Vilen Künnapu: New Architecture for the New Human

May 23, 7:30 pm

Architect and artist Vilen Künnapu, a partner in the Tallinn firm Künnapu Padrik Architects, has been called “the most eccentric architect in Estonia today.” In his lecture, listeners will find out about experiments in the field of form-building — a field at the intersection of construction, contemporary art, and Eastern mysticism — in the master’s works from the late Soviet and Post-Soviet periods. Among his most well-known buildings are the Estonian Methodist Church, 1994; the Radisson Blu Sky Hotel Tallinn, 1999-2001; the Viru Keskus shopping center, 2004; the “Elephant House,” 2013 (all in Tallinn); as well as the Snailtower high-rise, 2007, and the Science Center AHHAA, 2008, both in Tartu.

Vilen Künnapu is the author of a number of large-scale architectural installations, including Circle Temple at Tallinn Prison (2004) and The River Bell (London, 2010). The Russian Avant-Garde has played a formative role in Künnapu’s development as an artist. By his own admission, a trip to the Melnikov House in Moscow at the beginning of the 1970s completely changed his perspective: “I was filled by a strange sense of happiness and sweet excitement... It was as if I had signed an agreement with some higher positive forces.” Künnapu has been a guest lecturer at universities in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, in addition to serving as a Professor of Philosophy at Tartu University from 2006–2007. He currently works as Professor of Architecture at the Tallinn University of Applied Sciences and as a Professor of Composition at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanistics at the Tallinn Technical University.

This lecture is organized in collaboration with the magazine Project Baltia.

Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.