Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Debates about the location of the new building of the Estonian National Museum (ENM) started with the restoration of independence of Estonia in 1991 and initially the location of the original museum building which had been demolished in the WW2 was selected. The location had historical significance in the collective memory, but had also potential to activate the urban space and link city centre with this area. Raadi Manor in the outskirts of Estonia’s second-biggest town Tartu had prospered under the Baltic-Germans in the nineteenth century. The manor was given to the museum at the 1920s. In the pre-WWII Estonia, the area became a beloved park for summer and winter activities. After WWII the area became the Soviet military airfield, a highly secured territory with restricted access, located barely two kilometres from the cultural and university city’s main square. At 2005 the architectural competition for the new building was launched. The winning project “Memory Field” by DGT Architects did not consider former layers of the historically rich area, using the military airfield as a starting point to propose a space that would open up modes of meaning-making. The current renewal also involved landscape architectural interventions to the space, which had had became an urban wildscape with no regular human involvement after the departure of the military. In this study, we focus on changing meaning making of the museum building and its surrounding space looking at the time of the architectural competition (2006) and the time of opening the building (2016).