The twentieth century is a century of expansion of the concept of 
space – it could even be referred to as a century of entropy. Whereas space has been associated with specific, geometrically organised and literally defined areas in a city or interior in earlier Western culture, modern day understandings have expanded to consider space from compositional, psychological and philosophical aspects.

This revolution occurred in urban construction and architecture 
primarily through the concept of free planning that was applied during this century as if to express the new democratic society in which not even city space could succumb to rigid hierarchy.

Psychoanalysts revealed new aspects of the relationship between man and space. Subconscious associations with people’s surroundings joined conscious spatial experience, thus revealing both past and present through archetypes, and going beyond the ordinary boundaries separating life and death.

The slow but determined return of Western philosophy to the ancient teachings of the Far-East have actualised the concept of emptiness as the initial state of space as well as the phenomenological qualities of space, which bring forth the deeper ties between Man and spaces created by Man.

The space age that began during our century and the related sciences have also significantly widened our concept of space, even in terms of the several other spatial concepts created alongside three dimensional space.

The fine arts have also experienced extensive spatial development. 
The fine arts have made their way into the substance surrounding 
people through happenings, performances, art installations and environmental art, thus captivating and transforming it. The 
simultaneous creation of virtual space by computer is paradoxical in regard to the previously mentioned phenomenon. Not to mention that 
the majority of successful architects has moved on to computer aided design, hoping for the birth of an entirely new architecture.

In the context of Estonia, World Wars and political cataclysms have 
had a significant impact, forcibly changing our society, our territory, 
and the size, appearance and population of our cities, in short, our 
entire material culture, throughout the century.

This past decade, however, has been most influenced by factors that followed the re-establishment of national independence: early capitalist development, efforts to join the European Union, and the ideology of general openness, which favours movement and the abandonment of 
the long-desired ideal of a single, steady home, and fosters the 
blurring of national borders. It is ironic that all of this is occurring at 
the end of the century characterised by struggle for national existence and national identity.

Having reached the new paradigms of space, we are now in a situation where the romantic environment of the last century surrounded by orderly but unspoiled nature is becoming a chaotic artificial world without fixed compositional points and readily comprehensible symbols. 
The calm frame of mind of the past has been replaced by restless searching in the sphere of influence of the media where new ideas 
and trends are constantly changing. It is no wonder, then, that we 
have not lived in the era of harmony and peace hoped for in the 19th century, but rather in a century marked by extraordinary wars and violence. This has changed people to such an extent that prophets no longer expect anything good even from the new century and the end 
of the world is increasingly spoken of.

Thus, the goal of this book is to include as much material as possible from the twentieth century, now drawing to a close, that is foremost connected to the spatial arts: architecture, interior architecture and design, fields in which we can find perhaps the most expressive 
examples of change in Man’s perception of space without disregarding information on space as the broadest determining category of man’s 
life and existence. Since many of the previous century’s ideas were applied in the 20th century, reference material has been gathered to reflect the distant past as well as the possible future. This passing century can be defined as a period of change by using perhaps the 
most widespread keyword modernism – no significant creator of space
in this era has managed to get around it.

Not even the undersigned can go without emphasising the most 
gripping pursuit of modernism: to create each new object as something fresh and unique, rejecting tradition and applying new technology, making something new by destroying old myths and symbols with which abstract formations are inevitably actualised and by experimenting with pure form, colour and space. It is no wonder, then, that futurism cultivated similar ideology and preferred war as a grandiose spectacle, 
as opposed to peace. The world wars that brought a great deal of suffering with them can be considered unique technological games of modernism.

Modernism functions more on the level of human reason, and does not particularly care about the soul or body. The urban housing developments of the post-war era best express this attitude. A local example would be the large residential areas of concrete panel buildings that make up the suburbs of Tallinn.

Interior art of the new century will develop from precisely this type of modernistic city and will develop under the influence of virtual space. 
It will carry in itself many other tendencies that you will find in this exhibition. Much that is featured here will have been destroyed during the lifetime of younger generations, because we constantly destroy the old when creating something new. But since the new is often the forgotten old, it would be useful to know how much of that which is being recreated is new and how much of it is old. It would also be 
useful to know whether we are forgetting the natural Course of Life altogether when contrasting the two categorically – that which passes through everything material but also all that is spiritual, and from which all ideas get their beginning, and to which we simply give new names.

Professor Leonhard Lapin
 

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