Kalle Vellevoog reinterpreted Pärnu’s famous white Funk in his design for a holiday apartment building.

The seaside town of Pärnu is Estonia’s Riviera – dubbed the „summer capital“, it boasts a beautiful sandy beach, many restaurants and entertainment venues, spas and holiday retreats. Wild parties, around-the-clock nightlife in summer, everything one associates with the sunnier side of life. Architecturally, Pärnu is associated more than any other town with a white functionalist style. Right here on the beach stand some of the finest works of 1930s architecture – a seaside café and a grand beach hotel – inspired by technological progress and strict modernism. In addition, there are numerous similar villas and hotels throughout the town. Supelfunktsionalism – „swim-Funk“, if you will – has become Pärnu’s architectural trademark, and the everyday life of these buildings is strictly monitored by the heritage conservation authorities. Any architect who designs for this area has to come to grips with the legacies, one way or another.

Kalle Vellevoog, the architect of the apartment building on Seedri tänav 4, had no problem with the context as he is a staunch adherent of white Funk – meticulous, rigorous, detail-oriented. „Neo-funk is a timeless architectural style that will have more architectural value – whether in 10 or 50 years’ time – than any building with plywood siding tacked over it, which will have lost its lustre in five years, become faded and start deteriorating,“ Vellevoog remarked in an interview. „Eighty years of modern architecture is a long enough period to prove that Le Corbusier’s early villas still seem fresh, even today.“

In terms of its typology, the new building goes to the heart of the modern resort town apartment market: there is a doorman on the ground floor and most of the flats are rented out by their owners. It consequently has a very anonymous and transient residential population, and only comes to life in season (Pärnu is not half as popular in winter). So the programme has a certain anonymity and different parameters from a traditional residential building. The architectural space that has been created here is fairly strict and imposes clear contours. The V-shaped building has gallery access along glassed-in corridors that overlook an interior courtyard. The strict plan means that the apartments all face one side – either the sea or the street. The standard apartment is 50 to 60 square metres with one bedroom and a kitchenette. And, typically for a holiday area, all of them come with balconies.

The Seedri apartment building is a stylish place for a mobile population of modern holiday makers, a well-designed and smoothly operating machine whose coolness and sobriety are reinforced by the materials used: glass, concrete, steel. A solitary tree planted in the middle of the gravel-covered courtyard serves as an oblique reference to the luxuriance of the surrounding greenery – this outdoor area has not been designed as a place for lingering, but rather for observing the apartment building itself. Taken together, the glazed galleries and the central courtyard turn the Seedri hotel into a monitoring and controlling apparatus, yet those retiring into their own rooms have their own private view, full amenities and the knowledge that a holiday in Pärnu always involves modernist spaces.

A10, Fr., 2007.12.07

KOKO architects have placed a glass box on top of the Fahle building, symbolizing its conversion from paper to lifestyle factory.

The Fahle building, a former paper factory named after its onetime owner, is perched on one of the highest points in Tallinn, right at the gates to the city, on the main road to the airport. It has become the city’s first large-scale example of industrial rebirth, with lofts, restaur­ants, clubs and now, towering over all this, a new glass box with apartments. More than anything else, it is symptomatic of the current frantic building boom in Tallinn, of the rampant daring of developers, of attempts by real-estate sharks to capture market trends and to sell the kudos and added value of an entire living environment.

The Fahle factory has become a significant setting in the development of modern Estonian architecture. Six years ago, a group of young architects organized a brainstorming session here. They wanted the abandoned factory, with its mysterious corners, industrial mega-space and countless corridors, to become Tallinn’s very own Culture Factory: a 24/7 city-like venue for living, creating and consuming, a place where you can forget that, somewhere, boring suburbs and supermarkets still exist. All sorts of studios and galleries were supposed to take up residence in the complex; both the Estonian Academy of Arts and the best avant-garde theatre wanted to move in, feeding on the synergy generated by co-existence and popular industrial romance. They saw culture in terms of post-capitalism versus industry, the pillar of „old“ capitalism.
But the dream of synergy and spectacle was not to be. Today, none of the original candidates has moved into the paper factory on the hill. Nevertheless, at least one good art gallery has set up shop behind the limestone walls, and a tele­vision station has settled, as yet somewhat shakily, beneath its chimney. A posh lighting shop opened in the building opposite and at anonther place in the labyrinthic complex you can play badminton or lie under a fake sun.
Reconstructed according to a design by KOKO architects, the Fahle building, with its restaurant floor, offices and choice of apartments, is in fact the first step in the reinvigoration of the area. Architecturally, the objective is clear: to emphasize the imposing factory building on top of the tall hill by adding a new layer to this landmark, a fashion statement in the form of a sexy glass building overlooking the city. The 14-storey structure does not try to blend in or to hide its modern appearance. It is a fitting apotheosis for what was, until recently, a heap of crumbling limestone walls.

In the United States, this phenomenon of revamped industrial buildings began some decades ago, when the new middle-class became tired of suburban life and started to move back to the city centres. The rebirth of former industrial areas was an important part of revitalizing city life by repopulating the city. „Loft living“ became the new lifestyle for the emerging, fashion-conscious generation and a successful real-estate product. So successful that there is now a shortage of factory buildings suitable for conversion and developers have taken to building brand new loft buildings.

The story conjured up in that cold cavernous paper factory on the hill six years ago, the story of culture as symbol and the new motor for urban renewal, was a retelling of NYC’s 1960s SoHo – a rundown, low-rent area populated by artists and small businesses. In the next two decades, as the old industrial buildings became successful development projects, the „authentic“ bohemian atmosphere began to be „packaged“ into luxury studio apartments – a lifestyle product for the wealthy. Of course, in the process, the original inhabitants of the area were banished.

In Tallinn, in the absurdity of the Soviet period, the authorities kept factories working in the city centre (land did not cost a thing back then and the planned economy ruled) and built „official“ lofts for artists in the grey concrete-slab suburbs. Studio and factory apartments, eye-catching architectural solutions and city living as sales strategy, have only now infiltrated the vocabulary of local real-estate developers. Yet the best views in the glass apartment box cost 3500 euros a square metre (there are only few apartments still available!) so who will move in will largely be determined by the size of their wallet.

Dutch architect Adriaan Geuze has said that what makes old industrial buildings exciting is the sense of freedom, even rebellion that overcomes the new inhabitants. „Most likely the buildings will become better, if they are not planned for a certain function, if the building and the function must adjust to one another,“ he says. It seems that one of the most attractive examples of such mutual re-discovery and co-existence has now been born in Tallinn.

A10, Sa., 2007.03.31