Estonian National Museum Building Complex | Vincent Callebaut

PROGRAM : International Architectural Competition for the Estonian National Museum Building Complex
LOCATION : The Raadi Manor Complex
SURFACE AREA : 40.000 M²
CLIENT : The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Estonia, The Estonian National Museum and the Estonian Architects Association
PERSPECTIVES : Philippe Steels

“The ENM is an ethnologically (cultural anthropology) oriented national central museum, whose ethnological, cultural research and museology activities aid in the preservation and development of Estonian culture, keeping Estonian identity in an increasingly globalising world and fostering better understanding between different culture.”

For the hundredth anniversary of the creation date of the Estonian National Museum in 2009, the Estonian Ministry of Culture in conjunction with the Estonian National Museum and the Union of Estonian Architects, would like to build a new building complex in Tartu, the second largest city in Estonia. The Raadi Manor Complex is located on the Eastern district of the city of Tartu along the rural municipality.

At the crossing of the Estonian and Finno-Ugric History and cultures, the Estonian national Museum (ENM) presents an architecture that inserts itself as a built geography. Towards a new understanding of the place, it imposes itself like an open field of multilayer strength that compresses the nature of the city and of the dynamic processes which govern it. It is an animated matrix with compressive folds topologically open which forms a common meeting frame between the city and the rural municipality, between the site and the visitor. The museum is at the intersection of new devices able, simultaneously, to generate reactive mechanisms (operating paradoxes) and evolutional spaces (landscapes). It is an interactive field of strengths among other fields, a geography of transition.
Texts and images from:Vincent Callebaut