In wintertime, the Baltic Sea slows to a thin and brackish broth, the sky is dark by afternoon, and the lights are low in the old towers of Tallinn, Vilnius, and Riga. Collars are turned against cold and growing winds from the bitter east.
Inside it’s warm. There’s a hothouse of ideas across the Baltic region, lit with stylish new lamps, bold textiles, beautiful glass, and brash architecture. It’s driven by a set of energetic young designers and architects coming into their own in the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Legacies of the Bolshevik empire crashing to the ground, sparking chaos and cowboy capitalism, are receding, revealing new dialectics. Spend any time talking to the youth brigade here and they’ll be the first to describe tough obstacles, social and aesthetic alike. But it’s also easy to see that the Baltics are close to realizing trendsetting potential for design in Eastern Europe. There’s poverty here, but among designers in all three countries the thinking and vision feel free and fun. Even as the cold northern winter wraps a freezing cloak over the region into the new year, it’s worth watching closely.
Not long ago a bright harvest moon rose over the Estonian capital of Tallinn, kicking off a yearlong design festival and celebration full of late nights, television specials, parties, store openings, and discussions. “That’s one of the guys who is going to change the world,” Martin Pärn says with a wink, pointing to thin, lanky Pent Talvet, who happens to be walking down the same bustling street in downtown Tallinn. Pärn is the 35-year-old head of Tallinn’s Estonian Academy of Arts product design department and is himself a well-known furniture designer. “You’re bringing the revolution, right?” he says to Talvet, one of his students. “I hope so,” Talvet says with a looping grin. “Hope so?! You can’t hope for the revolution,” replies Pärn. “You have to say yes!”
Pärn’s joking. Sort of. But this kind of skepticism and modesty are typical around town, as are a close dedication to craft, careful attention to style, and palpable excitement about new possibilities. After economic chaos in the wake of Soviet collapse, factories are getting more numerous and dependable, and starting to engage designers—a necessity if raw talent is going to develop into something more. “For 50 years it was a Potemkin village here,” says Matti Õunapuu, a friendly rock of a man whose many design achievements include sleek black Packline car-top ski cases and the hurriedly erected 1980 Olympics regatta site, its torch still sitting proud near Tallinn’s beach. “We take this very seriously now.”
Although there are repeated threads and distinct local media and materials, there is no signature local style boxed and ready for export. It’s more complex than that. The “Baltics” are something of a Soviet construction; they’re forged together because of recent history, not because of shared consciousness. With spotty trains and narrow roads, it takes a long time to get around the area. But, of course, the Baltics are real—psychically and physically—and a natural market for ideas. It makes more sense to think of the region as a crossroads linked by similar and simultaneous experience—one that spent the past decade defining what it is not. The region, which started from zero, is now more or less broadband wired, looks to the future, and is beginning to see real results.
It has also a design atmosphere marked by youth; sure, some veterans are going strong like Õunapuu and furniture maker Maile Grünberg—who’s got a great mod take on bent plywood veneer. Even Bruno Tomberg, perhaps the region’s premier design thinker and founder of the first contemporary design school in the Soviet Union in the late ’60s, wryly calls himself a relic. “I’m retired,” he says with a laugh. Most designers here are in their 30s and running their own show. Triin Ojari, editor-in-chief of Estonia’s main architectural journal, Maja, is 32; Kai Lobjakas, curator of the local design museum, is 31, as is Karin Paulus, design critic of the influential weekly Eesti Ekspress. Everyone goes to the local art academy and there are opportunities waiting for graduates. All
of this has an impact on style, what gets made, and what it will look like.
“We like simple and minimalistic things,” says Ilona Gurjanova, a graphic artist whose work was once scrutinized by Communist Party art bosses for illegal national colors. “We are harmonic there.” True enough, agrees Tarmo Luisk, a mischievous 36-year-old designer best known for his chic, industrial lamp making. “But we’re not Finns. For Finns, Estonians are too crazy,” he says. As someone who once hijacked a show opening with an impromptu karaoke session, he’s got a point.
It takes two days to drive the 400 miles south from Tallinn to raw, dusty Vilnius, stopping at the more staid Latvian capital, Riga. Both places have a very different feel but share this sense of experimentation. It’s a little harder to hear about the scene in Riga (at least for this writer, perhaps because everyone seemed to be on holiday at the same time), but the architecture in both the small urban center and further afield is gaining regional notice, especially from the likes of the Sarma & Norde, Arhitektonika, and Arhis architecture and design studios. And not everything Latvian is practical and calm: Interior designer Agris Dzilna, for instance, is known for his dramatic fire-sculpture performance pieces with Akciju Sabiedriba, of the Action Society.
In Lithuania, the new design base gathers in galleries and at a studio/store in Vilnius called Contraforma. “A lot of new companies here are looking for an identity. They’re trying to use design now for that purpose,” says furniture designer Darius Cekanauskas. When 34-year-old furniture designer Nauris Kalinauskas started Contraforma with his partner, Egle Opeikiene, it was to recognize and encourage new materials and thinking, and to focus this growing energy. Kalinauskas explains, “Basically, we want to help young designers to communicate with manufacturers, to find the best way to present progressive design projects in the world.”
What’s happening across this chilly region, marked with pine, birch, sea, and snow is that many young voices are gaining sure footing at once and are able to get products and buildings made.
But more important than forging rules for a regional look is that there’s more work than dogma. “Maybe it’s better that there are no father figures, no models here,” Karin Paulus says. “It’s more free.” That could have something to do with the reception given to Tallinn’s new landmark, the Kumu Art Museum, designed by Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori. On the one hand, it’s a striking affair, a sleek, impressive, and important building; on the other, the local take is that it’s merely okay. “It uses limestone and copper, local materials, classical shapes,” Triin Ojari says. “It doesn’t say anything new.”
