Apartment Building Aiamaja
The 5-story apartment building is situated on the edge of the medieval old town of Tallinn.It is not dominant from the street level, nor does it seem too high in the surrounding context. The dynamic mass of the building is situated in the northern and western side of the plot. In connection with some old historically valuable buildings, it creates an environment of small interconnected units, characteristic to the architectural whole of the old town. Every apartment has a large terrace, bringing private house typology into the very center of the city.
The ground level opens to the street as an active shopping space. The construction of the building is a combination of reinforced concrete and steel frames. The non-supporting walls are finished with natural stone tiles, making thebuilding visually smaller, while alluding to the surrounding stone houses of the old town.The timber-clad terraces and the horizontal surfaces of the overhangs link the apartment block to the neighboring wooden house, while decomposing the buildingŽs volume into a variety of spaces. It is an inner-city landscape of different qualities.
The site is 2009 m2, while the building keeps up to 5500m2.
Since the building is in the core-city it has to be up-to-date - so to exclude the ususal remedies for sustainability, while still keeping with the intention, the ventilation and heating of the building is high-tech. Though expensive, it pays off in the long-run.