Community centre, Sõmeru

Community centre

SÕMERU (EE) - The Sõmeru community centre, which combines parish administration, library and a club with a hall, forms a new centre for a small parish in central Estonia. Because the building is located on the edge of the village, it must form a new spatial centre with its visually attractive facades, courtyards and inner streets.

Sõmeru centre, opened last autumn, was designed by young office Salto, who won the open competition in 2004. Actually, it was one of their first victorious competitions. The architects have participated successfully in more than 40 competitions by now, but the initial design of Sõmeru centre has remained quite intact – the landscape-like building has a rectangular plan, where spaces are organized around three courtyards. The project team, consisting of Maarja Kask, Ralf Lõoke and Karli Luik, as partners of Salto, and Kristiina Arusoo and Margit Argus, as co-authors, stated that they wanted to devise 'concentrated fragments of nature created by the inner courtyards, just as in the middle of open fields'. Their aim was to form a delimited space, like an urban square, for a change of existing sparseness.