Soviet Estonian Architects’ Travels During the USSR. The Case of Mart Port

Abstract

During the Soviet period, most Estonians couldn't travel abroad, but some
professions, like architects, had better opportunities. Such architects
were Dmitri Bruns and Mart Port. Port is known to have made more than
thirty trips abroad. Alongside his work as an architect, urban planner and
high-ranking administrator, he was also a university teacher at the archi-
tecture department of the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR. Port was
also one of the most active writers on architecture in his time. In 1966
he had published a travel book about England in which he shared his
impressions of the Sixth Congress of the International Union of Architects
held in London in 1961. It is the only architect’s travel book published in
Soviet Estonia. In this article I give an overview of Port’s travels abroad
and discuss how he represented them in his writings, and to what extent
might they have influenced his work.

Keywords
Mart Port — Soviet Estonia — Architecture — Travel — Association
of Architects — USSR

Introduction

While most Estonians were never able to travel abroad during the Soviet
period, there were some professions that were somewhat better placed to
travel. One such profession was that of the architect (Gorsuch 2006). Most
architects made up to three trips during three decades (Jagodin 2014). Esto-
nian historian Oliver Pagel (2016) has pointed out that the Soviet Union
rarely allowed blue-collar workers or country-dwellers to go on tourist
trips. Communication with the outside world was entrusted to people with
higher incomes from the city, who belonged to a higher social class or
represented a prominent sphere of life (such as architects, engineers, edu-
cators, doctors and senior officials). Soviet tourists had to promote the in-
ternational image of the USSR and be able to develop a conversation with
educated Westerners.

This privileged status was in keeping with the historical mobility of the
architectural profession. Getting to know important buildings on site has
traditionally been part of the quest for architectural excellence. This was
also the case during the Cold War, both in the East and in the West. From
the point of view of socialist modernisation, architecture was seen as a
central ideological cultural phenomenon (Belogolovsky 2014). This meant
that Moscow was highly interested in both learning from others and pro-
moting its own building activities elsewhere. As a result, around two hun-
dred Estonian architects managed to make at least one or two trips outside
the Soviet Union between the 1960s and the late 1980s (Jagodin 2014).
While trips within the Soviet Union (and sometimes in other socialist
countries) were organised by the Soviet Estonian Association of Archi-
tects (SEAA), trips outside of the Soviet Union were arranged by the central Union of Architects of the USSR where the groups were formed from
members of all Soviet countries (Jagodin 2014). For each trip, Moscow
allocated a few places to each of the Soviet republic, which were then
distributed by lottery or other means. One can assume that these opportuni-
ties were more or less democratically distributed. But alongside them were
some ‘more equal’ architects who travelled a lot more than others. They
were the administrative and ideological leaders of the architectural wor-
ld, who when travelling or attending various conventions, seminars and
congresses had a representative role on behalf of the entire Soviet Union.
From Estonia, such men were Dmitri Bruns, the long-time chief architect
of Tallinn, and Mart Port (1922-2012), the long-serving head of the SEAA.
Port is known to have made more than 30 trips abroad. In this article I give
an overview of Port’s travels abroad and discuss how he represented them
in his writings, and to what extent might they have influenced his work.

For over two decades Port had a monopoly on power in the Estonian archi-
tectural field. He headed the SEAA from 1955 to 1979 and between 1961
and 1989 he was the leading architect at Eesti Projekt – the central state
design institute where all grand urban development plans were created and
all major public buildings designed (Ojari 2012). Alongside his work as
an architect, urban planner and high-ranking administrator, he was also a
university teacher serving as a part-time associate professor and later as
a professor at the architecture department of the State Art Institute of the
Estonian SSR. Port was also one of the most active writers on architecture
in his time. He published around a hundred articles in Estonian newspa-
pers and specialist journals, as well as dozens in major Russian-language
Union-wide publications. Interviews with him often appeared in the press.
He was also a respected speaker on television and radio: the Estonian Pu-
blic Broadcasting digital archive contains sixty-seven broadcasts with his
participation, although the number of undigitised broadcasts is probably
larger. Port also published two books. In 1983 his overview of Soviet Esto-
nian architecture was published separately in Estonian, German, Russian
and English language (Port 1983). Seventeen years earlier he had publi-
shed a travel book about England (Port 1966) in which he shared his im-
pressions of the Sixth Congress of the International Union of Architects
(UIA) held in London in 1961. Besides the architectural theme, the book
introduced all fields of life in Britain in a popular format to a wider audien-
ce. It is the only architect’s travel book published in Soviet Estonia.

I begin this article with a discussion of Mart Port’s life and work and then
analyse his travels within the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc and capitalist
Western Europe. As a bibliographical note, it should be pointed out that
this is a scarcely researched topic and much of the discussion here evolves
from Karen Jagodin’s (2014) master’s thesis and the subsequent exhibi-
tion Architect’s Gaze. Bringing the West Home at the Estonian Museum
of Architecture (14.02-06.04.2025). As primary resources more than 100
articles by Port and interviews or reportages involving him were consulted.
Additionally I made use of Port’s personal files kept in the archive of the
Estonian Academy of Arts and the Estonian Museum of Architecture.

Biographical overview

Mart Port was born on the 4th of January 1922 in Pärnu, in the family of
a secondary school teacher. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to
Tartu, where his father Jaan Port found a job at the Institute of Botany, Uni-
versity of Tartu, first as a laboratory assistant, later as an assistant. Along-
side the daily work as a gardener at the Tartu Botanical Garden his father
studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences where he de-
fended his doctoral dissertation in botany in 1932. Two aspects of his fa-
ther’s professional influences on Mart Port’s career have been highlighted.
Firstly, the ever-present flora in his youth might have directed him to bear
in mind the importance of greenery in large-scale urban projects (Metspalu
2019). Secondly, it has been suggested that his father’s affinity to power
may have stayed with Port – his father was one of the central ideologues
of the nationwide home improvement campaign initiated by the Estonian
president in the 1930s (Kalm 2012).

In 1929 Port entered elementary school and graduated from Tartu Boys
High School in 1940. During high school summer breaks he worked as a
railwayman, as a technician and on a ship as a machinist’s assistant. Port
has said that by the age of fifteen he had already been to Scotland (Veen-
re 2012). One could assume that this kind of early insight into the world
fostered a passion for travel and a sense that the world was open to him
throughout his life.

Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940. A few months
later Port started his studies at Tallinn Polytechnic Institute. His studies
were interrupted by Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union – in June 1941
he joined the Red Army as a conscript. While his homeland went into the
hands of Germany he was receiving combat training near the town of Ka-
zan and for a short time worked as an engineer in the Chelyabinsk Tank
Factory as part of the labour battalion. Port’s view of life and architecture
was pragmatic and calculated – his engineering practice and technical stu-
dies played a role in this.

After the foundation of national military formations, Port served in the Red
Army and from 1942 he took part in the battles of the Second World War
on the Kalinin, 2nd Baltic and Leningrad Fronts. He finished the war as an
lieutenant and was awarded a medal for his involvement in the Battle of
Velikiye Luki and the liberation of the Estonian SSR. Port’s impeccable
wartime CV ensured him a certain immunity in the Soviet system. Since
a career in the Soviet Union could be hampered by an unsuitable family
background his rise to prominence was not so obvious. Perhaps the fact
that Jaan Port was disabled at home from the beginning of the war and died
in 1950 helped to wash away this potential ideological taint.

After demobilisation in 1945 he continued his studies at Tallinn Polytech-
nic Institute. Simultaneously with his studies, he worked for a publishing
house illustrating books and producing diagrams and mechanical drawin-
gs. Port became an accomplished illustrator – he used twenty-one of his
own caricatures and architectural drawings to complement his book on
England. Caricature had a special position in the Soviet system – on the
one hand it was there to ridicule the negative aspects of capitalism, but on
the other, such drawings could also be provocative against the Soviet way
of life. From the point of view of the architect’s profession, his caricature
talent lay in his ability to quickly capture the essence of the situation, the
most important structural element either at the level of the city, buildings
or human relations.

He graduated with honours in 1950 and started working at Eesti Projekt,
first as an architect, then as a senior architect, then as the chief architect of
projects, and from the early 1960s as the chief architect of the institute. His
early career is marred by the fact that during the Stalinist hunt for scapego-
ats to blame for bourgeois nationalism, he fiercely attacked one of the most
important Estonian architects of the early 20th century, Edgar Johan Kuu-
sik. Kuusik, who had already been subject to persecution – his wife had
been deported to Siberia in 1945 – was now expelled from the Associationof Architects. It was an act that was particularly difficult to forgive for the
young architects of the 1970s and one that is still not forgotten today – for
example, architectural historian Mart Kalm mentioned it in his obituary for
Port (Kalm 2012).

In 1953 Port was elected vice-chairman of the Board of the SEAA and in
1955 Chairman of the Board, a position which he held until 1979 when he
was famously overthrown by younger colleagues who held him responsi-
ble for the bureaucratisation of architecture and the stagnation of public
space. Port was elected as a member of the Board of the Union of Archi-
tects of the USSR in 1955, and as a member of the Presidium of the Board
in 1961. That year he also started working as an assistant professor in the
Department of Architecture at the Tallinn State Art Institute. Furthermore,
he was a long-time member of the editorial board of the magazine «Ehitus
ja arhitektuur» (Construction and Architecture) and the cultural newspa-
per «Sirp ja Vasar» (Hammer and Sicle). In addition to Estonian-language
architectural criticism, he actively published “architectural propaganda”
– this is how the popularisation of architecture was called at that time – in
major Russian-language newspapers. On the occasion of the 50th anniver-
sary of the newspaper «Pravda» in 1962, he was awarded the Order of
Honour of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for his active
contribution to the development of Soviet journalism.

Mart Port was the only architect in Soviet Estonia to be awarded the tit-
le of People’s Architect of the Soviet Union (Kurg 2009)2. When he was
awarded the title an anonymous young colleague praised him by saying
that «Mart Port has long since become synonymous with Estonian archi-
tecture» (Noor Kolleeg 1978). By then, Port had achieved all that could
be achieved in the institutional field. Yet, for the more subversive intelli-
gentsia, the term “honorary” signified an anecdotal prefix or even a swe-
ar word, and for many radically-minded architects Mart Port represented
everything unpleasant about embracing the Soviet occupation. Port co-au-
thored two hundred and fourteen architectural projects. Most of them were
realised and nearly half of them were “type” projects which were repeated
in different places.

As a member of collective he designed important high-rise buildings of
Tallinn: the headquarters of the Communist Party (now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the Viru Hotel and the House of Designers (Ojari 2012).
The fact that one man directed both architectural education and urban plan-
ning for almost forty years, and was the chairman of the Architects Asso-
ciation for twenty-five years, shows how personality-centred and stubborn
was the power apparatus of the time. In this context the fact that Mart Port
was not a member of the Communist Party was an exception that proved
the rule – the Soviet state was not run by law, but men (Lewin 2005).

A few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, architect and artist
Leonhard Lapin published an article in which he bluntly summarised the
1970s in Estonian architects as young Estonian architects vs. Mart Port:
«The official architectural life of Soviet Estonia was dictatorially ruled by
the gold-mouthed Mart Port, who, both in his words and cartoons, created
beautiful visions of the triumph of communism in ideal cities of the future
with rushing people and cars» (Trapeež 1991). Opponents would call him
a non-partisan party member. But the image of Port as a power-hungry
leader during the Soviet era did not last long. Over the years, emotions
dissipated, and as generations changed, his legacy has been reconsidered
from different perspectives. Already in 1999, architectural historian Triin
Ojari interpreted his oeuvre outside of the trauma narrative and called for
an analysis of Soviet-era urban planning in the broader context of the 20th
century modernisation processes (Ojari 1999). The media also continued
to be interested in him because his opinions were expressed explicitly and
he looked at everyday life from a distinctive perspective (Paulus 2004). If
he once criticised the inflexibility of the Soviet construction system, now
he condemned the narrow-mindedness of planning based on private capi-
tal and the lack of a central authority protecting the interests of the people
(Ojari 2012).

Mart Port’s travels

In 1958 Port became a member of the Estonian Society for the Develop-
ment of Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries. This asso-
ciation was subordinate to a All-Soviet organisation in Moscow, which had
been in operation for some twenty years. The association had its subor-
dinate USSR-Finland Friendship Society, which in turn had an Estonian
SSR-Finland branch, of which Port was also a member. This gives one
explanation why or how Port travelled so often.

Together with the Society for the Development of Cultural Ties with
Estonians Abroad the aforementioned society published its own weekly
newspaper «Kodumaa» (Homeland) from 1958 to 1991. The newspaper
disseminated Soviet propaganda among Estonians living abroad, bringing
weekly news of how one or other expat had decided to move back to Esto-
nia or how the residents of the Estonian SSR were able to travel freely
around the world. Mart Port’s articles or stories related to him appeared
regularly in the newspaper (Port 1963, 1968, 1975, 1985; Raudsepp 1972).
Estonian communities in exile were openly critical about the society and
its newspaper. One emigre newspapers put it bluntly: «The society has
been operating in the Soviet Union for a few decades and it has long been
known that it performs intelligence and surveillance functions abroad and
monitors foreigners entering the Soviet Union» (“Demobiliseeritud pu-
nasõdurid jäävad Eestisse” 1960).

Since the KGB managed to either destroy or transfer to Russia the Soviet
secret police archives concerning Estonia, it is exceedingly difficult or im-
possible to say how closely Port was involved with foreign intelligence and the secret police and to what extent he had to report on his Estonian
colleagues or Estonians abroad (Leivat 2016). Since we have no docu-
mentary basis for such a suspicion, it must be set aside. In chronological
order Mart Port’s files show that he made the following trips outside of the
Soviet Union:

1957 Finland (tourism), Sweden (tourism) and the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) (tourism)
1958 Belgium (work trip), Czechoslovakia (tourism)
1959 Czechoslovakia
1961 United Kingdom (delegate), Italy (work trip), Yugoslavia
1963 Poland (tourism), Czechoslovakia (work trip), Hungary (tourism)
1964 Finland (tourism)
1966 GDR (delegate), Sweden (work trip)
1967 Finland (work trip)
1968 GDR (delegate), Finland (work trip)
1969 GDR
1970 GDR (delegate)
1972 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) (work trip), Finland (tourism)
1973 GDR (three different occasions) (delegate), Hungary (work trip)
1974 GDR
1975 Hungary, Yugoslavia, Spain (delegate)
1987 FRG (delegate), GDR (delegate)
1988 Hungary (work trip)

A trip marked “tourism” typically meant a group holiday organised by the
Soviet Association of Architects (SAA) for which every Soviet republic
was allocated one or two spots. Moscow would send the information to
each republic where the local architects’ association would choose the na-
mes who were sent to Moscow for acceptance. The itinerary of these trips,
the sights to be visited, visits to architectural offices, hotels and places to
eat were organised by SAA, but all the costs were covered by the travellers
themselves. It was a rather expensive pleasure that few could afford. As
can be seen, Port only went on tourist trips to the socialist countries and
to Finland and Sweden which were cheaper because of their proximity. As
a comparison, architect Raine Karp remembers his three-week trip to the
United States in 1974 costing one thousand roubles, while his own salary
was 90 roubles a month. Thus the journey cost him a full year’s salary
(Karp 2025). According to Karp he could afford such an expenditure only
because he lived with his parents and had kept all his expenses to a mini-
mum.

Port visited most actively East Germany (ten trips reported), followed by
Finland (five). There is no information on Port’s foreign travel between
1976 and 1986 (except for a reference to a conference paper presented in
Athens between 1975 and 1980). This does not mean that he did not travel
in those years, but for some reason either Port himself did not record the
trips or the administrator lost interest in entering such data. According to
Karen Jagodin (2025), many architects have incomplete records of their
foreign travel. In 1979 Port lost his position as head of the SEAA which
meant a reduction in the number of representative trips abroad which were
paid by the government. But that must have not been a reason enough for
no travel at all, as he was still high on the list in Moscow and continued to
head the most important design institute in the Estonian SSR. The travels labelled as “delegate” meant that he went abroad as a representative of
Soviet Estonia or Soviet Union to, for example, attend a congress.

Travels within the Soviet Union

Although the Soviet Union with its sixteen republics was one country, a
permit was required to travel within the Soviet Union. Obtaining one was
usually not difficult (Jagodin 2014). Researching and understanding Esto-
nian architects’ travels and exchange of ideas within the Soviet Union is
more challenging than the topic of foreign travels. Similar to visual art,
history of Estonian architecture is directed towards the West and local de-
velopments have been viewed against the backdrop of trans-Atlantic ten-
dencies. On the one hand, this is understandable, because despite of its
metropolitan status, the cultural role model of Moscow was minimal for
Estonian art and architecture. Also in the memoirs by architects who lived
during the Soviet period, Moscow is commonly presented as a negative
place of no interest.

For example, Raine Karp has manifested that everything related to Russia
made him so disgusted that he had no desire to visit Moscow or Leningrad
voluntarily: he only did so in connection with foreign trips (flights started
from Moscow) or on a couple of occasions to get signatures for design
projects (Karp 2025). If we exclude the impact of Russian constructivi-
sm for the young architects of the 1970s, it is challenging to point out
(voluntary) influences from Russia on Estonian architecture. On the other
hand, such a derogatory and selective view on Moscow and Russian cultu-
re conceals how active was the actual relationship of the Estonian cultural
field with other Soviet republics and especially its political and ideological
centre, Moscow. In 1970, seven million people lived in the capital of the
Soviet Union, and this number grew steadily by about a million inhabitants
over a ten-year period during the Soviet period (Vodarsky 1993).

Moscow represented academic and technological might and was the epi-
centre of international communication which no doubt attracted and drew
thousands of technocrats to its opportunities. Work meetings, national and
international congresses also sent Mart Port to Moscow. Since no records
were kept of intra-Soviet travels this in the personal files of the Associa-
tion of Architects, it is unclear how many times he did so exactly. Port was
elected a member of the Board of the Union of Soviet Architects in 1955
and a member of the Presidium of the Board in 1961, which meant very
close contact with colleagues in Moscow. It also brought obligatory par-
ticipation in the architectural life of other Soviet republics like attending
congresses or participating in the jury work of competitions. For example,
it is known that Port attended work-related events in Georgia in 1962 and
1972, Uzbekistan in 1971, Lithuania 1974 and Azerbaijan in 1984 (“Kes?
Kus? Mis?” 1962b; “Oli ja on” 1971a; “Oli ja on” 1974b; “Arhitektide
Liidus” 1972; “Arhitektide Liidus” 1984).

In 1958, the 5th Congress of UIA was held in Moscow. Port attended and
later published an article about it in the Soviet Estonian cultural weekly
(Port 1958). Attending this congress and getting a taste of international
networking gave him a direction for the following decades. Port noted in
his article, delegates from forty-four countries attended the meeting with
eight hundred of them from capitalist countries and three hundred from the
socialist bloc. The leitmotif of the conference was the statistical verdict
that if the population of the world continues to grow by one billion in every
twenty-five years, then it will be necessary to build 5,000 new cities for
200,000 inhabitants every quarter a century. Such a sociological perspecti-
ve and urban planning imperative became Port’s main theme both as an
architect and architecture writer.

It was customary for local newspapers (“Kes? Kus? Mis?” 1962a; “Arhi-
tektide Liidus” 1965; “Arhitektide Liidus” 1972) to report about Union-wi-
de gatherings of architects in Moscow (Port 1965b). Sometimes Port repre-
sented Estonia alone, but occasionally the Estonian delegation was larger.
For example, at the Sixth Congress of Architects of the USSR, held in
the Kremlin’s Grand Palace in November 1975, Port was joined by the
chief architect of Tallinn, Dmitri Bruns, the head of the architecture depart-
ment of the Estonian State Institute of Art, Prof. Helmut Oruvee, the Chief
Architect of the State Design Institute Eesti Maaehitusprojekt (Estonian
Rural Construction Project) Boris Mirov and architects Valve Pormeister,
Raal Kivi, Paul Madalik, Toomas Rein, Irina Raud and Valentin Zilbert.
(“Oli ja on” 1975b) The content and form of these meetings varied. Some
were more formal, others more substantive and academic.

For example, while preparing for the 1975 UIA Congress in Madrid, Mo-
scow held an All-Union “creative discussion” to set forth the talking points
agreed by the architects from the Soviet Union (“Oli ja on” 1974b). A few
months later, Port and the Vice-Chairman of the Union of Estonian Soviet
Architects, Voldemar Herkel, were back in Moscow for the IX Joint Ple-
num of the State Committee for Civil Engineering and Architecture and
the Board of the Union of Soviet Architects, where the construction of
public buildings according to standard designs was discussed (“Oli ja on”
1975a). Architect Ülo Stöör has recalled that when he was in Moscow in
1970 for the Congress of the Union of Architects of the USSR, one of the
opening speeches was given by Mart Port, who earned a rapturous applau-
se from the entire hall after his very first sentence.

He had manifested that «if the question of war and peace were not the most
important point of discussion in the world, it would be the question of ar-
chitecture» (Stöör 2025). In the Soviet Union, where people were used to
Leonid Brezhnev’s four-hour speeches and the subsequent fifteen minutes
long applauses, the meaning of such speeches and the reactions that fol-
lowed were a ritualised practice (Yurchak 2005). Such public utterances
repeated well-known truths, while at the same time it was a spectacle in-
volving the entire society.

It formed a performance against the backdrop of which actual decisions
were taken. It is an inescapable fact that whatever Port and other Estonian
architects took part in Moscow, their participation confirmed the supre-
macy of Moscow’s political rule. On the other hand, Estonian architects
tried to resist Moscow’s colonising, sovietising and Russifying practices
through individual and collective strategies by using a wide variety of
methods. The general opinion is that Port, too, tried to play cat-and-mou-
se with Moscow (Kalm 2012), but fared much worse than, for example,
his counterparts in Lithuania, where architects retained moral and actual
power over construction (Drėmaitė and Maciuika 2020). Reading Port’s
articles and speeches, it is challenging to conclude what his exact political
agenda was. On the one hand, Port was incessantly and sharply critical of
the monotony of Soviet cities (Port 1958), of the sloppiness of construction
(Port 1961) and of the poor quality of materials (“Vanad linnad uuenevad”
1968).

On the other hand, until the end of his life, he seemed to believe in the hu-
manist project of socialism (not to be confused with Soviet rule), believing
that private property was not beneficial to urban planning and that building
and real estate management should be a state monopoly (Port 1961). He
was by no means a die-hard communist, but as a technocrat3 seemed to
genuinely believe in socialist modernisation and architecture’s leading role
in making the world a better place (Port 1964). Even as late as 1985 he did
not hesitate to quote several lines from Leonid Brezhnev, which must have
made colleagues scratch their heads. Port concluded this very article with
the demanding words:

«In the Soviet Union and other socialist countries the ultimate goal of ar-
chitectural design and construction is to solve major social problems. And
this in the interests of all segments of the population on an equal basis (Port
1985)».

Learning from the Eastern bloc

In 1957, Mart Port received the first prize at the All-Union Young Archi-
tects Competition in Moscow, the prize of which was a fifteen-day trip to
the German Democratic Republic (Estonian Academy of Arts Archive). He
made at least eight more trips there. Thus, contact with German colleagues
and learning from them was an important influence for Port. In addition to
his excellent command of Russian and English, Port also spoke German.
It can be assumed that in the case of East Germany, Port sympathised with
the historical connection between the two cultures and the similar pro-
blems of Estonian cities in terms of preserving historical old towns.
For example, in 1968 Mart Port and urban planners Malle Meelak and
Hain Karu participated in a two-week-long study trip in GDR with a focus
on renovation of historic town centres. They also attended a conference on
urban planning with participants from all the countries sharing the Baltic
coast – the Soviet Union was represented by the Estonian SSR. As Tallinn
was the only Soviet capital with a medieval Gothic town core it was vital
to learn from Germany where – to use Port’s own phrase – there were such
towns on every footstep (“Vanad linnad uuenevad” 1968). During this trip,
Estonian architects visited Bautzen, Berlin, Gera, Jena, Leipzig, Stolpen
and Weimar where local urban planners advised them about the preserva-
tion of medieval town cores, the removal of vehicles and transport from
the old town, keeping larger new houses away from the centre, respecting
the historical nets of streets, and also the emerging issue of mass tourism.
Two years later in 1970 Port participated in a colloquium in another former
Hansa town Rostock.

At that time Tallinn was preparing to renew its master plan and for Port the
key take-aways from these trips were that every town has to evolve around
its historic core – the denser the centre, the better it is. He also pointed out
that any town which has access to water (sea, river etc.) should design its
centre accordingly (“Vanad linnad uuenevad” 1968). It is interesting here
Port’s argumentation is similar to that of the critical urbanists of the time,
such as Jane Jacobs in the US. However, in the same interview Port still
claims that in order to accommodate future car traffic, it is nevertheless ne-
cessary to demolish old buildings in the centre to make room for high-rise
buildings and more intensive urban life. Mart Port emphasised the good
practice of the German Democratic Republic to organise architectural
competitions for major public buildings and urban planning commissions.
Port complained that in Estonia, at that time, there was at best one com-
petition per year and this was causing stagnation. Here again, Port’s habit
of criticising – or even whining about – the Soviet context is problematic,
because he himself was in the position to potentially improve the situation.
It seems that Port had adversely accepted the status quo in which the price
per square metre of construction was the supreme aspect of Soviet archi-
tecture. For example, he would ironically compare a Soviet architect to a
writer who is commissioned to write a multi-volume novel, even though it
is known that the printing house lacks two-thirds of the alphabet and that
the letters a, c, and k can only be used 154 times, because more is simply
not provided for – but the work must nevertheless be grandiose, up-to-date, progressive, and positive (Summatavet 2015). On the other hand,
he worryingly lamented that if the cost of buildings in the Soviet Union
were to increase by even one percent, each year a city with a population of
100,000 would not be built (Stöör 2025). One gets the impression that he
used the rationalisation principle both as a positive or negative argument
according to his needs.

Drawing on his experience in East Germany, he fought vigorously, at least
in words, for the preservation and reconstruction of Tallinn’s old town and
argued that it was a value that could not be put into money (Port 1967). In
the same way, he berated the officials for having raised the idea of building
prefabricated houses in the wooden district of Kadriorg (Nääriintervjuud.
Mart Port 1971) On the other hand, it is hypocritical to stand up for two
districts of Tallinn, while at the same time he orchestrated the design of all
major standardised residential districts in Tallinn, in addition to Annelinn
in Tartu, Männimäe and Paalalinn in Viljandi and was also one of the cre-
ators of the 1-317 series of standard apartments which engulfed the whole
country and became the symbol of Soviet rule.

Apparently, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Port was heard
praising the environment of the pre-fabricated districts at one of the sum-
mer events of the Union of Estonian Architects, saying something like:

There is a lot of light in these apartments, not like in the old town, where the living spaces are dark. The houses are quite far from each other, not sitting on top of each other like in today’s new housing estates. You can get to the city from home by bus or tram, you don’t have to have a car, there are shops nearby, you won’t go hungry if your car tire is flat [...] (Mutso 2011).

As the author concluded, everything sounds correct, but for some reason
Port himself preferred to live in the bourgeois Nõmme and Pirita suburbs
of privates houses.

Returning to the GDR’s practice of organising open architectural compe-
titions praised by Port, in 1973 Estonian architects Kalju Luts (head of the
authors’ collective), Mart Port, Lembit Aljaste and Vello Erman took part in
an international competition to design the Grosser Dreesch community and
shopping centre in Schwerin’s new residential district (“Eesti arhitektide
rahvusvaheline edu” 1973). Although the Estonian authors shared the first
and second place with their colleagues from the German Democratic Re-
public, their project did not go ahead. The Grosser Dreesch is considered
Northern Germany’s largest prefabricated housing estate. Starting in 1971,
apartments for a total of around 60,000 people were built on the empty
field on the outskirts of the city. The competition called for the design of
a district centre, including a department store, hotel, hospital, restaurants,
cafés, beer halls, library and swimming pool. In order to do this in two
months, the authors divided the work between them: Kalju Luts designed
the commercial part, Vello Erman the hotel and youth club, Lembit Aljaste
the cultural centre, and Mart Port put it all into an urban ensemble.

Port’s close interaction with East German counterparts and learning from
their accomplishments and mistakes is a good illustration of what was ge-
nerally lacking in the architecture of the countries under Soviet rule during
this period. It took years for best practices to find a way into Estonian
architecture. For local architects, international success was an important
sign that the right thing was being done. It boosted their self-confidence
and sense of mission.

It also helped in disputes with local authorities and builders. One direct
example was the construction of the Õismäe housing estate. Mart Port and
Malle Meelak planned a pond in the middle of the new town, which the
city’s executive committee did not agree with – a park would do. Port
collected all the views of ponds and fountains from his slides archive and
made a powerful defence speech, which allegedly helped to realise the
fundamental idea of the project (Mürk 1986). However, Port was unable
to convince the city administration that the houses in Õismäe should be
raised on see-through pilotis as popularised by Le Corbusier.

Besides GDR, Port made several trips to Yugoslavia (1961, 1975), Cze-
choslovakia (1958, 1963), Poland (1963) and Hungary (1963, 1975, 1988).
The Soviet Estonia’s intelligentsia’s trips to the Eastern bloc countries
must have been so frequent that it also happened that acquaintances from
Tallinn unexpectedly met each other in another country. Thus, in one of his
articles, the Estonian writer Egon Rannet tells the story of how he bumped
into Mart Port during an interval in the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest
(Rannet 1965).

As with Port’s other journeys, he exemplified his aesthetic and technical
experiences from the Eastern bloc in his writings. For example, in his 1973
essay “Man and City”, he argued that one of the main reasons why So-
viet Estonian housing architecture is so monotonous is that it is built only
from precast concrete slabs, rather than monolithic concrete cast on site
(Port 1973). He then gave several examples from his travels around the
Soviet Union and the socialist countries (Armenia, East Germany, Hun-
gary, Poland, Soviet Russia) arguing that new solutions could also be used
in Estonia: «All these methods deserve to be studied and adopted in the
building practice of our republic, otherwise we will fall further and further
behind our neighbours every year». A few years later, the construction of
the monolithic concrete Kuldne Kodu (Golden Home) terraced house desi-
gned by Toomas Rein began in Pärnu, which became one of the landmark
apartment buildings of the Soviet period (Kalm 2008).

Although the project was not directly connected with Mart Port nor the
Eesti Projekt design institute, it was still inspired by the different types of
contemporary housing seen elsewhere in Europe, and especially in Fin-
land.

Finland – a special friendship

As in the case of many other Estonian architects, Port’s very first trip abro-
ad during the Soviet period was to Finland in 19574. In two weeks Estonian
architects experienced Helsinki’s historic and new buildings, as well as the
town of Hämeenlinna, Tampere (including its Lenin House Museum) and
Turku. Port also visited Finland in 1964, 1967, 1968 and 1972 – in many
cases as the tour leader of a group of Estonian architects. These trips to
Finland initiated a widespread Finnish-inspired architectural language in
Soviet Estonia. It was significant to get acquainted with the new residential
areas and the building quality of Finnish public and private architectu-
re. The examples of the Tapiola and Pihlajamäki housing estates played a
substantial role in shaping the nature-oriented design of the new estates in
Estonia (Metspalu 2019). In this sense, trips to Finland were not only in-
spirational, but had an actual effect on the built environment. On the other
hand, visiting Finland could also have a depressing effect as the quality
of building materials and workmanship in the Soviet Union was hopeles-
sly poor and took away the desire of the architects to work. For example,
Raine Karp has described the confrontation between the two worlds as a
deeply revolting experience (Karp 2025). Writing on the same subject in
1968, Mart Port was more diplomatic in his choice of words: «It is very
instructive for us to become acquainted with the high culture of workman-
ship and the enviable precision of the Finnish builders, manufacturers of
building materials and furnishings, which enables the most demanding in-
tentions of architects to be realised without distraction» (Port 1968). Truth
is probably somewhere in the middle. For example, architect Riina Raig,
who besides Finland managed to travel to Bulgaria and India during the
Soviet period, has said that “Finnish wisdom” (functionality, minimalism,
clarity) was the easiest to apply (Raig 2025).

Architectural historian Karin Hallas-Murula, who has researched Esto-
nian-Finnish architectural relations, has pointed out that during the late-So-
viet period learning and borrowing from elsewhere was a positively valued
aspect of the architectural field. In this context, copying or mirroring was
not something to be ashamed of, but quite the contrary: to do what was
done abroad was seen in itself as a guarantee of quality (Hallas-Murula
2005). Incidentally, such a collective view on architecture also meant that
Mart Port and his generation (who dominated until the mid-1970s) adopted
the attitude that architecture was an anonymous phenomenon – or at least
that it was an inevitable aspect of the coming to terms with modernisation
in the Soviet Union. During the trips to Finland several Estonian architects
made life-long friendships with Finnish colleagues who would later beco-
me their vital physical link and spiritual beacon for the remaining decades.
It was customary that when Estonian architects had the option to travel to
Finland, their Estonian colleagues who had previously been there would
help to arrange meetings with local architects or cultural people. In this
way, many Finnish architects started to visit Estonia regularly. As Port was
a member of the Estonian SSR-Finland Friendship Society, he was also
able to plan study trips for Estonian and Finnish architecture students to
their neighbouring countries (Port 1968).

Within the framework of this cooperation, an exhibition of Finnish post-
war architecture was held in Tallinn in 1968, accompanied by a small ca-
talogue (Soome arhitektuur 1968). On a Moscow-organised trip to Finland
in 1972, Estonian architects visited Alvar Aalto’s studio together with col-
leagues from other Soviet republics. Although Aalto was at work, archi-
tect Ülo Stöör, who was also on the tour, said that the great Finn made it
clear that he would only receive old friends. As Stöör watched twenty or
more architects working in the open studio, translating Aalto’s visionary
sketches into architectural drawings, he was reminded of Mart Port’s ear-
lier words: «Our young architects just don’t know how many opportunities
they have to excel in competitions and as project authors, but in a foreign
office you are a nameless collaborator» (Stöör 2015).

This is yet another example of Port’s double-speak, because at the same
time he would accuse the Soviet Estonian architectural scene for organi-
sing only a few competitions a year. Port’s criticism of the anonymity of
the twenty people working in the Aalto office is surprising, since his own
design institute employed 600 people and ultimately all the active Estonian
architects were divided between five large design offices. When Port lost
his position as the head of SEAA in 1979, he was precisely accused of ha-
ving undermined the identity of the architect as an intellectual profession.
On the other hand, there was some truth in Port’s reasoning, as internal
design competitions were common in Estonian design institutes and, as a
director, Port participated on an equal footing with his colleagues (Stöör
2025). Architects who worked at Eesti Projekt have said that Port would
often propose his own solution for each new project, but if a subordinate
architect came up with an even better idea, he supported it. Not all the ar-
chitects at Eesti Projekt were as talented as he was, so it is likely that Port
indeed co-authored more than a hundred projects (Kalm 2012).

Elsewhere in Europe

In 1958 Mart Port spent fifteen days in Belgium as a USSR delegate to
the Brussels World’s Fair. Somewhat surprisingly, Mart Port did not write
about the experience in the Estonian press. Given the political and cultu-
ral context of the extravagant event, it was bound to leave an unforgettable and mixed impression on visitors from Soviet Estonia. It was the first
major world’s fair after the Second World War and the occasion attracted
some 41.5 million visitors, making it the second largest World’s Fair after
the 1900 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris. It was also
the first opportunity for the politically divided Europe to learn about the
technological and cultural developments in the socialist camp. At the time,
Europe’s old imperial powers were struggling with the independence aspi-
rations of their colonies. Decolonisation was also supported by vocal ho-
me-grown critics. The ideological stakes of EXPO’58 couldn’t be higher.

Looking at the articles published in the Estonian press about the World
Exhibition, the wealth experienced in Belgium truly disturbed the authors,
who saw behind it the slave labour of millions of Africans and the illegal
appropriation of natural resources (Peterson 1958). Port fiercely criticised
such wealth built on injustice when writing about the United Kingdom.
Understandably Port could not write at the time that Russia and Estonia
were in a similar colonial relationship. EXPO’58 also had the added signi-
ficance that the expat Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanian who had fled the
Soviet occupation, made themselves visible to the Belgian public through
protests and public appearances, to show the free world «what a crime the
Soviet Union committed when it strangled a small country» (“Eestlased
tuhamägede all” 1958). During the Second World War 70 000 people emi-
grated from Estonia, many of them from the technical and cultural elite.
As the Stalinist years had a devastating effect on the country, it has been
pointed out that even in the 1960s Estonian cultural life was more active
in exile than at home. For example, in 1965 more Estonian-language li-
terature was published abroad than in Soviet Estonia (Hasselblatt 2016).
However, the expat cultural life was almost entirely separate from that of
the homeland and, moreover, fragmented all over the world. Against this
backdrop, the Soviet authorities naturally tried to prevent and play down
cultural encounters between Estonia and “non-Estonia”.

At the same time, however, expat Estonians made a very big thing of fo-
reign trips by “home” Estonians. For example, when Port was in Sweden
for two weeks in 1959, the local Estonian-language newspaper manifested:
«After a long break, a group of tourists from occupied Estonia is now in
Sweden, about 5 people, including architects Edgar Velbri and Mart Port
(born 1921). They stayed at the Kristineberg Hotel, are currently touring
Sweden and will return to Stockholm at the end of this week» (“Turiste
Eestist Stockholmis” 1959). The newspaper’s rather aggressive and ac-
cusatory form of expression suggests a division within the émigré Esto-
nian community. There were those who were in favour of cutting off all
communication with occupied Estonia and those who were in favour of a
more moderate attitude. When Port was back in Sweden seven years later,
another Estonian newspaper reported, «One of the best-known architects
of the younger generation from occupied Estonia is in Sweden, and he
came to see Swedish hotels in order to get acquainted with the architecture
of modern hotels».

In Tallinn, a new hotel of Western standards is to be built (“Arhitekt tuli
hotelle vaatama” 1966). The hotel is question is the Viru hotel in Tallinn,
designed by Mart Port and Henno Sepmann which opened in 1972 (Nup-
ponen 2007). Architectural history to date has not identified any direct
references to Swedish architecture in the Viru Hotel. It is clear that the
building spoke a similar modernist architectural language to that of the
city centres if Brasilia, Rotterdam or, as a closer example, Arne Jacobsen’s SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen (1960). On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Port was affected by the demolition of historic Swedish town centres, which had escaped the war entirely, and their replacement by new
high-rise buildings. Such action may have had the short-term and ostensi-
ble effect of densifying and activating city centres, and it is interesting to
wonder whether Port saw this process as a genuinely socialist clever urban
planning or as a trap set by the capitalists. As historians have later shown,
this devastating process, driven by consumerist ideology, was covertly and
secretly supported by Swedish banks and corporations (Johansson 2011).
Whatever was Port’s view, both he and Tallinn’s chief architect Dmitri
Bruns must have found it useful to place a gigantic building with a strict
geometry right next to Tallinn’s Old Town. This decision set the future
direction of the city.

From this perspective, it is rather paradoxical that when Port visited Italy
in 1961, he criticised the 1958 Pirelli Tower in Milan, designed by Giò
Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi (Port 1963). Without a bad word to say about
the building’s architecture or the quality of its construction, he found that
«towering above the surrounding old houses, it is one of the outstanding
rocks on which modern Western architecture rests». In his article, Port
used the metaphor that while in the middle of the ocean, a few cliff tops
(the most prominent representatives of the culture) rise up, deep beneath
the water at the bottom of the ocean, the underclass and the poor are hid-
den. Using Pirelli Tower as a parable for the whole Western world, he con-
cluded that capitalist architecture relies on individual phenomena, such as
new skyscrapers, large corporate administrative and industrial buildings,
luxury hotels, bank houses, single-family homes and housing complexes
for the wealthier classes.

Port boasted that in the Soviet Union things were the other way round:
«In our view, the first priority must be to build a large number of the most
necessary, economical buildings of a satisfactory standard for the broa-
dest sections of the population. Throughout the year, day and night, every
twenty minutes, a giant Soviet construction machine churns out a new
80-apartment, five-storey building». By the end of the 1960s, the “ocean”
in Tallinn must have been taken care of enough to start building a specta-
cular hotel exclusively for tourists and ‘socialist consumerism’. As this
article was published in a propaganda newspaper for Estonians abroad, it
is understandable why Port, like other Soviet authors writing about Italy,
used such figurative language in his article, trying to construct a reductive
image of the capitalist West and its societal fundamentals, and contrasting
it with a positive Soviet society (Kõvamees, 2011). It is known that Mart
Port shared his Italian travel impressions with students and lecturers of
the Civil Engineering Department of Tallinn Polytechnic Institute (Sellik
1961). He illustrated his presentation of contemporary Italian architecture
with a wealth of photographic material. Such slideshow presentations to
family members, friends and colleagues were common during the Soviet
period and it can be assumed that the content of the presentation varied
according to the audience.

In England through the eyes of an architect

Literary scholars have found that travel books ranked second only to no-
vels among the literary genres read during the Soviet period (Kõvamees
2011). Travel books were read as a pastime and also for self-improvement,
as the information they provided was very graphic and emotional.

In 1961, when Mart Port spent fifteen days in England with a Soviet dele-
gation at the UIA Congress, he used his impressions of the trip to publish a
small-format but densely text-filled 218-page travel book with a print-run
of 12 000 (Port 1966). In the Estonian context, this is an exceptional book,
as no architect before or since has published a book on a single journey.
From an architectural point of view, the book is of particular interest for
the first-hand experience Port shares of England’s post-war new towns like
Coventry and Stevenage. He wrote with particular enthusiasm about Co-
ventry and the way it had created a pedestrian-friendly and car-avoiding
environment in the city centre. It was in England that Port first encountered
the explosion of private car ownership sweeping the western world, and
he devoted a whole chapter of his book to the subject. Port’s attitude to
cars was critical, but as with many other issues he took it as inevitable and
rejoiced in the fact that while in capitalist countries cities had to be retrofit-
ted to accommodate car traffic, in the Soviet Union they knew how to plan
for such things twenty-five and fifty years in advance.

Port took the view that linking historic city centres and new towns with
wide highways was unavoidable, but that ideally cars and people should be
separated – as he later did in Lasnamäe. The theme of car congestion was
echoed in his later articles, which painted the western cities in even darker
tones (Port 1965a). He claimed, for example, that in West Germany, about
40,000 people were killed in traffic every year. Although the actual number
of fatalities was not much better at 16,494 (Road traffic accidents 2025),
such an exaggeration in speaking of the evils of the West seemed to be his
habit. When Port gave a presentation at the 12th Congress of the Interna-
tional Union of Architects in Madrid in 1975, he focused on the then still
unbuilt Lasnamäe housing estate project, «where special attention is given
to the protection of the environment and the isolation of motor traffic from
residential areas and the main pedestrian routes» (Port 1975).

However, leaving aside the issue of new towns, it is a highly opinionated
piece of writing, typical of the era, and it requires a lot of patience from
the reader to get through the ideologically dense text. In his fleeting touri-
stic glimpse, he draws fundamental conclusions about English society and
capitalism more generally. Throughout, the book depicts the bottlenecks
of capitalist society, the struggle of working people (the “real English peo-
ple”) to cope with low wages and high prices. Against all this, the reader is
given a sense of how good life is for the working man in the Soviet Union.
Added to this is the separate theme of the morally stunted West (film indu-
stry, pornography) and the view that capitalist culture is interested in the
sick psyche and makes everything for money. In keeping with the genre, he
is negatively condescending towards religion, expressing the Soviet view
that religion stifled clear thinking (Kõvamees 2011).

Conclusion

If so far in Estonian architectural history it has been common knowle-
dge that Port was a rationalist and a pragmatist, a good architect and an
excellent writer, but a cynic who grew bitter when he could no longer do
better, then analysing his trips abroad and the writings based on them adds
another aspect. The Iron Curtain was by no means as impenetrable as it is
sometimes presented. Port, like hundreds of other Estonian architects and
engineers, travelled the world and brought that knowledge back to Estonia.
Port was particularly active in doing so, holding positions of power in
several institutions.

In addition, he strove to make his views known to the wider public. We can
assume that many good things happened in Estonian architecture thanks to
Port’s foreign travels, but on the other hand, it must also be admitted that
Port developed a rather inflexible image of both Western life and the Soviet
system at an early age, which he tended to repeat in his architectural wri-
tings for the rest of his life. The problem is that, writing from such a high
position, his opinions also tended to construct reality.

Notes
1 «Pravda» was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and was one of the most influential papers in the country
with a circulation of 11 million.
2 People’s Architect of the USSR was an honorary title granted to architects of the
Soviet Union. The title was bestowed upon architects who had achieved significant
results in Soviet architecture’s development either applying their expertise and crea-
tivity to the urban planning or to the design of important building compounds for ci-
vil, industrial or rural use (Johnson 2011). Altogether forty-five people were awarded
the title. The Soviet Union singled out four honoured professions: artists (including
performing arts and literature), teachers, doctors and architects. As these titles were
granted by the government, honorees were afforded certain privileges (e.g., possibility
to travel or acquire a car). Members of the creative intelligentsia were conferred upon
four tides: Honored Artist, Honored Figure of the Arts, People’s Artist of the Republic
and the People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. On republican level there were dozens of
other honorary titles such as Honorary Social Care Worker or Honorary Forestry Wor-
ker. Yet, the most prestigious award was People’s Artist, Teacher, Doctor or Architect
of the Soviet Union, which could be conferred only by the all-union government. A
total of 1006 people were awarded the title of People’s Artist of the USSR – including
nineteen from Estonian SSR.
3 His faith in numbers is well expressed in an article on the synthesis of the arts, where
he justifies the necessity of monumental art through the effectiveness of art’s visibility.
Based on the number of members of the Artists’ Union, adding to this the amount of
amateur artists, and making assumptions about the annual productivity of artists, Port
suggested that in twenty years in Soviet Estonia, 40,000 to 50,000 original artworks
were created, 12,000 of which were seen about 15% of the population in public exhi-
bitions, with each viewer looking at one work for 30 seconds. Port called for more ef-
fective engagement that only publicly visible monumental art could offer (Port 1964).
4 Architect Voldemar Tippel was able to to film the trip. Tippel’s family has made the
film available on Youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUlNi4wU_ww].
(last accessed 31 March 2025).

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