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This article looks at discussions of communist urban planning in relation to both the Marxist theory of ideology and communication theory in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, and the ways in which the...

This special issue brings together five articles focusing on architecture and urban planning in the Soviet Union (and in one case, its export to Afghanistan) from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the per...

Architectural Histories, 6 (1), ISSN:2050-5833

The fifth international meeting of the European Architectural History Network was held in Tallinn, at the National Library of Estonia, from 13 to 16 June 2018. The reports from this meeting aim to capture some of the main themes that came up during four intense days of academic discussions and exchange, meetings, and free-form interaction in different spatial and social settings. After the introduction by Andres Kurg, host of the Tallinn Meeting, five delegates review the five thematic tracks which organised the selected sessions and ran in parallel throughout the three days of the conference: Mediations, Comparative Modernities, Peripheries, Discovery and Persistence, and Body and Mind. In his closing keynote lecture, Reinhold Martin from Columbia University further reflected on the ample critical discussions which had taken place throughout the conference.

The first part of these field notes consists of three perspectives from Germany, Estonia, and Portugal on the meaning of ‘Europe’ for the historiography of architecture. The second part contains four reflections on the history and role of the EAHN in opening new and inclusive venues of inquiry vis-a-vis the fragile concept of ‘Europe’.

Leonhard Lapin's “Objective Art” was written for “Event Harku '75. Objects, Concepts” – an exhibtion and an accompanying symposium on the premises of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku, near Tallinn, Estonia, in December 1975. Objective art, in the artist's mind, answered to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 20th century, to the growing significance of not only mechanical but also electronic machines in everyday life, and to the emergence of the so-called artificial environment. Rather than representing this environment, new art had to intervene in it or even produce it. Lapin's call was quite different from other reactions to the changing postindustrial environment in the mid 1970s in the Soviet Union in that instead of active intervention many of them proposed withdrawal as the most appropriate tactics to resist the grim surrounding reality.

This article discusses the Soviet-Estonian home decoration magazine Kunst ja Kodu (Art and Home). It focuses on the transformation of the magazine's content in the 1970s, under the direction of a newly appointed editor with a background in art and design professions who used the magazine as a platform for communicating alternative accounts of the environment and for presenting new ideas for a changed practice of art. The home during the late Soviet period has often been characterized retrospectively as having been a self-enclosed, private sanctuary from repressive state institutions. However, in the context of Soviet domestic life, what emerged from the pages of Kunst ja Kodu was the home as a ground for critical dialogue with the outside—a space where the border between private and public was permeated by, among other things, consumer items, popular culture, and information networks. I argue that the processes that transformed the home and enabled the permeation of its borders in the 1960s also c...

This article discusses the home interior of two Estonian artists, that of Mare and Tonis Vint, viewing it on the background of discourses that associate Soviet unofficial art with the allegedly autonomous private sphere. The Vints' home, located in a 1960s prefabricated housing area in Tallinn, became from the late 1960s a well-known gathering place for Tallinn's artists and intellectuals, an alternative site for the exchange of information and discussion of artworks. The apartment's interior decoration reflected the Vints' interest in Aestheticism and Art Nouveau and was supposed to embody an idea of art and life belonging together, forming a total work of art. The article discusses the fascination with Art Nouveau and interest in nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk as a projection of issues relating to Soviet Estonia during the second half of the twentieth century. It further examines the ways the autonomous artistic sphere was permeated by public interests and values as well as how interiors wer...

In May, 1978, the laconically entitled ‘Architectural Exhibition 78’, displaying the work of 14 architects/artists/designers, opened in the foyer of the Academy of Sciences library in Tallinn. Alth...

Without the predominance of a single presiding tradition of modern architecture in Estonia, the way has been clear for a younger generation of architects to make their mark. Andres Kurg describes the work of 3+1 architects, who launched their career in the mid-1990s with an Estonian Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania. Through their trend-setting domestic work, they have proved able to appeal to a new wealthy client base, while also developing their own interests in programme and architecture's relationship to the physical landscape. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Built in 1980, the Linnahall Concert Hall in Tallinn, Estonia, is a fairly recent but nonetheless controversial Soviet monument. Having been highly praised on its completion for its bold architectural solution, within a decade its close associations with the previous regime meant that it had fallen into disrepute. Developers, who realised the economic potential of the site, were quick to seize on its controversial history and called for its destruction. Andres Kurg looks at the changing role of the Linnahall in Tallinn over time and asks what the future might now hold for it. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper analyses selected works of Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922- 2010). This Serbian architect, writer and Professor of Architecture at the University of Belgrade, was the author of numerous monuments devoted to the victims of fascism in former Yugoslavia (1952-81). As the Mayor of Belgrade (1982-86) Bogdanovic was a liberal member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and later, a strong opponent of Milosevic’s regime. This paper argues that Bogdanovic has always been both a dissident and an avant-garde proponent of architectural surrealism and its wider culture. Living with the belief that the vocation of an architect presupposes lifetime devotion to learning and experimentation, Bogdanovic carried on with this attitude throughout his life. This approach, spiced up with playfulness and mystery as presented in his early volume Zaludna mistrija (The Futile Trowel) 1968, is the focus of this paper. In this unusual book the narratives are an intrinsic part of the architectural realm including design, drawings of various kinds, and the built form itself.

This series investigates the historical, theoretical and practical aspects of interiors. The volumes in the Interior Architecture series can be used as handbooks for the practitioner and as a critical introduction to the history of material culture and architecture. Hotels occupy a particular place in popular imagination. As a place of exclusive sociability and bohemian misery, a site of crime and murder and as a hiding place for illicit liaison, the hotel has embodied the dynamism of the metropolis since the eighteenth century. This book explores the architectural significance of hotels throughout history and how their material construction has reflected and facilitated the social and cultural practices for which they are renowned. Contemporary developments in the planning and design of hotels are addressed through a series of interviews and case studies. Illustrated throughout, this book is an innovative and important contribution to architectural and interior design theory literature.

The article looks at the relationship between the Soviet architectural discourse and art discourse from the late 1950s onwards. In architecture modernism and industrialization became the official dictum; Stalinist decorativeness and the Beaux-Arts tradition, prevalent earlier in the decade, was condemned and a new technocratic approach to the built environment was embraced. In art, however, the Stalinist-Zhdanovist canon of Socialist Realism was the official model until almost the end of the Soviet Union and the oppositional modernist/abstract art was forced to remain unofficial. My focus is on a group of architects and designers in Estonia in the 1970s (Juri Okas, Leonhard Lapin, Vilen Kunnapu, and others) who operated simultaneously in the sphere of art and architecture. Thus we can look at the exchange between critical art practice and architectural production of this period, leading initially to an exhibition in 1978 in the Academy of Sciences library in Tallinn and the works of the Tallinn School in architecture in the early 1980s. Also, this practice could be seen as an attempt to displace the realism-abstractionism opposition in art as well as the art-technology debate (focused on the synthesis of arts) in architecture.

The growth of suburbia around Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, epitomises the new social and economic choices that are presenting themselves to Estonians. For as Andres Kurg explains, people are choosing, in increasing numbers, to move out of their 1960s and 1970s apartment blocks into newly built single-family houses. Architecture is taking a symbolic role in this process, as the types of design that are selected are often indicative of changing lifestyle aspirations. Kurg looks at some of the most interesting cases that have recently been built in this unexpectedly extensive suburban sprawl. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Roundtable "Beyond Instrumentality: Environmental Histories of Architecture" (Daniel A. Barber, Sophie Hochhäusl); International audience; This paper proposes a conceptual framework to study the decline of environmental experiments within architectural history. It is based on a case study: the trajectory of a solar heating device named Trombe wall. A key component of solar architecture, it was experimented during the postwar decades and became highly popular during the 1970s oil crisis, but it did not manage to be applied on a large scale, and its appeal ended up declining. The Trombe wall case is analysed using two main frameworks developed in the history and sociology of science and technology. Firstly, Bruno Latour's indepth analysis of a technological failure (Aramis, or the Love of Technology) invites to beware of simplistic arguments focused on the efficiency of a given experiment, and instead to investigate the dynamics of social actors and cultural factors that are involved in innovations, contributing to their success or failure. Then, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz' proposition to interpret modernisation as a process of 'disinhibition' (L'Apocalypse joyeuse), by which environmental awareness and alerts have been bypassed, leads to interrogate the counterpart of the decline of environmental experiments within architecture, namely the domination and impact of building technologies and types that have become widespread.