Merilin Kaup

Project Location
Tallinn, Estonia

Topic 
Utopia Formal Experimentation, New Ways of Living 

Program 
Collective housing Infill, Social 

Study of Everyday Life, Utopian Dreaming and Bodily Experience 

“Practical Utopias” is a study of everyday life, utopian dreaming, everyday aesthetics and bodily experience. Questioning the nuclear-family-based model of life and the accompanying spatial typology, the thesis also challenges normative understanding of bodily existence and movement, which dominates our daily spaces. 

Why do we live the way we do? A life model that developed around the Industrial Revolution, is still so widespread that it may appear to be biological in nature. In addition to heteronormative and chrononormative notions, a normative understanding of bodily existence and movement dominates the everyday spaces. According to evolutionary biologists, the defining characteristics of humans would never have evolved if we had lived for millions of years in conditions as monotonous and unchallenging as the space that surrounds us today. The spaces we live in shape us and make us internalize assumptions about how everyday life “is done”. Thus, we need more different representations of home and everyday life. 

These thoughts led me to utopian dreaming as a means to create alternative visions of home and co-habitation. Is the concept of utopia too infected with negative connotations, or can it even today be used to refer to dreaming about different everyday life? Based on Ernst Bloch's notion of concrete utopia, I propose the concept of grassroots utopia – a kind of utopia that springs from the grassroots and represents one specific collective's dreams about its own future. I believe it is important to imagine as many different hyper-local visions of alternative presents and futures, as possible, while avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions. The work concludes with an archipelagic vision of collective living in the center of Tallinn for a loosely defined group of architects, artists, builders, junk collectors, bricoleurs. Not an intentional community, but rather a collective of individuals. The imaginary home-archipelago consists of small ascetic huts scattered in the center of Tallinn, in which various everyday activities take place. The center of the archipelago is The House of Day, a bigger building situated between soviet era garages. It is surrounded by glass towers, making it look like a horizontal sky-skraper between the vertical ones.The House of Day is a workshop and kitchen, a mother house where all the other little huts are built and then carried around the city and planted into its cavities like parasites. When the huts finish their life cycle, they will be brought back to the mother house, dismantled and reused or burned in a large furnace. The home-archipelago is characterized by constant change, development and regression, construction and demolition. This thesis is on the thin line between speculation and seriousness. The choice of sites is critique towards current socio-economic conditions, in which only certain types of development pass in a central area like this, resulting in socially and aesthetically homogenic environments. The imagined buildings are tactical micro-interventions, not a strategic attempt to find objectively the best solution for these places.