In response to the anthropocentric attitude of contemporary architecture, this project explores various principles for designing a communal residence that provides a habitat for multiple species. It decentralizes the human by proposing shared living and with nature-inclusive guidelines. Co-habitat explores these concepts through the lens of porosity; a theme where a building becomes accessible to multiple species rather than for the individual human only. By softening the rigid boundaries between interior and exterior spaces, the project investigates porosity across three scales: the roost (facade), the facade (the building), and the neighbourhood (the site), situated within Tallinn, Estonia. ... Read more

This thesis examines the challenge of oversized Soviet-era buildings in Tallinn, focusing on large vacant structures such as Linnahall. These monumental buildings occupy prominent urban locations but remain disconnected from daily life due to their scale, historical associations, and rigid architectural forms. Often linked to Soviet occupation, they carry complex political and cultural meanings that make reuse difficult.

The project explores how these buildings can be reinterpreted as valuable architectural resources rather than problematic remnants. Through adaptive reuse, it investigates how new programs and human-scale interventions can reconnect these structures to the city and its residents while preserving their historical significance.

Focusing on Tallinn’s Olympic legacy, the thesis proposes architectural interventions that contrast with and complement the monumental existing structures. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the project aims to transform politically charged buildings into meaningful spaces for contemporary urban life, while also exploring circular construction strategies such as material reuse and improved building performance. ... Read more

Between the material accumulation of intersecting unfinished urban visions, strange, inactive spaces emerge within condensed nodes of homogeneous activity in Tallinn's city centre. This thesis sits in this creative interval, recognizing such a gap as a potential site of rhythmic disruption and public engagement rather than one requiring sanitization and assimilation into the "smoothed" over urban whole. The choreography begins with and through the body, adopting a phenomenological approach in the reimagination of the gap as a site of social encounter. In reaction to “erasure” by means of demolition and concealment, the thesis explores modes of “revealing” through sensorial choreography to engender new forms of public reappropriation with those inherited structures of Tallinn’s Soviet past.
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Tallinn is a city of varied landscapes. From the lake Ülemiste which provides the city its water, to the river Pirita as an important ecological asset, and Tallinn Bay that opens the city to the greater Baltic Sea. Various infrastructure and architecture of Tallinn are built to respond to these varied landscapes, forming a tangible dialogue between the landscape and the anthropocene.

This project delves into the exploration of one of these landscapes, albeit intangible today: there was once a river running from the lake to the sea, called the Härjapea. Its history reveals the industrial roots of Tallinn in the past, but it also tells of its eventual demise -- as industrialisation eventually polluted the river and was filled in. Traces of the river only exists in the urban form of Tallinn today, with some residual buildings from its industrial past and some residual landscapes in the form of topography.

Starting with an unused paper mill situated adjacent to the central business quarter of the city teeming with skyscrapers, the project looks into the reintroduction of the river and the reintepretation of its exploitive industrial past. ... Read more

This graduation project began from my interest in time as an architectural condition. During my visit to Estonia, and especially through walking in Tallinn, I became increasingly aware that time is not only present in monuments, preserved façades or historical narratives. It is also embedded in less immediate visible conditions such as changes in ground level, traces of former infrastructures, reused structures, fragmented walls, buried passages, material junctions and everyday patterns of movement.

Rather than understanding time as a chronological sequence, this project approaches time as something spatial. Cities accumulate time through construction, erasure, adaptation, abandonment and reuse. These processes do not always produce clear historical readings. More often, they result in overlap, discontinuity, concealment and coexistence. A wall may remain visible while its former function disappears. A ground level may rise until a former entrance becomes a basement. A tunnel may persist below the surface while the city above develops another life. These spatial contradictions became central to the way I understand temporal layering in architecture.

Tallinn offers a particularly rich context for exploring these ideas. Its urban fabric contains medieval structures, defensive systems, adapted buildings, underground passages, contemporary urban surfaces and everyday civic uses that coexist both horizontally and vertically. However, many of these layers are not easily experienced as part of daily life. They are often hidden beneath the ground, isolated as heritage objects, or passed by without deeper spatial engagement. ... Read more

This thesis addresses the urgent issue of civilian safety in Tallinn, Estonia. Amidst increasing geopolitical instability along NATO's eastern border, questions of safety and resilience have become pressing architectural concerns. Estonia, sharing a long border with the Russian Federation, is especially exposed to potential security threats, yet remains insufficiently equipped with contemporary civilian defence infrastructure. At the same time, ethnic and social differences, and increasingly individualistic urban lifestyles are deepening social fragmentation within Tallinn's neighbourhoods. Current urban planning offers few high-quality community gathering places, particularly ones that function year-round. This weakens the neighbourly ties that are essential to resilient communities in times of crisis.

Architecture is positioned here as an active agent in addressing these intertwined challenges. The project first reconsiders the bunker itself, conventionally seen in cultural imagination as an anxious, defensive, unwelcoming space concerned only with physical protection. Drawing on phenomenological and neurological research into perceptions of safety, it investigates how underground infrastructure can cultivate both physical protection and psychological comfort, and how spaces of safety can in turn serve as cultural environments. The resulting proposal combines a public cultural community centre with a fully operational civilian defence shelter – redefining the bunker not as a dormant emergency facility, but as an active civic environment that supports everyday social life while remaining prepared for times of crisis.

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This graduation project investigates how architecture can contribute to reconnecting Tallinn and its residents with the Baltic Sea through craft, learning and the adaptive transformation of existing coastal heritage. The project addresses both the inaccessibility of the waterfront as wel as fading nautical practices such as the craft of shipbuilding and material knowledge.

The project proposes the transformation of a vacant coastal structure within the Lennusadam area into a vocational shipbuilding school and public learning environment. Through historical research, fieldwork, interviews, material experimentation and research-through-design, the project explores how traditional shipbuilding principles such as repairability, flexibility and material awareness can inform contemporary architecture.

The resulting design combines education, making and public engagement within an existing building, responding to the climatic and seasonal conditions of the Baltic coast through timber construction, breathable material assemblies and adaptable spatial organisation. Rather than treating heritage as something to be preserved in isolation, the project positions it as an evolving practice that continues through use, repair and the transmission of knowledge. In doing so, the research contributes to broader discussions on waterfront redevelopment, craftsmanship and the role of architecture in supporting cultural continuity. ... Read more

Tallinn is a dissonant city, constituted by fragmentary materialisations of superimposed layers of historical visions, that were developed under radically different socio-political frameworks. The resulting dissonance reaches from the large urban scale, down to the human experience of the city. Today, Tallinn is subject to progressive “smoothing”, homogenising and commercialising its cityscape, based on the exclusion of materially and socially dissonant elements. This is especially tangible in the Central Market of Tallinn, that is characterised by dissonant heritage, the Soviet market hall, on the one hand, and a dissonant community, Russian speaking vendors and market-goers, on the other. Its isolation and poor condition, has brought the market under imminent threat of demolition, which would eliminate the storied history of the site and eliminate its characteristic dissonance. By problematising fragmentation and valuing a generative reading of dissonance, based on the notion of defamiliarisation, a new proposal is drafted, that attempts to turn Keskturg from a poorly maintained commercial space into a common local centre, fostering both the connection between isolated communities and the fragments of built heritage on site. It attempts this by bringing together difference – instead of superficially smoothing, it harmonises with and embaces Tallinn's dissonance. ... Read more

The primary school is situated between Kalamaja and the old town and aims to serve as a social connection between these two distinct neighbourhoods. The project challenges the conventional design of school architect ure by rethinking the classroom, circulation space and playground as an active participant of learning. The design treats the notion of a school as a social building embedded in its urban context. Nature and playfulness guide the spatial strategy of the project, creating a multitude of possibilities that allow children to learn, play and socialise beyond the classroom. Through this approach, the project seeks to support the role of imagination as a vital part of a learning environment. ... Read more

The project is a contemporary reinterpretation of the bastion, highlighting the multiple temporal layers accumulated on-site through the deliberate actions of excavation, highlighting, framing, subtraction, and addition. By overlaying past and present information, the project establishes a meaningful connection that allows the site’s history to be read directly from its physical form.
The proposal serves as a model for navigating the tension between a historic urban image and a bustling modern city and how to negotiate the site’s relevance without forgetting its past. ... Read more

This doctoral study explores forms of collectivities and their spatial politics in Albania across three political periods: state socialism, the anarchic aftermath of its collapse in the early 1990s, and the current neoliberal regime. It challenges the prevailing assumption that the fall of state socialism led to the loss of collective practices and a turn towards individualism. The study draws a sharp distinction between state collectivism, utilized by the party-state as the main ideological tool, and fragmented commoning practices that persisted and intensified precisely in moments of institutional failure and political instability.

Empirically, despite their fluctuating agency, it shows that commoning practices have remained present and politically relevant throughout successive regimes. Often overlooked and marginalized in professional and academic discourse, they have served as vital social infrastructures shaping the materialization of livelihood patterns and urbanization. Theoretically, the study advances the concept of kincommoning to account for collective practices reliant on practical kin-making, spatial proximity, reciprocity, and migration. It engages with these practices as contested terrains, recognizing the internal tensions and contradictions, while foregrounding their capacity to sustain collective life, as well as their often unseen defiant tacit politics of everyday life. Methodologically, the research has a transdisciplinary approach, integrating multi-modal spatial ethnography, including documentary film production, and reflexive writing.

Centering the agency of marginalized places as generative of knowledge rather than mere case studies, the dissertation critiques deterministic emancipatory frameworks perpetuated by the interplay of hierarchies of state power, market forces, and professional practices of architecture and urban planning.
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This doctoral research investigates Franco Purini’s work ‘Una ipotesi di architettura’ (1966–1968), examining it as both a foundational architectural inquiry and a hypothesis on drawing. Through a detailed analysis of Purini’s research, the dissertation develops the concept of an “architecture of drawing”—a critical framework in which drawing is not merely a representational tool but a form of architectural thought and theoretical investigation. Central to this work is the assertion that architectural drawing is inherently double: it generates and questions architectural meaning.
This dual role reflects the tension within Purini’s method, in which drawing serves as both a tool and a conceptual field for dismantling the systems it constructs. The dissertation further explores how Purini’s grammar-based architectural language emphasises the autonomy and poetics of drawing. The investigation revolves around visual analysis and analytical drawings whose findings have been applied to reinterpreting a series of Purini’s projects. Finally, the thesis posits that the structure underlying the “architecture of drawing” is paratactical, enabling drawing to function as an open-ended form of architectural inquiry. Consequently, drawing can both reinforce and resist conventional design logic—a capacity that lies at the heart of its ongoing relevance and poetic potential in architectural practice. In summary, this research not only repositions ‘Una ipotesi di architettura’ as a critical episode in contemporary architectural thought but also affirms drawing as a mode of theoretical production. It establishes the architecture of drawing as both a methodological tool and a conceptual framework through which architecture itself can be reimagined. ... Read more

Pause
My project is a pause.
In architecture, many different buildings exist in the same realm. A pavilion, community centre, airport. The list goes on. But can architecture also be designed to function as a pause? A small break in between the traffic? Or a small break in your daily routine?
The project is situated at three different locations along the edge of Tallinn’s medieval centre, where the old city meets newer developments. A sudden boundary, without a threshold designed to ease the shift from one to the next. These sites were selected based on the various intensities and intervals of public transport. The first location, next to the old town and the Viru hotel, serves as the main site. The second sits in the middle of traffic, beside Freedom Square and surrounded by a three-lane road on either side, with buses and trams passing frequently. It offers a stepping stone to the city’s newer parts. The third is placed in the park, bridging two green areas and creating a safe place to wait for transport at night.
In a city centre challenged by layered scales and diverse architectural languages, the project responds with a system designed entirely at the scale of the human body. These scales are found in material choices, subtle height differences, and depths that shape the walls, elevations and surroundings. It mediates the differences in scale, people, and spatial languages.
Built on the idea of small implementations to create a larger impact, Pause offers a space not just for transit, but for presence. It functions as a social threshold. Part shelter, part meeting point, part memory. An anchor where people pause, reflect, and reconnect with their city and with one another.
Together with this framework, soft curves shape the landscape. They guide and embrace visitors, leading them toward the various functions embedded in the site. The canopy enhances this embrace, creating a space where people can wait, spend time, and meet with others.
Rooted in Estonia’s local materials and shaped by the colours of its seasons, the project suggests a pathway for new locations to come. What does it mean if half of a site is lowered by a torso? If the step toward the coffee bar shifts up or down by one foot? These small spatial gestures offer another layer, a new dimension that enhances everyday use.
Pause becomes a breathing point in the city. Not monumental, but a necessity.
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This project envisions the transformation of a former railway warehouse complex in Kopli, Tallinn, into a hybrid dynamic community facility. Drawing from the site’s industrial memory and the theoretical framework of Terrain Vague, the design reclaims the in-between condition of the post-industrial landscape and activates it with new spatial narratives.

The idea of Dynamic Space emerged from the need to create an adaptable framework rather than a fixed form. It is rooted in the belief that architecture should respond to changing community needs over time. By incorporating modular grids, movable walls, and overlapping programs, the space resists singular definition—allowing users to reshape its function and meaning through daily inhabitation, negotiation, and collective authorship.

The intervention consists of two main elements: the adaptive reuse of the historic brick warehouse and a new timber structure forming from the old grid. A modular system is applied in both—embedded gently in the old building as flexible programmatic “boxes” that respect and contrast the existing shell, and fully expressed in the new construction to allow community-driven spatial transformation.

The space serves as a community “living room,” hosting exhibitions, performances, co-working, and daycare. Architectural devices such as a diagonal ramp, double-height volumes, movable partitions, and suspended installations emphasize spatial flexibility, porosity, and layered engagement.
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Synergy in Paradox is a proposal for a new ferry terminal in Tallinn.

The current terminal offers an underwhelming entrance; its infrastructure forms a border between the city and the coastline; and the typology shows similarities to that of a racetrack. These observations have been directly translated into objectives: A grand entrance to Tallinn; A walkable coast; and A temporary F1 track. These objectives form an apparent contradiction: A paradox.

Although, by implementing scale, sequence and system as operators for the design process, it has been possible to achieve these goals and have them reinforce each other: A synergy
Because of its large scale, an intermediary is implemented to bridge the gap between objectives, operators, and the actual design. This intermediary ensures that the project has its own character: A hexagonal transition zone between the orthogonal infrastructure and the dense city scape.

In summary, the project comprises a ferry terminal, an elevated park, and a temporary Formula 1 circuit, distinguished by a unique character achieved through the application of a hexagonal intermediary framework.
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Set in the heart of Tallinn, this project addresses the challenges of spatial uniformity and the disconnection between public and private realms at the urban scale. It proposes a new framework for mixed-use development that reimagines housing as a dynamic, layered system that moves beyond the generic. At the base of the project lies a transparent urban hall: a column-free space formed by a waffle structure. This area acts as a public living room for the city, offering openness and a sense of collective ownership. It accommodates community functions, small-scale commerce, and flexible programs that invite constant reactivation by the surrounding neighborhood. Above, a green landscape - the “petri dish” - serves not only as a shared space for recreation and reflection but also as a spatial and social mediator. Rising from this platform are tree-like structural cores that support cantilevered housing units while preserving the ground level for shared use. The varied massing and fragmented volumes prevent the formation of monolithic blocks, allowing light, air, and people to flow between spaces. ... Read more

The Dwellers of Väikese Rannavärava proposes a new kind of urban ecosystem within Tallinn’s Old Town—one that promotes coexistence among diverse groups by creating a system of shared resources and unique contributions. The project offers what is currently missing in the area: a cohesive, resilient neighbourhood. Through the adaptive transformation of the Väikese Rannavärava Bastion, this intervention integrates everyday life with privatized activities, revitalizing both the space and its community.

While the site was selected based on a threshold analysis that revealed a clear physical and symbolic separation from the Old Town, the design response—puncturing the site into smaller, human-scaled elements and the creation of a public square—respond directly to this condition.

I also acknowledge the ongoing debate about preserving Tallinn’s historical appearance. But, as Alatalu states, “today’s creation is tomorrow’s heritage.” I believe that new interventions—if done with sensitivity, clarity, and care—can enrich heritage rather than diminish it. The Dwellers of Väikese Rannavärava is my contribution to that evolving dialogue. ... Read more

The dissertation considers attitudes regarding how the architect might begin. The notion of beginning, or finding the means to a beginning, is contingent upon that which presents itself to the architect upon a first encounter. Examinations of urban conditions reveal ideologies and intentions directed towards shaping subjectivities. They also reveal the cultural specificity of appearances, which, as outward manifestations of intent, are utterances, like those of language: imperfect representations of ideas. The central part of the work concerns the approach to the artefact, and proposes a reconciliation between phenomenology and material culture, through consideration of the presence of representation. I contend that appearances are representation’s threshold, which, through acute attention, yields access to their essential nature, and to the real. The meeting with the real demands the architect’s suspension of impulse to projection, replacing it with something closer to empathy.... ... Read more

This is a story about an archive that could sit in the heart of Appingedam, Groningen, commemorating two diasporic cultures which, against all the odds, found refuge in this quiet, mediaeval city.

The first Ashkenazi Jewish population saw its birth in Appingedam, Groningen in the early 17th century. Despite centuries of difficulties the community flourished in this small rural city for centuries until it was all but eliminated in the 1940s, starting with their forceful eviction to the Dutch concentration/transit camp Westerbork. My grandmother is the last survivor of this community.

After the war, Kamp Westerbork - renamed Schattenberg - saw the arrival of a new community, the Moluccans. Intended to be a temporary stay whilst the Dutch negotiated their independence as a state from Indonesia, the years saw little progress as it became evident that this temporary stay was quickly becoming permanent. In 1960 it was proclaimed that the Moluccan community would be rehoused permanently across the province of Groningen, with the first city of permanent dwelling being Appingedam. A city which can be walked across in 25 minutes now bore witness to the birth of two significant communities within the Netherlands, centuries apart. Although there could never have been any crossover (one community terminated prior to the other starting) this is the story of how to analyse the intrinsically spiritual connections between two vastly different communities, and how a new syncretic direction for commemoration - one the focuses on the power of a multiplicity of memory rather than the privacy and exclusivity of a single collective remembrance - can be brought forward.
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The sauna in Estonian culture is seen as a necessity of life, an instinct. It is the biggest social network in Estonia and the oldest. The sauna is a place where Estonian people meet, reconnect, and share on a physical and spiritual level. By being naked in this heat, one re-experiences its body, to reconnect the physical, mental, and spiritual relationship with one-self, others, and nature.

Whereas gentrification is on the rise in the Kopli area it is important to create spaces where local people can meet, socialize, relax and thrive in there neighborhood. To have a space where they feel connected with themselves, the sea, nature, and their surroundings. The chosen location near the sea has the possibility of connecting people and water. People need each other and nature to thrive.

The site-specific design of these four buildings allows the people of Tallinn to reconnect with themselves, each other, and nature in a mental, physical and spiritual way. The saunas and its buildings function as a place of sensorial reconnection, through materials, nature, and social facilities. ... Read more