Changing Slums
	Karin Hallas-Murula

	The historical slums which emerged in the course of urbanisation constituted a dense body of similar wooden box-like houses, mostly very densely populated: one room could accommodate several families. Vices were plentiful: life's miseries were drowned in alcohol. Embittered people, who had been caught between the wheels of life, often found an outlet for their emotions in rows and fisticuffs. The shoemaker Johannes and his merry wife Liisa were an inescapable part of Estonian slums, and a corner shop the place to meet.
	Architecturally, the slums emerging at the edges of town formed a kind of transitional zone between the real city and the countryside. People arriving from the village society brought along their habits, such as saunas and barns in a farmyard. Various types of laundries and tool sheds cropped up in the slum yards, kitchen gardens were established and a lilac tree planted. A slum was not merely a place to live, but also a way of life. In Tartu this meant a timeless and boozy existence, in Tallinn some additional earnest drudge - as literary scholars have described it. Slums still live on in many Estonian towns. It is really a matter of sentiment where the border between slum and non-slum lies. No slum today consists of buildings of the same period any more; instead a certain milieu is what determines its status as a slum for us. Or maybe this is no longer the case.
	The general look of Tallinn's slums for workers was improved by the wooden Art Noveau apartment houses of the 1910s, then the so-called Tallinn house with a central stone entrance hall, decorated with art deco ornaments and various patterns. "The number of monumental buildings erected here cannot be very big, and our architectural look cannot be based on them. Culture is not created by single palaces in slums; what matter is that the slum itself had some style and a face of its own," said architect Arnold Matteus in the 1930s, expressing a widely held opinion. In quite a few places, a slum was elevated to the status of a decent urban quarter. The slum regions were shaped by the Stalinist period more forcefully than is generally supposed. The edge of Pelgulinn, with its low standard houses, and the beginning of Kopli and Lasnamäe are no longer thought of as slums, although the buildings of the time were also cheap and boringly similar.
	One of the slum's brighter periods was the 1980s when it was associated with the urban identity of Estonians. In the national heritage, there were disputes that often spread all over the country. Many began to think that in order to get oneself into national history it sufficed to live in a slum. To move to Lasnamäe or Mustamäe almost seemed like a betrayal. The 1980s were a time when some Estonian architects were also fascinated by the slums. The postmodernist wave brought along the Robert Venturi-like fondness for everyday and vernacular architecture. Christian Norberg Schultz's genius loci (1979) introduced a subjective and sensitive line into urban planning theories. These failed to impress the modernist urban planners of that period, but left a mark on younger romantic architects who mystified the 'spirit of the place'. However, it turned out to be impossible to make any changes in Soviet residential construction. A solitary example of the postmodernist slum inspiration was the house at 20a Vana-Kalamaja Street (architect Erkki Valdre, 1985-1988) that was supposed to become a new standard Tallinn slum building. To actually build this low house, constructed in accordance with a special project, was an achievement in itself, although nothing significant followed from it.
	The sharp differentiation of population of the early 1990s caused a two-directional 'slumming' process. New 'slums' appeared at the outskirts of town - 'luxurious defensive camps' (Steven Flusty's expression) separated by barriers where people voluntarily lived under extremely strong social control as in the village society of past times. It is a nice coincidence that in the 1990s a kitchen connected with the living space again came into fashion (quite a few people in the newly independent Estonia started improving their living conditions by pulling down the wall between a room and the kitchen). This can be seen as similar to the old arrangement, where the room and the kitchen were separated only by a low partition. At the same time the real slums were rapidly declining. The row of cellar shops re-emerging in the 1990s reflected the legalisation of smuggled goods and profiteering. Living in a wooden house of a slum today is a sign of social decline. Glossy magazines have eagerly cultivated a high living standard and luxurious ideal homes, something that is possible in a slum only when a completely new stone house is built there, or when the whole area is sanitised, in which case it is no longer proper to call it a slum.
	Mostly cheaply built apartment houses with a pretension to being fashionable have appeared in almost all areas of Tallinn dominated by wooden structures. The interests of solvent citizens and the instances of returning houses to their rightful owners have determined the development of residential construction. The boldness of the clients and architects has often concealed a utopian image of the disappearance of the whole area in the near future. A tall and wide house almost covers the entire plot of land, as the owner wants to get the most out of his new house. The available land is full, and the intimate space between houses disappears. A few houses nevertheless reflect the attempt to relate to their surroundings. The higher part of the apartment house at 14 Ravi Street (architect Peeter Pere, 2000) is pushed back from the street; the architectural solution displays associations with the three-storey stone houses across the road, dating from the 1920s-1930s.
	Architect Kalle Vellevoog's house at 16 Suur-Patarei (1998) relies on the architectural language of the 1930s, maintaining a clearly perceived Tallinn style even while employing fashionable methods. The result is remarkable especially because this is an ordinary building and not something unique and under national heritage protection. The new sense of being typically Tallinn could well lie in developing a certain type of house and varying it according to different areas in town. One of the more modern examples of extending an old building upwards is the apartment house at Tobiase 4/Kollane 5 situated in an almost (or still) slum (architects Toomas Tammis, Tarmo Teedumäe, Urmas Luure, Arhitektuuriagentuur 2002). The house in a 'semi-slum', largely filled with later stone buildings, is a hybrid itself: the facades facing two streets are markedly different, as if it was not the same house at all. Its architecture refers to the problem common to many slum-like areas: when the slum has lost its social and architectural unity, what then is left that people can relate to? How is one to address the dead shoemaker Johannes?
	At a time when the architecture of the whole world has become increasingly similar, devoting oneself to a certain place is a wonderful opportunity to do something original. The contrast-abounding milieu of Tallinn's outskirts, the chaotic and diverse nature of the former slums, and the intermediate, so-called dispersed zones, offer ample opportunity to make something different. I very much hope that this will be of more inspiration to architects. For a calculating real estate developer, it is not complicated to design a house, but it is definitely more difficult to build a town that a poet would like.
	| Estonian Art 2/02 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2002 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |