The City of the Living – The City of the Dead

Leonhard Lapin’s The City of the Living, the City of the Dead—exhibited for the first time in 1978—proposed inserting a cemetery into a public courtyard in one of the Soviet-period prefabricated residential districts in Tallinn. Lapin suggested reconstructing garages to function as tombs and bodies to be buried in cars, whereas the graves’ monuments could also have functioned as playground elements for children. (“In this way, people would take better care of the area and parents would not allow their children to vandalize its equipment”, as one reviewer mockingly put it). This grotesque scene, executed in the style of pop art, satirized the idea of a new urban micro-district that would provide everything necessary for daily life. As Lapin himself put it, this addition would enable the area to be self-sufficient and the “inhabitants [would] be able to remain in their neighborhoods forever without ever needing to cross a single thoroughfare”. The project referred to the courtyard visible from the living-room window of the apartment in which Lapin lived with his then-wife, artist Sirje Runge. In Lapin’s design, several members of the architectural establishment had been buried in the courtyard—their names are shown on gravestones—and a corner of the courtyard has been set aside for the common grave of members of the Architects’ Union. In this way, Lapin commented on the changed conditions of architects’ work; in the context of mass-produced dwellings the role of the architect had faded, leaving him or her only to follow obediently the many restrictive building laws and regulations.
Text: Andres Kurg