03.05. — 14.05.2011
Arhitektuuri- ja disainigalerii (Pärnu mnt 6, Tallinn)

Press release

On May 3rd-14th, the Design and Architecture Gallery presents an exhibition of models by Salto architecture office, celebrating the occasion of Salto’s seven years in business. For Salto partners Maarja Kask, Karli Luik and Ralf Lõoke, last seven years have meant about seventy designs and competition entries, twenty two of which have found their way to the exhibition. The chosen ones represent the most important projects ranging from housing to urban plannig, from the initial versioon of Estonian Road Museum to the recently opened Straw theatre. A lot of them are models for competition entries but there are also work models displaying the design process, as well as pure representation models.

Salto is one of the most renowned contemporary architecture offices in Estonia that has successfully participated in a number of open and invited competitions and received several honourable annual awards like the ones of the Estonian Culture Endowment and the Estonian Ministry of Culture. The most acknowledged projects have been Sõmeru Community Centre, Estonian Road Museum, Sports hall for the Estonian University of Life Sciences, and the Gas Pipe, the Estonian exhibition at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale – a set of projects with very different characteristics showing that Salto has no distinct aesthetic handwriting, but rather are the architects defining the relationship of space, environment and the user anew for each design. With a noticeable amount of projects in non-urban environments, Salto has been termed the elaborator of local organic tradition as well as a smart combiner of pragmatics and playfulness. In any case, the main emphasis is on three-dimensional spatial experience, whence the preference of models as the medium of representation. On one hand, the model is the user-friendliest medium – simple, attractive, emotional and fairly realistic. On the other hand, the model is the best way to convey the arhcitects’ own ideas and conceptions of a project – a scaled-down ideal world. Thus the exhibition of Salto’s architectural models is a case for a necessary self-reflection as well as an attempt to propagate architecture and make the conceptions and the design process easier to comprehend.

Opening: 05.05.2011 / 20:00

(Photos by Vahur Puik)