Welcome on Wednesday 15th November 2023, 5–7pm at PUBLICS, Helsinki as part of our Festival of Books and Voices we will celebrate the launch of Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders, 1960s to 1980s

The event will be led by Indrek Sirkel from Lugemik Publishing.

Andres Kurg will present the book and exhibition and be in discussion with Kristo Vesikansa.

Forecast and Fantasy stages a meeting point for scientific predictions and futuristic fantasies that were manifested in architecture and art from the 1960s to the 1980s. The works gathered here emerged from the new technological reality that followed the Second World War, and took it along unexpected paths: foreseeing the replacement of work with games and collective pleasures in computerised societies, turning away from the overarching machine logic and replacing it with myths and romantic ideas of the human being, or looking for traces of other civilizations from space, instead of conquering it. Focusing on Eastern European conceptual architecture and drawing it together with selected parallels from the West, the book presents a new reading of the ‘postmodern turn’. It also recontextualises phenomena such as ‘paper architecture’, constructivist aesthetics and geometric abstractionism.

The book includes 799 color and black and white illustrations from among others the following architects and artists: Kirmo Mikkola, Hardijs Lediņš, Jozef Jankovič, Zdeněk Hölzel, Jan Kerel, László Rajk, Gábor Bachman, Yuri Avvakumov, Totan Kuzembaev, Vilen Künnapu, Ain Padrik, Mari Kurismaa, Toomas Rein, Kai Koppel, István B. Gellér, Zoltán Gyertyános, Predrag Ristić, Stefan Müller, Constantin Flondor, Avo-Himm Looveer, Tibor Gáyor, Anna Halprin, Tõnis Vint, Leonhard Lapin, Stano Filko, Alessandro Poli, Jüri Okas, Alexander Brodsky & Ilya Utkin, Mare Vint, Sirje Runge, János Sugár. The publication also features work by collectives DNA, Archizoom Associati, NER, Archigram, OHO, Dvizhenie, Superstudio, and materials from magazines and publishing projects Arkkitehti, Japan Architect, Archigram, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Bercsényi 28-30, and Ehituskunst.

Andres Kurg, Mari Laanemets
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders, 1960s to 1980s
Lugemik & Estonian Museum of Architecture, 2023
400 pp with 799 color and bw illustrations
Published on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name at the Estonian Museum of Architecture, 20 January – 30 April 2023.

Bios

Andres Kurg is an architectural historian and Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) in Tallinn.

Kristo Vesikansa is an architect and the Editor-in-Chief of the Finnish Architectural Review. His professional experience consists of restoration projects, teaching and research.

Mari Laanemets is an art historian and a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) in Tallinn.