Most known for possessing the best-preserved medieval city center in the world, the capital of the Baltic region’s northernmost country—Tallinn, Estonia—also houses a wealth of other architectural styles. (These styles are celebrated at the Estonian Museum of Architecture.) Soviet, neoclassicism, Baroque, and even contemporary technofuturism collide in a perfect contradiction of non-contradictions. Buildings from the thirteenth century land in the shadows of great communist towers like the Sokos Hotel Viru, and Europe’s tallest building in the sixteenth century occupies the same “skyline” as some of the finest exemplars of brutalism.
I’m decently traveled for my age, I like to think, but I’ve never been to another city where the architecture of each building contrasts with the next in an almost predictably unpredictable routine to the same extent as Tallinn—not even the other post-USSR cities I’ve been able to visit. The Rotermann Quarter and its strong clay-like colors have a rich modern feel not all that dissimilar to parts of Grand Rapids, as does the street art sprinkled throughout parts of the city like the Telliskivi Creative City. Other parts, like the area around the iconic Viru Gates, resemble a city something like Prague, and a place like Kalamaja may remind others of the picturesque Amsterdam urban areas.
Tallinn is truly a unique city.
My personal favorite building is probably the Kino Sõprus, the first multiplex theater in Estonia. Opened in 1955, the theater’s name means “friendship” in Estonian to mark the Soviet Union’s (then) recently improved relations with the People’s Republic of China. The two-theater design, its transition into a nightclub and casino amidst financial difficulties in the 1990s, and its subsequent restoration into a theater in 2004 demonstrate the building’s rather complex aesthetic design and historical innovation. The Soviet theater largely retains its original form after a “return” to the arthouse world in the 2000s.
The two-screen design, as well as the column work and impressive curvature on the front face of the building, paradoxically signals the cinema as both an artistic relic of the past and something once socialistically innovative. There’s also a standing bar/concession booth in the back of the theater’s one remaining screen on site (there’s another screen located elsewhere that’s somehow related)…and that’s just awesome theater design. The Sõprus’s concrete walls stand tall and impose its unapologetically and deliberative Soviet look onto the Old Town, giving the cinema a dignified and considerable feel that makes me lament the ugly-contemporary and full-throated capitalistic incentives of North American multiplexes.
Now among the world’s most atheistic countries, the architectural remnants of Estonia’s Christian heritage resemble a museum in their preservation of cultural change. There are several unique elements of Christian Estonia that symbolize different moments and traditions of the religion that thrived in the country at different times— Orthodox, Lutheran, and civic religion as incarnated in the Cross of Liberty (pictured)—while also holding several disparate architectural styles together. The richness of this perspective from the War of Independence Victory Column (the cross) in Freedom Square, the corner of Old Town that honors and educates people on Estonian freedom, is simply profound.
This architectural pluralism is no less than an incarnation of the badges of history Estonia wears into the present, a memento of the past and a dream of a techno-future. And as a United States citizen, it’s also a depressing reminder of the consistent American failure to realize a dream of a beautiful city beyond the omnipresent landmarks of capitalism—or even a skyline worth seeing, for that matter.
Joshua Polanski (’20) is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking and exhibition, slow and digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern film.
