A 7km long man made river will replace the main traffic axis through Lasnamäe, a failed soviet modernist vision in Estonias capital Tallinn.
Among the new EU member states Estonia is the most aspiring, at least when it comes to economical development. However the urban legacy from Soviet times is widely ignored. These modernist concrete deserts from the 1960s and 70s exist around the world and to what failed urban planning can lead got apparent with last years Banlieu riots in France.
To anticipate such developments Florian Bartholome and Robert Ostmann (yeah, that’s me) propose with their diploma project a big scale intervention in the district to completely change it’s character.
The thesis, that was just rewarded with the Celebration of Cities Award, shows how a river can become a landmark and identification symbol for the inhabitants and above all initiate social, ecological and economical developments.
The documentation of this diploma project which was part of Dr. Wouter Vanstiphout’s class at Technical University Berlin can be downloaded as a short summary (pdf 7mb) or as a detailed version (pdf 55mb) and if you don’t like pdf than there’s still the flickr page containing all important images as well as photos of the presentation.
The winners of the Celebration of Cities Competition which is initiated by the International Union of Architects will be exhibited at Venice Architectural Biennal this autumn.