Restored 17th century Tallinn bastion to include school sports facilities
Restoration works of the seventeenth-century Skoone Bastion in central Tallinn are reaching their final stages, ending four years of work.
The area is to be set aside for sports and physical education for schools located in the nearby Old Town sports.
The architectural competitive process to convert the zone is to be announced next month.
City of Tallinn chief architect Andro Mänd told "Aktuaalne kaamera": "If we take a look at what is happening here now, how the surroundings of the bastion and this area are being used, not only around Skoone but the whole bastion area – here there is an extremely great potential hidden, which we have not managed to use until now. Now, as a city, we will start moving step by step so that around the Old Town an active green belt would arise, which is not only a park, but is also actively used by the public."
The bastion's walls had become very dilapidated and are being restored, while the bastion's upper area is also to be rejuvenated. The bastion is adjacent to a bus parking lot, mostly used by county buses traveling out of the city.
"This bus parking lot is not a place intended for city residents. Near the top there will mostly be activities connected with movement, such as for carrying out movement classes for downtown schools and as recreational areas for local residents. Of course, there are different ideas here, like ice rink topics and everything else. But right now the first stage is still to create the area under Skoone and a mobility zone here," Mänd went on.
Some nearby schools which do not have their own sports grounds, such as the Vanalinna Hariduskolleegium, the Gustav Adolfi Gümnaasium and the Toomkool, will in the future be able to use the facility, meaning the city can stop renting the sports facilities currently used by the schools, such as those in the nearby Snelli Park.
Head of the City of Tallinn's department of culture and sports Hillar Sein said: "The city currently rents from Snelli, which is in private hands, a stadium for physical or movement classes. It will probably be possible to reduce the volume at Snelli and redirect it here, but that is not the main goal. The main aim is that children would have modern opportunities to conduct movement classes. Schools have a new movement education curriculum, which is significantly different from the physical education lessons we did back in our time at school."
Examples from other countries are to be taken as models, Mänd said, while training opportunities for users of different strengths and needs will be taken into account, in line with the new education curriculum's focus on forming lifelong exercise habits rather than on result-based goals.
"We have estimated that the number of children who could conduct their exercise classes here is in the thousands. In designing this area we certainly also wish to consider people with movement disabilities and/or older people, so that they would also have their own opportunities here in the form of equipment or spatial interventions," Sein added.
The Skoone Bastion, known in Estonian as Rannamägi, was one of the most formidable defensive structures erected at a time when Estonia was under Swedish rule, starting from the late 16th Century until the Great Northern War of the early 18th Century.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Johanna Alvin
Source: "Aktuaalne kaamera"
