength of a projection space for the national feeling of the Estonians. It was the new functionalism whose buildings left an influence and impression on the new bourgeois elites of the young nation and helped to make the dominance of the Russian “big brother” relative, at least in cultural terms. The cultivation of the “cultural inheritance of modernism” turned out in Estonia to be an element that was suitable to strengthen national feelings. The schools, apartment buildings and family houses built throughout the country that were characterised by the modern functional building style of European internationalism and, above all, by Scandinavian and Finnish modernism, were the pride and joy of the young nation. Like in other Baltic states reactionary forces came to power in Estonia in the 1930s also, which particularly emphasised everything “national”. However, functionalism did not vanish entirely from Estonian architecture. In a certain sense it blended with the neo-conservative classicism that represented the spirit of the time to form what was called “limestone functionalism”. A hybrid that seems almost post-modern. In 1940, almost unnoticed by the rest of the world, Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union and after the end of the war the first attempts began to “Soviet-ise” Estonian architecture. But the Stalinist building doctrine was never able to establish itself and during the “thaw” of the Kruschkev era it came to a sudden end. “Bourgeois formalism” was no longer disdained, and Estonian architects could once again orient themselves on international modernism – above all, due to the geographical and linguistic proximity, on Finnish concepts.
In other areas, too, an art avant-garde formed, like for example in Poland, that – in contrast to the dominant practice in the USSR – was not completely banned to the underground and was even tolerated by local authorities. Various groups brought the ideas of Pop-Art and Op-Art to Estonia and experimented with concepts from the Western avant-garde. And: many Estonians saw a distance to the socialist art canon as a confirmation of their national identity.
It is certainly true that at that time Soviet everyday life was also marked by parallels to Western fashions: whether it be platform heels, bouffant hair styles, jeans or pop music. But in Estonian society there was a parallel modernity whose connotations and political and ethnic areas of influence conflicted with Soviet ones. In the 1970s a change of paradigms took place in Estonian architecture, a conflict between the generations in this discipline. The leading urbanists of the time continued to build monotonous large housing estates in the International Style. Megalomanic urban expansion projects based on models of Moscow Soviet modernism were erected for the hundreds of thousands of job migrants from Russia. The two kinds of modernism, the Estonian-Scandinavian and the Soviet-hybrid also reflected two modern life styles. The group of young artists and architects of the Tallinn School opposed Soviet planning mono-culture. At the end of the 1970s Leonhard Lapin was to write a Russian “End” in Cyrillic script beneath a black triangle on a white background….
The special thing about the Tallinn school was not its attacks on the dominant, often crude and over sized style of Soviet large projects – the same kind of aesthetic revolts took place parallel elsewhere int the Soviet empire. The special aspect of the Estonian revolt was the design means it employed. And the anti-urban, small town, petit bourgeois individualistic attitude with which it absorbed with the aesthetics of a Western art schooled in concrete abstraction, Pop, Op and neo-avant-garde tendencies. And: it dared to base itself on Estonian architecture of the period between the wars and to employ this motif as a weapon against Soviet architecture.
In 1978 this group first presented itself in a self-confident way in a large exhibition in Tallinn’s Architects Union, in the garb of a modernist display – but in the works shown the aim was to corrode the paradigms of Soviet modernism using the formal language of post-modernism. This exhibition was a success and its influence continued in the 1980s, extending deep into the entire Soviet empire, going as far as the corrosion fantasies of the Moscow paper architecture movement at the end of 1980.
This grounp also received applause from representatives of the old Estonian functionalist tradition, which had withdrawn with its work to an extent to the kolkhozy in the country. The Estonian kolkhozy, which in contrast to the Soviet Russian ones worked productively, had achieved a certain level of prosperity. The kolkhozy confidently displayed this in an Estonian modernist architecture –a reminiscence of the estate owners of the first republic. Even before the architects of the Tallinn School architectural experimentation found its first clients in this society, as is shown by Toomas Rein’s row houses in Pärnu (1972-1981).
What did the exhibition of 1978 show? Tiit Kaljundis presented a minimalist project for the Linnapark (1976), whose ideas take up resources in designs by Hans Hollein or Superstudio and used as its themes the tension between the industrial serialism of Soviet modernism and the individual physiognomy of Estonian modernism and the differences between town and country.
Jüri Okas, in a work almost reminiscent of Robert Smithson showed in a collage a heap of waste material dumped in a empty corner building site and Leonhard Lapin presented the image of a Tallinn silhouette made up of left-over Constructivist elements. For the public this was read as a veiled and and cynical epitaph for the Soviet tradition. In Harry Shein’s collages the criticism of the city and the enormous housing blocks of the micro-rayon was more direct, and referencesto Paris 1968, to Roland Barthes or to ancient Rome were mounted in a masked manner. Ain Padrik contrasted this with the idyll of a moderately modern villa suburbia. Whether one looks at this dense bourgeois small town, Sirje Runge’s pop-reworkings of real urban situations from Tallinn, or the pop-romanticism of Ülevi Eljand one thing becomes clear: despite the difference between the aesthetic programems of the individual members of the group they were essentially united by an individualist and anti-modern basic approach.
The appearance resulting from the ambiguous fascination with Western postmodernism and the architecture of French revolutionary Classicism acquired, even as early as in Toomas Rein’s Nirvaana House, a national-romantic undertone that related to early art nouveau. Mats Vint provided a further symbolic view in his design for a Mandala House: this villa condensed paraphrases of images taken from an analysis of the historical typology of the bourgeois city. In aesthetic terms these designs were essentially of their time. From a present-day viewpoint the differences to Western postmodernism may seem minimal, but they are historically important: the utopian designs and projects of the Tallinn Group excluded the anti-idealistic character of Western postmodern aesthetics, and eliminated their collective motifs. The work of this group developed in the direction of a bourgeois employment of the architecture of modernism leading towards the creation of a postmodern style. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a consolidation of the work of the School of Tallinn. A good example of this direction is the architecture of Vilen Künnapu, which soon moved from the first projects that directly continued the architecture of the 1930s to a neo-classicist typological reinterpretaion of this tradition, an approach that still echoes today as a position of power – for example in his project for a Buddhist Centre in Tallinn from 2005.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet empire and the second declaration of independence the School of Tallinn had succeeded in convincing the broad Estonian public that, in addition to choral singing, folk dances and limestone functionalism their architecture should also be understood as “native” art, indeed as a symbol of resistance towards the rigid Soviet system. In a certain sense post-modernism mutated to the “national” building style in Estonia in the 1980s. A postmodern architecture nationalism that is unique, at least in Europe.