The Architectural Pluralism of Tallinn

Most known for possessing the best-preserved medieval city center in the world, the capital of the Baltic region’s northernmost country—Tallinn, Estonia—also houses a wealth of other architectural styles. (These styles are celebrated at the Estonian Museum of Architecture.) Soviet, neoclassicism, Baroque, and even contemporary technofuturism collide in a perfect contradiction of non-contradictions. Buildings from the thirteenth century land in the shadows of great communist towers like the Sokos Hotel Viru, and Europe’s tallest building in the sixteenth century occupies the same “skyline” as some of the finest exemplars of brutalism.

I’m decently traveled for my age, I like to think, but I’ve never been to another city where the architecture of each building contrasts with the next in an almost predictably unpredictable routine to the same extent as Tallinn—not even the other post-USSR cities I’ve been able to visit. The Rotermann Quarter and its strong clay-like colors have a rich modern feel not all that dissimilar to parts of Grand Rapids, as does the street art sprinkled throughout parts of the city like the Telliskivi Creative City. Other parts, like the area around the iconic Viru Gates, resemble a city something like Prague, and a place like Kalamaja may remind others of the picturesque Amsterdam urban areas.

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