Between Earth and Wall
Stratified Ground Activation at Ingermanland Bastion, Tallinn
Hao Feng Chuah Hao Feng (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
K.M. Havik – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
P.H.M. Jennen – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
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.