Estonian Art 1' 2006


	New Estonian Museum - Two Cases
	Triin Ojari



	"Art lives here!", which adorns the numerous posters scattered all over town, is the new rallying cry of the Art Museum of Estonia. Kumu has its own tram, bus stop and stamp and various other eye-catching devices that should remind people of the forgotten habit of visiting an art museum. For the first time in history, Estonian art has finally got a specially built home, and the significance of this fact is hard to overestimate. In Kadriorg, the largest and grandest park in the capital city, where the museum is located, the situation now resembles that of most European capitalsÊ- classical old art is displayed in a historic palace (in Tallinn this is the Baroque palace built by Tsar Peter the Great), and the 20th century art resides in a contemporary building with a more or less grand architecture. Having lived for several months in the general Kumu euphoria it is very difficult to speak of Kumu as a building as distinct from Kumu as a remarkable national achievement, the joy of Estonian artists, the protagonist in the saga of perseverance through multiple hardships towards victory. The public has declared Kumu a national monument and its creator, architect Pekka Vapaavuori, is the first foreigner to receive all the major architectural awards in Estonia in 2006.

	Complicated location The contest for the new art museum building was announced in 1994. Some time before the new national library in the Tallinn city centre had been completed. However, the huge building started at the end of the Soviet era still bore the unmistakable seal of a Soviet-era monument. The young nation-state wished to start its 'symbolic capital' with a much more contemporary and open architecture; for local architects this was the first opportunity to participate in an international contest for a truly grand-scale building. The shock for Estonian architects was even greater when the results were made public - all the awards went to the neighbouring country. Finland is, of course, a country with fine and famous architecture, where, additionally, the architects were able to practise their skills a few years ago at the contest for KiasmaÊ- the modern art museum in Helsinki. The reasons and excuses were many and diverse. A small historical irony lies in the fact that at the contest for an Estonian art museum in the first Republic of Estonia in 1937, the entry of the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto had not been appreciated.

	The winner in 1994 was the thirty-year-old architect Pekka Vapaavuori, a complete 'freshman' in architecture. Having recently completed his architectural studies, he was just about to go to Berlin in search of work (due to the economic slump in Finland), when the museum victory fell in his lap. Paradoxically, in its historical disruptions, Tallinn can in fact be compared with Berlin in terms of its building methods and modern, extremely brisk construction activities; in a town released from its shackles everything suddenly seemed possible. Today, the ten-year old dream of building a totally new city for ourselves has largely been fulfilled, but we have become much more critical of methods and results. The heart of the Old Town, for example, is now completely geared towards tourism and commerce. The privatisation politics that began in the early 1990s with apartments and state companies has swiftly turned the whole public space in the city centre into a private sphere as well. In that light, we could claim that the decision made ten years ago to place a significant cultural magnet in an idyllic park landscape instead of in the city centre was emotional rather than rational. All through the Soviet era, the art museum was housed in the Baroque Kadriorg Palace, and building a new museum in the vicinity was supposed to continue people's tradition of organising weekend family outings to the museum - it is difficult to visit the area on busy weekdays. The plot at the furthermost edge of the park is complicated: the picturesque park ends in tiny 19th century summer cottages and a few-dozen-metre-high, steep limestone klint; in the upper part begins a considerably more brutal environmentÊ- Lasnamäe, the largest Soviet-era high-rise residential area for 140 000 inhabitants. The shift in scale could not be more drastic.

	Limestone castle The Pompidou Centre introduced the idea of maximum spatial flexibility into the museum architecture, and the Bilbao Guggenheim offered the model of an architectural attraction geared to maximum economic growth. In today's highly diverse world of museum typology, Kumu represents a rather classical approach: both the concept and architectural solution follow a rigid line. Distance from the town centre and consideration of the natural environment result in Kumu's contemplative character. It does not aspire to have an active say in urban matters. Because of its location near the historical palace, the architectural aim of Kumu, instead of being demonstrative conspicuousness, is paradoxical concealment, hiding its real bulk - thus the most expensive cultural building of the new independence era is not visible even standing in front of the palace. Only half the structure can be seen rising from the imposing limestone klint of a few dozen metres limestone office block, the wall of the halls lined with glass and copper, and a low hall for temporary exhibitions. A certain feeling of cave-like claustrophobia accompanies the visitor throughout the structure; the parallel of the mighty central atrium with an open-cliff crevice is blatantly obvious. To enable people to orientate themselves in 'mute' halls, the architect has provided the exhibition spaces with vertical narrow windows opening to the inner courtyard. All offices look out on a curved inner courtyard, surrounded by a harsh and high concrete wall. Only the upper floor ribbon window of the reading room offers an extensive view that connects the museum with the surrounding environment outside the wall. This is a serious and self-absorbed institution that does not dare open up to Lasnamäe above or the park landscape below; the museum can be accessed either by the tunnel starting above at the car park or through the narrow 'lower entrance' between some old houses next to the museum, retained there for some inexplicable reason. The dominant element in the Vapaavuori's architectural competition entry was the relief limestone cliff, and the building grew out of it, whereas in today's Kumu the connecting element of the entire project is the huge artificial landscape, the inner courtyard articulated by concrete terraces: a future sculpture garden? A complicated landscape and complicated urban situation - everything seems to have been solved with one mighty curved stroke. Limestone as the dominant material unexpectedly connects Kumu with cultural buildings of Soviet Tallinn: a row of buildings with the same material that started with the City Hall, National Library and Sakala Centre (all by architect Raine Karp) now ends here. National characteristics, if you like!

	Slow architecture in swift times There are people in the rapidly changing contemporary world who believe that architecture's main strengths are its slowness, static nature and reliance on permanent values. Others see a way out for architecture in its ability to quickly react to changes, embrace various other disciplines, always move with the times, and be cool. The speedy development of Estonia over the last decade has not left any space in architecture for basic permanent values, as the key words are openness and innovation (just like extreme commercialism or focusing on private capital). Kumu, hidden away at the edge of Kadriorg Park, thus seems as if 'arrived from outside', a slice of Finland - safely balanced, an island of welfare clad in a somewhat ponderous modernism. Not the slightest hint here of insecurity or critical paradigm: all forms are final and details minutely polished. Architect Pekka Vapaavuori himself has stressed his aim of maintaining a certain feeling of timelessness, a sign of something classical and perpetual. In a way this permanence - timelessness, as it were - has served the project with a laborious construction history rather well. It took five long years after the competition before construction of the museum once again appeared on the agenda. One of the arguments at the time emphasised the classical manner of the winning entry - no danger of it ever going out of fashion. Kumu contains grand architectural sweep, a modernist urge to dominate where the building towers over the urban or natural landscape. It has the clear aim of symbolising the museum as a respectable institution. The 5000 sq m exhibition space is comprised of a 19th century national gallery, a 20th century modern art museum and a centre of contemporary arts. Walking around the halls, the first impression is that there is too much art on the walls. There is already a rumour going round of the need to establish in Tallinn a museum of contemporary art...

	Post Scriptum, or the museum wave continuing in a more radical key... Simultaneously with Kumu's opening, the contest ended for the next grand-scale object, the Estonian National Museum in Tartu. The winner is once again from abroad: the young architects Dan Dorell (Paris), Lina Ghotmeh (Paris) and Tsuyoshi Tane (London), with their polemical entry called Memory Field. These two essentially very different museums (one still at design stage) are inevitably connected by a certain 'glance from outside', standing aside from the local context. Against the background of relatively architecture-hostile public opinion, Kumu, with its architectural language solved in a rather conservative key, functions in the role of social conciliator, whereas the project Memory Field tore open a painful and confusing wound in the consciousness of Estonians. Unexpectedly, the winning project that regarded the former Raadi military airfield as an equal environment, raised the acute issue of the role of architecture in critically analysing the environment and our national identity in the light of recent history. Should we aesthetisize the Soviet-era landmarks? The National Museum should naturally convey a message about our national heritage, but the location at Raadi chosen by museum authorities themselves was by its nature a Soviet military utopia. The idea of the winning entry continuing the radicalism, joining recent history and the scarred landscape into a spatial whole, seems a bold, but justified, plan. The project, with its extremely simple form, critically re-evaluates traditional museological spatial solutions and is, in a way, also a conciliator. However, compared with Kumu, it acts from a considerably more provocative social position. The New National Museum does not repeat old values or mould institutional power into clear-cut form; in the course of critically analysing the environment, the young authors of the new museum, half unwittingly, touched the unconscious of Estonians, brushed the borders of our tolerance, and asked us to have another think about the diversity of our actual cultural heritage. Triin Ojari (1974), graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 1996 as art historian. Has worked at the Museum of Estonian Architecture, since 2000 editor in chief of the architectural magazine Maja (House). Mostly writes about modern architecture and urban building in numerous publications at home and abroad.


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