Sauna at Hiedanranta. Foto Eija Jokinen
The Open Lecture series of the EKA Faculty of Architecture will take place in the autumn of 2024 under the general title S*cial – Values in the built realm, curated by Mattias Malk, PhD student and visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture.
The lecturers will focus on the ongoing shift in planning practice, where considerations other than pure economic viability increasingly play a role in decision-making.
Mattias Malk, curator of the autumn lecture series, PhD student and visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, describes the main theme of the lecture series as follows:
Participative practices, the valorisation of social space and the changing role of architects, especially in the public sector, are gaining ground in Europe’s spatial development, but things are still moving slowly in Estonia. So far, our economic growth has been based on environmental degradation and, despite rigid market-driven planning, we are among the weakest in the EU in resource use. However, the foundations of a smarter spatial policy, which is more useful than profit, are still undefined and untested.
One of the aims of the lecture series is to define and rehabilitate the word ‘social’ in Estonian spatial policy, including the social responsibility mentioned in the new planned public procurement. All the invited lecturers deal with the issues of space and sociality in their daily work and will share their experiences of the changing role of architects through examples.
On September 19 at 6 pm Elina Alatalo will hold the lecture “Creating shared spaces together: the power of the new roles of architects”.
Elina Alatalo is an architect and researcher in Environmental Policy of Tampere University, Finland. Her recent work has concentrated on new proactive forms of urban activism, getting vacant spaces back into use and developing sustainable urban neighbourhoods. Elina is a co-founder of Insurgent Spatial Practices, a collective that explores the valuable knowledge that alternative cultures and grassroots develop in the city. She also teaches Landscape Architecture in Aalto University in Helsinki and coordinates interaction for societal impact in Co-Carbon research project of urban nature.
In her work, Elina focuses on co-design methods and self-organising community approaches. In this lecture, she will discuss how to create meaningful participatory processes and how to deal with the messy-quirky situations arising in them. She will also share some theoretical lenses that help in making sense of the dynamics in these processes. The power of the new roles of architects will be illustrated through three inspirational projects. From realizing a community sauna to facilitating the development of a network of self-organising coworking spaces and making the typology of Nordic Superblock real, we will see that co-creation is worth embracing.
The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.
All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.
Schedule of the autumn 2024 lectures:
September 5 at 6 pm Jonas Janke (architects, b+)
September 19 at 6 pm Elina Alatalo (architect, Tampere University)
October 17 at 6 pm Giovanni Piovene (architect, Piovenefabi)
October 31 at 6 pm Christian Pagh (curator, Oslo Architecture Triennale)
November 28 at 6 pm Petra Marko (architect, Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava)
Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.
The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.