The Pleasures of Mud. Estonian Summer Resort Architecture
	Mart Kalm

	It might seem funny, but simple resting and relaxing have often been regarded in Estonia as a waste of time. Resting with the purpose of improving one's health, ie going to a health resort or, in today's lingo, 'spa', is seen as more ethical. Could this have something to do with the Lutheran work ethic, which legitimises a holiday if it guarantees successful functioning of body and soul for purposes of work? This might contain a grain of truth, but it is not the main background for Estonian bathing architecture.
	Health resort Frequenting health resorts was the great 19th century fashion. The popular European resorts such as Vichy and Carlsbad (today's Karlovy Vary) relied on mineral water. In Estonia, on the other hand, various diseases, especially arthritis, have been treated since 1825 with sea mud. Taking a simple bath in the sea was also considered curative. Most resorts, eg Haapsalu, Pärnu, Kuressaare, and Tallinn, had romantic old towns. In terms of spatial environment, this meant an establishment run by an enterprising medical person, where people took baths, and the boarding houses that sprang up all around, where the bathers rented rooms. The main leisure place was always the Kuursaal (concert and assembly hall). Most buildings were wooden and thus have not survived. In the 1980s a new Kuursaal was built in Kuressaare to replace the old one that had burnt down. By the Narva Road in Kadriorg in Tallinn stands a former bathing establishment, the sole reminder of its period in the town's development. At the end of the 19th century, the wooden houses were increasingly decorated with historicist wooden lace and often with elements of exotic cultures.
	In the health resorts, the owners, doctors and other key figures were German, the people carting the mud and all the servants were Estonians, whereas the visitors mainly arrived from St Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia, and also from central Europe. The holiday-makers did not necessarily consist of only Russians, as the Russian elite was actually quite international. Due to its cosily familiar linguistic and cultural environment, Estonia was a favourite destination for the numerous German population in Stetersburg. This trend was further enhanced by the tsarist family - most of the 19th century Russian sovereigns spent some time in Haapsalu, particularly Alexander II (1852, 1856, 1857 and 1859). Prominent holiday-makers included the composer Pjotr Tchaikovski (1867), memorialised by a bench bearing his name by the sea, painter Nikolai Roerich, et al. Visiting the resorts by the Baltic Sea was the easiest and most comfortable way to go to Europe. They arrived on steamers and, after the opening of the Baltic railway in 1870, increasingly by train.
	The beach In the course of WW I Estonia became an independent country and communists seized power in Russia. Therefore the resorts lost their haut monde atmosphere and clientele. The situation was somewhat alleviated by the changes in post-war leisure culture. It was no longer deemed necessary to seek the curative powers of mud baths, and mud baths were largely replaced by sunbathing and swimming. Kuressaare and Haapsalu, with their shallow water and muddy seabed, were no longer in a privileged position. The Pärnu beach, on the other hand, was sandy and faced south. Excellent swimming conditions could be found at the rapidly expanding beaches in Narva-Jõesuu in the north-eastern corner of Estonia, which emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as a suitable holiday location near St Petersburg.
	Sunbathing, swimming and other sporting activities on the beach constituted the perfect holiday for the urbanised working class of industrial society. The beach in 1920s Estonia, however, was associated with an attempt by the recently emerged young Estonian middle classes to cultivate a modern lifestyle. White-collar workers did not want to spend their precious holidays in the country with relatives helping them with farm work; it was much more exciting to rent a room in a summer resort. In the 1930s the developing transport network, in which tour buses increasingly competed with trains, brought all summer resorts closer to Tallinn. Of all the former Estonian summer resorts, Pärnu was the quickest to pull its act together, focusing in the 1920s on the Finns and, after the early 1930s economic crisis, on the Swedes. Summer ship traffic between Stockholm and Pärnu started in 1936, making a stop at Haapsalu. Half the holiday-makers in Pärnu in the late 1930s were foreigners.
	In the 1920s most buildings used in summer resorts were pre-war, but in the 1930s many new buildings were built. The flagship of the new functionalist architecture was the Pärnu Beach Hotel (architects Olev Siinmaa and Anton Soans, 1935-37). Its curved middle section, with a roof terrace facing the sea, resembles a steamer. The white building with large windows and numerous balconies gives no indication that there was any need to economise, but the inserted ceilings were made of wood, and by no means did every room have a shower and central heating. The wealthier Swedes staying at the hotel did not much like the fact that the guests in cheaper rooms had their dinner in the same place, and therefore the restaurant put up prices. The number of Swedes in Pärnu was so impressive that a separate boarding house, Vasa, was built for them (architect Alexander Nürnberg, 1938). It also had a flat roof and a balcony in every room. The glass wall of foyers, reaching out beyond the corner of the Estonian Red Cross sanatorium, opened in Haapsalu in 1937 and named after Johan Laidoner (architect August Volberg), is like a distant echo of the famous Bauhaus schoolhouse in Dessau by Walter Gropius.
	Another significant type of building was the beach house, with its changing cabins, cafe, rental of beach equipment and lifeguard station. Architecturally most remarkable was the Pärnu beach house designed by Olev Siinmaa. The concrete mushroom in front of the building immediately became the town's symbol. A similar concrete mushroom in Oslo's Ingierstrand (architects Eyvind Moestue and Ole Lind Schistad, 1934) merely served as a place to dance, whereas in Pärnu more activities were possible: during the day people could sunbathe on top of the mushroom and dance there in the evening, or one could enjoy cool shade underneath it. Most beach buildings, however, were made of wood, as seasonal constructions. As in the 1930s the stone houses in Estonia were mostly built of bricks and then plastered. The usage of modern ribbon windows was not practical. This, however, went perfectly with light wooden constructions. The Narva-Jõesuu beach house (engineers E. Otting and R. Ederma, 1935) had such effective long ribbon windows that they managed to hide the otherwise dull architecture of the entire building. With the spread of the swimming habit, wooden beach houses emerged also at inland lake shores (Elva, Viljandi, Aegviidu), and even at the ponds created by the damming of spring water (Tallinn-Mustamäe). The only one of those still surviving is the Rakvere bathing house (architect T. Mihkelson, 1938), because it was adapted to accommodate an old people's home.
	Sanatorium The Soviet authorities approved of people restoring their health at cheap sanatoriums, and the doctors were only too eager to dispatch them there. Estonians were able to visit summer resorts by the Black Sea and elsewhere, and Estonian resorts became popular among the Russians. Finally the Estonian rural population made it to the resorts as well, as the collective farms established sanatoriums in Narva-Jõesuu (1956-61) and Tervis (Health) in Pärnu (in 1966). After the war, the holiday-makers from Moscow and Leningrad reappeared again in Pärnu and elsewhere, eager to rent rooms for the season. These were mostly elderly Jewish intellectuals, whose children preferred warmer locations by the Black Sea. In the 1990s that group moved to the USA and Pärnu beaches were filled with Finnish grannies.
	Spa At the beginning of the 2000s, the spa-hotel became a new rage in Estonia. These establishments offer every kind of bath, mud and otherwise, but they are primarily based on people's faith in their curative qualities. The aim of spa-hotels was to keep the Finnish grannies here longer, although the drastically overworked Estonians of the 1990s gradually began to appreciate the chance to relax without leaving the country. The founders of spa-hotels lacked the foresight to invest in architecture, and thus the buildings look quite spartan. Although the Pärnu Health Paradise (architect Raivo Puusepp, interior architects Tüüne-Kristin and Urmo Vaikla, 2004) has a truly comfortable water park, which avoids the typical kitsch of similar establishments, its grey colour suggests the whole institution might belong to the defence forces, and the intense red of the foyers might suggest something much more exciting... The Georg Ots spa in Kuressaare is named after the singer who was hugely popular in Finland during his lifetime and whose songs, especially the Saaremaa Waltz about the charm of a midsummer night in the island, are still widely played. The spa, already the third most popular in that small town, thus provides an additional local attraction (KOKO Architects Raivo Kotov, Üla Koppel, Andrus Kõresaar, interior designers Liisi Murula, Raili Paling, 2004). The spas are well located in the vicinity of the old town, in a cove, with a view of the medieval Episcopal castle. The safe and cosy, quality architecture of the young architects, spiced with ethno-pop and contemporary Holland, should attract trend-conscious young people. Although the spa-business is doing nicely, a large number of Estonians still believe that the best remedy for spiritual and bodily problems is the good old farm sauna. Mart Kalm (1961), graduated as art historian from Tartu University in 1984. 'Kandidat isskustvovedenya' at All-Union Institute of Theory and History of Architecture and Townplanning, Moscow (1991) and PhD at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn (1998). He teaches at the Academy since 1992, Professor and Chair of the Institute of Art History. He has written extensively on the 20th century Estonian architecture.
	| Estonian Art 1/06 (18) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2006 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |