Gaps in town – along the coast from the city centre to Paljassaare Peninsula

Estonian Institute
Triin Ojari
gaps in town There are an infinite number of stories going round the Tallinn waterfront, its harbours, nooks and crannies. That is, of course, if we want to be romantic and think of the urban environment as a continuation of little tales, as a whole full of personal impressions and fantasies. The French Situationists taught us to appreciate the fortuity of a town when we roam around in it; the all-consuming present, too, is trying to capture the invisible but essential categories of urban life: movement, trajectories, dynamics. To capture the processes and direct them, to be place-sensitive and total at the same time. Due to its new buildings, the collage character of Tallinn in certain areas is becoming increasingly even and thus draws even clearer dividing lines across the whole picture. But is this something specifically typical of Tallinn or is it a widespread post-Soviet situation? The rapid development of our urban construction and the building boom have shown that we certainly wish to shake off the historical weight of layering. At the same time, we like our new liberty, the undefined situation reigning in both the town and in building regulations, but most of all in our own senses. The western architects who come here rejoice – Tallinn is like an urban building laboratory; it has everything! Slums and city, cheap-ugly and interesting-pretty. Nothing seems totally complete and there is immense space for improvement.


gaps in town A trip with brief stops to the Tallinn harbour area might be a summary of this sensitive floating, the urbanism of the post-industrial time, capital flows and a new generation of local architects. The waterfront area, usually seen as stretching between the Russalka monument in Kadriorg and Paljassaare in Kopli, is still quite wild: even the buildings erected here over the last few years are, to some extent, the products of ‘wild urbanism’, born out of chance, the pressure of capital and the disorientation of the official authorities. To say nothing of the ‘real’ wilderness – a huge military-industrial landscape, infrastructure in disarray, and thriving undergrowth. Finnish tourists move along the well-trodden paths in the middle of the passenger harbour wasteland; the Soviet colossus – the enormous concert hall of the City Hall – is quietly crumbling. Then come a number of silly-naive tin houses with high roofs trying to imitate the old town, and finally the urban jungle: the realm of birds on the Paljassaare peninsula, from where you can enjoy the striking views of the journey you just took, and the silhouette of the city centre.


This trip along the harbour area is more like a thematic mind journey, where connections with specific buildings or landscapes may be only occasional. The same spatial and mental landscape was, in fact, already described on the pages of the same magazine by architect Andres Alver in 2001. His essay ‘Harbour area – boulevard into the 21st century’1 urged us not to miss the unique opportunities of urban construction offered by the Tallinn seaside area, and to create our own boulevard, as it were. These ideas are still valid today, seven years later. Many architectural competitions have been organised in the meantime, and some developments have emerged, but there is no sign of a boulevard that would open up all the differences and possibilities of the whole area.


gaps in town City centre harbour: mental games of the open space
A waterfront area has been called an essential feature of a modern city, and seaside development projects have become a global product, the design principles of which are copied as extensively as the ground plans of shopping centres. The key idea in relevant West-European development projects is the union of public and private capital. As a rule, planning the former harbour land belonging to the public sector is the responsibility of the local authorities, and the ‘revivers’ of new areas are often significant public buildings: cultural institutions, universities and offices of state administrative agencies. In Tallinn, a recurring idea is to create a new town hall, the city’s new administrative building, in the harbour area. Building the town hall in the nearest part of the harbour area – the Admiralty quarter – was already being considered in 1994. In that year, the fences separating the harbour area from the rest of the town were pulled down and the architect Irina Raud compiled a development plan for the whole region. The town hall was supposed to be established near the Admiralty basin in the former shipyard (now demolished). Another public object – an opera house – was planned at the edge of Kadriorg, in an ideal, totally green area, relatively free of businesses and residential houses. The idea of an administrative building in the same place also emerged later, when the town had already sold the land and Nord Project created a much denser association of business and residential buildings.


gaps in town The change of the millennium brought quite a few architectural competitions to the area, plus a number of modern keywords: density, multiplicity of activities, urban activity. The winning entry of recently graduated architects Veronika Valk and Villem Tomiste at the 2000 competition foresaw the seaside as a dense network of active points: conference/opera/town hall/town square/water centre/sailing harbour, connected by urban public transport – a tram line. Two years later, Tomiste again won the competition for the region at the Admiralty basin with his design, which had almost the same density of buildings as in the Old Town. He shared first prize with Jan Verwijnen, a professor of architecture in Helsinki, whose entry focused on establishing a huge covered area – ‘24/7 active bazaars’ – by the basin.


Seven or eight years on, in 2007 the city once again planned a town hall, admittedly in another location, as the best land had been sold off. The city centre had been largely completed, and structural and functional density had moved in. As far as the city centre harbour area is concerned, we have to set our hopes on the purposeful activity of the authorities, on the next economic boom or consolidation of the interests of the private sector in the name of developing larger plots of land according to the same principles.


gaps in town City Hall, Culture Cauldron and Patarei Prison: incubators?
The Patarei (Battery), a former marine fortification established by Peter the Great and a long-time prison, marks the military history of the seaside region; the former power plant, currently a multi-functional art factory called Kultuurikatel / Culture Cauldron, adds an industrial layer. The City Hall, a huge concert hall built for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, was the first step in urban planning meant to connect the sea with the town. This is a structure which you can walk over straight to the sea, a building that once attracted masses of people (in addition to the hall seating 4000, there is also an ice rink). Throughout the 1980s this was a popular venue for large-scale events, where both national and pro-Soviet demonstrations took place. The opportunities for the City Hall were passed over in 2001, when another huge venue was completed at the other end of Tallinn, in a typical suburban shopping-strip. Saku Arena accommodates up to 10 000, but does not quite measure up to the City Hall, not in location or in quality. The former power station, a striking complex near the City Hall, is now administered by a non-profit organisation, which is trying to introduce the culture industry from a grass-roots level, as it were, on the initiative of the third sector. Financial difficulties, however, have kept its doors closed in winter. The future of the Patarei prison and the adjoining Seaplane Harbour is a bit clearer as well – last year’s architectural competition offered a spatial vision of the Maritime Museum complex in the harbour, as well as of a large palace of justice next to it. Architects Sverre Laanjärv and Ivar Lubjak, winners of the competition, want to turn the prison into a modern monastery – a separate world of small industries, handicraft workshops and rooms for meditation and reflection. Quite a different idea has also been presented – to set up a gambling hall, a super casino there. In any case, the most remarkable location of Tallinn’s sea boulevard is expecting a powerful and attractive function, in order to make the whole area behind Kalamaja work properly.
The City Hall, the Culture Cauldron and the Patarei prison form a kind of belt consisting of buildings belonging to the town or the state, which influence the surrounding space, and the future of which marks the entire harbour area.


gaps in town Paljassaare – utopism and a new town
For a large part of its history, the Paljassaare peninsula has existed as a separate island in an urban environment – uninhabited, godforsaken, dangerous and alluring. Paljasaare is a kind of anti-town, a spatial gap, where the wild shores offer a view of another forest: the cluster of skyscrapers that appeared in the Tallinn city centre during the 21st century frenzied building boom.

In the past, there were two islands instead of a peninsula. The military inhabited them only from the 18th century onwards. When the construction of maritime fortifications named after Peter the Great started in 1912, in the course of scooping out the harbour the two islands became one peninsula. Military nostalgia is deepened by the ruins of the battery that have survived, the railway embankment and the Katariina quay. As a military object, Paljassaare has always been inhabited – in the 1930s a few hundred people lived here – and also uncivilised. Due to dismal roads, people travelled to town mostly by sea. The virginal purity of Paljassaare is lined on both sides by cargo and military harbours, transit operations, factories, sewage plants treating waste waters, illegal Soviet-era cooperative garages, an equally illegal garbage dump and innumerable other weird ‘rough’ structures. Tallinn is not a very rational and evenly developed town. It has various gaps and unexpected layers, and it has not yet been swept away by the rearrangements of history, which is currently having a quiet laugh at very corner.


gaps in town Today’s Paljassaare does not seem to belong to people at all. According to scientists, the flora here is remarkably diverse. Ornithologists are excited about the various species of birds who stop here on their migration routes and they have officially established a protection area for birds here. The property boom spreading outside the town centre is due to the attraction and value of wild nature in the middle of town, of a potential theme park. Harbours will move out, factories will close, and ecologically balanced activities will make it possible to build residences right next to the sewage plant. Tallinn is colonising its gaps.

A new vision of Paljassaare foresees a dense centre in north Tallinn, a yacht harbour, non-residential buildings and about 10 000 new inhabitants. The gap is becoming an organic part of the town centre, with good connections and many natural opportunities. In the city centre, private owners have so far been operating on individual plots of land, and the harbour area displays no signs of any joint activity, but there is hope that Paljassaare may have a compact scheme and a different development project.


Several trends can be distinguished in the developments and non-developments of Tallinn’s coastal area. The most significant trends include the strong pressure of private capital and the lack of interest of official authorities in working out a concept for the whole area. What is it anyway – a new centre, a touristy suburb, a belt of a new type of cultural establishments? In the late 1990s, the reason for the cautious approach to establishing a new seaside city was the dispersing interests of investors – all of the building activities should not be concentrated in one location. Social scientists considered that period unsuitable from the point of view of preferences: people moved out of town to ever expanding suburbs. A western- type generation of young people had not yet emerged who had become bored with suburban life and wished to get back to town, to enjoy urban density. All that has changed in less than ten years. The reduction in the huge profits in the property market has invited more complex, multi-functional and judicious projects, the milieu of historical houses has become a significant argument and sales strategy, the town fully perceives its opportunities to enrich the environment via culture and to create an image (Culture Capital 2011 project!), and a flexible and diverse living environment is encouraging people to move back to town. Waterfront sells.


1 Andres Alver. Harbour area – boulevard into the 21st century. – Estonian Art, no 1/2001.


Triin Ojari (1974), architectural historian, since 2000 editor in chief of magazine Maja. Mostly writes about modern architecture and urban building in numerous publications at home and abroad.


| Estonian Art 2/07 (21) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2007 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |