This year’s Jaan Holt Scholarship will be awarded to Diana Drobot, a student of architecture and urban planning, for her outstanding and active professional activities.
Architecture students are encouraged already 5th year 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 included Dr. Sille Pihlak, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture of EKA, Prof. Toomas Tammis, Head of Master’s Studios, and Martin Melioranski, Head of the 3D Laboratory. According to the committee, Diana Drobot is a professionally and socially active student who has enough courage and proactivity to take on responsible tasks.
Her master thesis “Sinking & Shrinking. Adapting to subsidence on the example of the shrinking Kohtla-Järve” deals with the topic of the shrinking of industrial cities and examines the possible future scenarios of post-industrial landscape. The districts of Kohtla-Järve, where the explosion of industry and mineral wealth are replaced by a hollowed-out landscape, extreme shrinkage and sinking apartment buildings, are discussed.
The committee considered the role of the future architect to be important in designing and visualizing future scenarios of high-quality spatial solutions. Therefore, it was decided to award a scholarship to Diana Drobot, who has made independent new creative spatial decisions in her thesis, which brings solutions that offer new quality to a current and problematic situation.
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.