Restart. A fresh look on Modernist housing. Book launch and exhibition

The exhibition and seminar are a collaboration between the LINA members Architectuul and the Estonian Museum of Architecture. The whole project spanned two LINA cycles – 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 – and consisted of publication, seminar and exhibition. The publication was produced in the framework of LINA 2023/2024 programme, exhibition and seminar in the framework of LINA 2024/2025 programme.

What are the opportunities and challenges for the renewal of post-WWII housing estates? What has been the shift from collective to total private ownership? Young practitioners from across Europe looked at the innovative housing estates of the past from today's perspective, revealing their architectural background, current uses and the personal stories behind the facades. Housing has become one of the key issues of modernity – how to ensure a living environment that creates a new collective identity and offers equal opportunities for all. The exhibition Restart. Transformations in Modern Housing Estates took a fresh look at the utopias of the past and analysed how housing estates from across Europe can be transformed today, where the idea of collectivity has been dispersed into a multitude of privatopias.

Exhibition

The exhibition project on transformations in Modern housing estates was managed by the Estonian Museum of Architecture (project manager Triin Ojari) along with Architectuul (project manager Christian Burkhard). The Estonian Museum of Architecture and Architectuul conducted

two online workshops with the fellows (June 13, August 20, 2024) to analyze and discuss their contributions. The fellows submitted the text and images for the exhibition on transformation in modern housing estates in their respective countries (Slovakia, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and collaborated with the graphic designer and exhibition designer to finalise their panels. The corresponding examples from the Estonian context, research studio Slenderblock by the architecture students from the Estonian Academy of the Arts were added to the exhibition.

The following projects were exhibited:

Rajna Avramova: Negotiating Post-War Housing in a Local Context

Elspeth Lee: Building Up + Tearing Down

Hedwig van der Linden, Kevin Westerveld: A New Village on New Land

Lýdia Grešáková, Viktória Mravčáková, Katarína Onderková, Zuzana Révészová, Kristina Roman: Laundry room, stroller room, meeting room: Socialist housing through the prism of caring architecture

Ena Kukić, Dinko Jelečević: Learning from Alipašino Polje

Estonian Academy of Arts: Slenderblock. Variations on the transformation of a Soviet housing block