Tartu Downtown Cultural Centre

With a clear purpose—to create gathering spaces that establish a sense of cultural identity within the town’s core—the Tartu Downtown Cultural Centre fills the voids. The design concept begins by considering the footprints of structures past and presents a new form rising from what were the open spaces of those historic ruins. The design respects and preserves the historic old growth trees and essentially turns the built environment inside out.

Purposefully fluid and full of niches and nodes, appendages of all sizes and shapes circumvent old growth trees. They create interior connections and exterior courtyards that celebrate the surroundings and cultivate interaction and reflection in support of the library, art museum, cinema, and event center functions within.

From plan view, the cultural centre’s many limbs, angles, and jogs are reminiscent of another type of matrix, the QR code. Here the voids of historic structures alongside the infilled new spaces represent the code’s many black and white pixels. Collectively they transmit a message that the Tartu Cultural Centre is a world-class Baltic institution.