Seen from the water, Tallinn presents the skyline of a Hanseatic merchant town. During the Soviet period, most of the seafront was a restricted military zone, leaving the harbour as one of the few places where the city and the sea could meet. Even Linnahall, the vast concrete venue built for the sailing events of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, was positioned in part to preserve the view of the old town for ships approaching the harbour. For half a century, Tallinn grew away from the water that had made it a trading city, so when independence was restored in 1991, some of the capital's most valuable land was also among the least familiar to its inhabitants.
Tallinn's recent architecture is largely an architecture of reconnection. The city has been reopening what was cut off and adapting what lost its purpose, while building new structures where the boundaries between city, infrastructure and landscape are still being negotiated. The factories around the medieval centre, from Rotermann's mills near the port to the submarine yards at Noblessner, had lost their original purpose. Their gradual conversion has since become one of the defining stories of contemporary Tallinn. Much of this architecture is deliberately quiet, deriving its impact from the way old structures, new uses and the waterfront have been brought back into the life of the city.
