Tallinn

Estonia - Tallinn

Archetype

In Estonia wooden heritage townhouse, from 1800 to 1945 are studied, alongside the masonry heritage apartment buildings. One type of wooden heritage townhouses is the wooden apartments of Lender type (early 1800s-1900s), were designed for industrial workers and peasants moving to cities. These two-story buildings featured horizontal logs, finished with horizontal boarding, and were organized with 4 to 8 one-room apartments. Characteristic is the axis: normally the central axis corresponds to the front door and buildings could have 3, 5 or 7 additional axes, to respect the symmetry. The wooden apartments of Tallin type, built during the1920s-30s, featured brick stairwells and housed apartments with different sizes and with multiple living rooms and modern amenities (like a water closet). The Tallin type also consists of two stories with an additional attic under the roof and the facade could be finished with wooden boarding or plaster. Around the period of WWII, Stalinist-style buildings replaced those destroyed in the war, combining classicist forms with national elements, and were designed to accommodate workers from Soviet Russia, resulting in often apartments with simple living conditions. These buildings, both in wood and brick, were part of new urban planning initiatives and hold cultural heritage value due to their role in shaping the urban landscape and accommodating different social classes over time.

Lender Section

Lender View

Tallinn Section

Tallinn View

Neighbourhood

In Estonia, well-preserved and valuable areas can be classified in different protection categories, next to officially listed cultural monuments. Buildings can be graded as highly valuable, valuable, milieu valuable and low-valuable. In Tallin, eight milieu protection areas are defined, of which Uue-Maailma is one.
Uue-Maailma – or New World- used to be a meadow until the middle of 19th century. Most of the wooden apartment buildings were built between 1890 and 1939, and brick apartment buildings in the 1950–60s. It started to develop as a residential area when the need for workers housing rose. The first buildings were of the Lender’s type, while the second type, the Tallin one, started to appear after the First World War and the Stalinist buildings in the context of the Second World War, when the destroyed wooden buildings needed to be rebuilt.
Therefore, the development of this area that is now considered of milieu value consists of a variety of building types of different sizes and construction materials allowing us to follow and retell the historical events that have formed Tallinn.