TALLINNSoviet Modernism  ·  1960–1991

Tallinn's old town is a UNESCO site that most visitors never leave. A few tram stops away the city keeps a different inheritance: Linnahall on the waterfront, the memorial terraces at Maarjamäe, and the Lasnamäe housing reached through a trench cut straight into the limestone.

Estonia has been more decisive than its neighbours about removing Soviet monuments from public space — which is why a field of them now lies behind the history museum at Maarjamäe, taken down but not destroyed. Seeing them stacked together, out of the settings they were designed to dominate, is a different experience from finding them still standing in a square.