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VISIBLE CITIES – INVISIBLE CITIES AT HOME IN THE CITY HARRY PYE’s POSTCARD FROM LONDON MY WEB ROCK-MUSIC FROM BUDAPEST AMSTERDAM IS A CITY HUMAN LAYER_TAIPEI PERM. WHERE IS THIS PLACE? WHAT IS THIS PLACE? A HAPPY MORNING VILEN KÜNNAPU’s SHORT INTERVIEW WITH THE POET ANDRUS ELBING SCENES OF PAIDE RADIO-SAUNA |
DUSK
Viru Centre is essentially a time-machine. Something the futurists dreamed about. Glass lifts, escalators, inclined planes and stairs move around tens of thousands of people, thousands of cars, hundreds of buses. There is a bus station under the building, a hotel and shopping centre in the middle. Roof balconies, a house resembling a glass cube, the still unfinished art centre and dozens of technical rooms float above the machine. The whole organism is dominated by a strong element of masculine energy. To counterbalance that energy, architects Vilen Künnapu and Ain Padrik planned a large female figure in the south-eastern corner of the complex. The bronze figure symbolises Love. The authors are Estonian sculptors August Weizenberg and Mare Mikoff. Weizenberg created his version of Venus (or Aphrodite) in the mid-19th century, copying the ancient sculptures in Rome. He produced two marble figures that he called Dusk. A century and a half later sculptor Mare Mikoff made a clay copy of one of them, and on that basis created an independent five-metre bronze figure that today stands in the Viru Centre. Thus the joint genius of an ancient master, Weizenberg and Mikoff has created a mighty figure of a goddess that energetically balances the whole complex. In addition, Dusk is a significant image in the architecture of the new main street of the Tallinn City – Laikmaa Street. From the point of view of figurative art, Dusk forms a unified astronomy with the temporarily vanished Mermaid sculpture by Edgar Viies, Jaak Soans’s Tammsaare and the Taxi hailer in front of Estonia Theatre. The renaissance of sculpture and architecture existing together has begun. |
