This year’s Jaan Holt Scholarship will be awarded to Jornas-Toomas Iisak, a student of architecture and urban planning, for his outstanding and active professional activities.
Architecture students are encouraged by Jaan Holt, an Estonian architect of Virginia origin and Professor Emeritus of Virginia Tech, with a scholarship. The purpose of the scholarship is to support the studies, creative activities and self-development of one successful student of the last year of architecture and urban planning at EKA. The amount of the scholarship is 1000 euros.
The scholarship committee consisted of Prof. Andres Ojari, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture of EKA, Dr. Renee Puusepp, Senior Research Fellow, and Dr. Sille Pihlak, Research Fellow.
According to the committee, Jornas-Toomas is a socially active, environmentally sensitive architectural thinker and at the same time a student who is oriented towards successful learning.
His master’s thesis “Pärnu Fisherman’s Quarter Creative Space” focuses on finding a new solution as an alternative cultural space for the old factory complexes on Suure-Jõe Street in Pärnu, offering a positive outlook for an environmentally valuable riverfront environment.
The Fisherman’s quarter has the potential to become an active part of the urban space, which will be supported in the near future by the construction of a new bridge and the connection of the Rail Baltica station.
Jornas-Toomas is an active student who, in addition to studying, always has enough energy for extracurricular activities and enthusiasm for introducing EKA’s architecture education to prospective students.
Jaan Holt is a long-time director and professor emeritus of the Virginia Tech Washington-Alexandria Center for Architecture and an honorary member of the Estonian Academy of Arts. He has been a long-term supporter of Estonian architectural education, creating opportunities for many of our architects to exchange at the Architecture Center since 1992, where a large number of architects with an art academy background have been teaching and studying.