Monumental art and heritage researcher Anu Soojärv’s opinion on the subject of Linnahall on 01.04.2026 in kultuur.err:
The debate over the fate of Tallinn’s Linnahall shows the paradox of a complex heritage: the building intertwines the Soviet ideological background and the modern spatial experience, which is why there is no simple solution to its future, writes Anu Soojärv.
The controversy over the sinusoids of Linnahall is thus at its peak again. There are still broadly two camps: those who think that the Linnahall is an ugly, decaying mausoleum of the occupying power, the evil spirit in which can only be rid of by demolishing it, and those who consider the Linnahall to be a unique, world-class spatial experience, with the disappearance of which something much more important than the physical body also disappears. The problem is that both are right and this is the main paradox of a complex heritage.
The Soviet layering cannot be denied here, it cannot be made non-existent. The Linnahall was built for the Moscow Olympics, commissioned and financed by the state – clearly, you couldn’t just design it however you wanted. The goal of the Tallinn Olympic facilities was to demonstrate the openness and modernity of the Soviet Union.
For this reason, an important sewage system was built in Tallinn before the Olympics, for example, which is not something to complain about. So the city hall was also to become an ultra-modern and prominent, undoubtedly as monumental a building as possible, following the prescribed spatial program, even in terms of how to direct people’s trajectory from the city to the sea. All of this is and remains a geopolitical inevitability.
In parallel, however, there is another supra-ideological level – the one that the architect, in this case Raine Karp, started with the instructions he received. During the Soviet era, the local architect was above all an interpreter and mediator, and the city hall is a skillful, sensitive and supra-political mediation of what was prescribed by “higher instances” into the local urban space.
Today, the Soviet Union, the country where the city hall was born, has collapsed. Thus, the stratification that binds the building to Soviet ideology is no longer active, but in the case of a complex heritage, it is inevitable that it is still perceived psychologically. What remains is the Linnahall, a unique and outstanding hybrid of architecture and landscape on a global scale, a late-modernist boulder growing organically from the earth’s crust, which flows peacefully from the city center into the sea.
Despite its scale, the Linnahall, with its rising and falling levels and the area surrounding the building, has a much more airy feel than the modern seaside quarters. It is significant that the building has never been unused. When its official activities ended, the city hall began to function as a landscape. And this landscape, the seaside cliff, is actively used every day.
This is where the uniqueness of the Linnahall is expressed, a solution by a capable designer that has long surpassed ideology. Building “something better” in place of the city hall would be like repairing something that is not broken. And in this article I want to leave aside the fact that the city hall is indeed physically quite broken.
So, in the case of the Linnahall, we have two main opposing spatial experiences and two choices: which one do we turn on, which one do we turn off. Do we want to collectively remain on a level that is no longer active, that exists only in our personal semantic interpretation? Or do we prefer – seeing through the political slogans and despite the unstable eastern neighbour – another stratification, existing in the present, which is much more understandable to younger generations and architecturally sensitive people outside Estonia?
Editor: Karmen Rebane