The Tallinn utopia
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| The Tallinn utopia | |
| Andres Kurg | |
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The City Concert Hall was completed in
1980 for the Moscow Olympic Games regatta, which
took place in Tallinn. Its expansive symmetrical form
adorned glossy books about the Olympics, and Soviet
treatments of architecture in Tallinn culminated with
views of the City Concert Hall's grand amphitheatreshaped
hall. Thus at first sight the City Concert Hall
is a typical example of official Soviet architecture, or
yet another Eastern Block Palast der Republik - rhetorically
hollow, of inferior quality and perhaps even
made of noxious materials. No monument is ever safe
from ignorance, but even the most aggressive opponent
will certainly not find any asbestos there. In the
1980s, overwhelmed by patriotic sentiments mixed
with the desire for Western consumerism, people
tended to regard this building with scorn. With the
passing of time, however, the value of the City
Concert Hall has increased and few dispute its position
in European architecture.Because of its emphatically symmetrical shape, which resembles a ziggurat, the building, designed by Raine Karp and Riina Altmäe in the second half of the 1970s, has often been interpreted through the metaphor of Mesopotamian or pre-Columbian American architecture. Visually, an even clearer association is provided by the Concert Hall's exterior walls, which end in inclined planes that are covered with grass. These walls resemble the 17th century bastions around Tallinn. Karp has always fondly talked about his fascination with the Old Town of Tallinn and medieval times. This view nevertheless seems too one-sided and the structure too complex to be seen in terms of a few hermetic style similarities. I would rather attempt to characterise the City Concert Hall via some contradictions or paradoxes that run through the architecture and history of this building. |
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1. It is a modernist chunk that imposes its
conditions on its environment. This might
indeed be true from today's point of view; from an economic
viewpoint, it could even be seen as no less than
an act of violence towards the surrounding environment.
What speaks against this perspective is the
assiduous attention to the specifics of the Old Town.
However, seen in this light it is simply yet another isolated
'island', which stands in opposition to its surroundings.
Despite that, the importance of the City
Concert Hall, in its time, lay in the way public space
broke through to the sea. Before that, the coast had
been either the territory of the military or of the harbour
authority, so that the first chance to actually
reach water in Tallinn was near Kadriorg at the
Russalka monument. The building's low bulk was determined by its location between the sea and city
centre, a requirement that the iconic sea views of the
Old Town be preserved. Bordered on one side by industry,
and on the other by the military and the harbour,
traversed by the railway (it was not possible to move
the railway branch leading to the harbour, and thus
part of the long way to the Concert Hall also operates
as a railway bridge), the City Concert Hall was precisely
the building that created the context of the location
as we know it today. As such, the City Concert Hall is
more than simply a building or a planning unit to be
used in the traditional hierarchical logic of town construction.
Hence my next point.
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2. The City Concert Hall should be interpreted
as a mega-structure rather than as an
ordinary building. Mega-structures emerged powerfully
in the 1970s, in opposition to the established
town planning that relied on separate individual buildings.
A mega-structure is a huge formal frame that contains
different functional units of the town, more of
which can be added later. This is a kind of multi-functional
system that seems withdrawn into itself and isolated,
but in reality allows unexpected combinations
and flexible usage. Here, the system contains an ice
rink, with an urban square, concert hall, cafes and
smaller halls built on top of it. In the 1990s, amazingly,
this logic has in fact been extended. Its location has
attracted other facilities: a hydrofoil port, a heliport,
and an outdoor swimming pool under the heliport (earlier
the pool was used to collect the ice rink's cooling
water). But is it possible to transfer the logic of a megastructure,
derived from a Western model of planning
and land usage during the Cold War period, to the
other side of the wall, into an environment with a
totally different planning system? The City Concert
Hall indeed has the characteristics of a mega-structure,
but at the same time it was created in the context of
Soviet state land ownership, where the designers didn't have to worry about the price of land, and where the
strictly symmetrical building follows the grand axes of
town planning (the City Concert Hall is visually in
line with the Viru Hotel. The initially planned promenade
between them is however impossible because of
the protected industrial area). Isn't this the reverse
side of the utopian space of the Western world in the
1970s, the official Soviet architecture that is located
at the other end of the axis of mega-structures? What's
more - does the City Concert Hall allow us to reinterpret
mega-structures as such?
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3. The City Concert Hall is a rational
building that has an effective exterior, and
where the interior rooms are submitted to rigid axial
symmetry. After the completion of the City Concert
Hall, its architects described it as a 'grand' and 'rational'
building where 'irrational essential substance' is
missing (Ain Padrik, 'City Concert Hall' Ehituskunst
II-III 1982-1983). They probably had in mind the
affective postmodernist spatial games that were so topical
at the time. Paradoxically, the City Concert Hall
in its extreme rationality today seems totally irrational,
and from the point of view of real estate
investors ('one piece of land after another') wholly
impractical. This is a perfect utopian space that refuses
to adapt to the existing world or the thought patterns
with which we try to capture this world. Therefore the
City Concert Hall is a nuisance to both the current
owners and to potential buyers; the latter are interested
only in the land that the building sits on (4.3
hectares), aiming to create an exclusive residential
district between the city centre and the sea, so that
inhabitants can have their yachts at their doorsteps.
Admittedly, the desire evoking this fantasy is irrational
through and through, but this is irrationality
without utopia.
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4. I am greatly tempted to add here a few
paradoxes that should not be connected to
the architecture of the building (and should not
lie within the professional borders permitted a cultural
historian), for example the systematic activity of the
present owner of the building, the Tallinn city government,
to the detriment of the City Concert Hall. In
2001 the government participated, as a shareholder, in
the construction of the huge sports and concert hall
near Õismäe, at the same time depriving the City
Concert Hall of any support. Or I might mention the
present intention to please potential buyers of the seaside
territory and allow them to demolish the ice rink,
whereas the town is planning to be involved in the
building of several new ice rinks. Something is amiss
in the logic of sustainable development in the relevant
offices of the city government: the more so in that
since 1992 the City Hall is under state protection as
an architectural monument.Tallinn City Concert Hall Mere 20, Tallinn. Completed: 1980. Architects: Riina Altmäe and Raine Karp. The building has a concert hall, ice hall, landing place for helicopters, hydrofoil port, etc. Andres Kurg (1975) is an architectural historian. In 1998 graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts; 2000-2001 MSc at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He has written architectural criticism and curated exhibitions; currently works at the Estonian Academy of Arts. |
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| Estonian Art 1/04 (14) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2004 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 | |
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