Estonian Road Museum

The open-air exhibition grounds of the Estonian Road Museum is a mixture of many layers. Not only does it operate on an informative level, it also incorporates opportunities for leisure activities and for experiencing artificial and natural landscape in a compelling dialogue.

The concept of the exhibition grounds is based on a road – while passing by, your route will be surrounded by different landscapes. The solution forms a long 8-shaped path, where functions with different character and scale are placed in succession like a comic strip. All space necessary for the museum is scooped into the hilly South-Estonian landscape, leaving rest of the environment as natural as possible: natural and artificial landscape is clearly separated, yet treated equally. A hollow ranging from 10 cm to 4 m deep forms more than 13 000 square meters of open-air exhibition space which is barely visible from the remote surrounding areas.

The structure is built of reinforced concrete, with wood-paneled ‘nests’ (ticket and souvenir booth, lavatory), authentic historical objects (roadside pub, gas station, bridge, segment of a railroad etc) and graphic concrete softening the architecture of the conveniently infrastructure-like edifice.