The history of utopias is rather long and thorough in the cultural history of Europe and the whole world. Some of them are better known, some less. The backbone of some of them is the idea to organize the society better – e.g. various communistic expectations about how people will live together in harmony and solidarity. Other utopias tend to be more fantastic – their aim has been to guess what the world would be like in fifty, one hundred or five hundred years. And then there are utopias of the third kind that try to unite the two and ask: how to arrange things so that in fifty years the world would be a slightly different place and living in it would be more interesting, colourful, exciting.

 

Jaak Poom’s personal exhibition brings back to mind several ideas that were widespread in Estonian architecture in the 1970ies. In the so-called paper architecture various semi-fantastic utopias were proposed about how a city might be organized so that living in it might become fit for a human being. Above all the ideas emerged from immediate surroundings: one after another several “dormitories” with anonymous architecture and milieu were erected. The dreams of those days, carried also by the spirit of technological progress, attempted to introduce colourful butterflies, black cats and fantastic angles into such environment.

 

Yet the works of Jaak Poom who possesses an amazing visual sense of space, having been executed in vigorous colours, full of detail, slightly giving away their technological background appear to be very much modern. Although the “dormitories” and other such phenomenon seems like part of the past, the superabundance of catalogue houses, the uniformity of interior design magazines and functionalism starting to signify certain taste – all of that serves as background for Jaak Poom for addressing totally different values. His works full of joie de vivre, favouring creativity and admiring the non-conventional city space are surreal, fantastic, symbolic and simply really cool, all at the same time. It is clear that none of those buildings will actually ever be raised. It is clear that no city will ever be built according to Jaak Poom’s wishes. But on one hand one can ask whether it is important to be engaged only in projects that have actual use when it is possible to fantasize and strive towards something that seems impracticable at first sight. And on the other hand the current exhibition makes one ask: doesn’t this city really exist? Or does it already, does right here?