Open House Tallinn 2025, courtesy of the Estonian Centre for Architecture
Open House Tallinn is an annual architecture festival that opens the doors of the city to everyone curious about what lies behind them. For one weekend each autumn, residents and visitors are invited to explore the stories of Tallinn through buildings, landscapes, and urban spaces that are not always accessible to the public.
Open House Tallinn 2024. Courtesy of Eesti Arhitektuurikeskus MTÜ.
On the weekend of October 12th and 13th, Open House Tallinn returns with more than 40 buildings opening their doors for free guided tours. The programme offers fascinating locations across Põhja-Tallinn, the city centre, Mustamäe, Tondi, Nõmme, and Kadriorg.
This exhibition stages a meeting point for scientific predictions and futuristic fantasies that were manifested in architecture and art from the 1960s to the 1980s. Bringing together authors from Eastern Europe and the West, the exhibition will display works that emerged from the new technological reality that followed the Second World War, and which took it along unexpected paths: foreseeing the replacement of work with games and collective pleasures in computerised societies, turning away from the overarching machine logic and replacing it with myths and romantic ideas of the human being, or looking for traces of other civilizations from space, instead of conquering it. A utopia of quantification and of scientific planning, of the separation of life and work, was replaced by a striving towards harmony between the machine and nature, the mind and the body. These projects are extensions of a technologicised world, ironic and absurd situations that present a critique of rationalism and speak of the contradictions of late modern society, demonstrating at the same time both its intellectual horizons and the limits of its utopian fantasies.
