Open-Air Exhibition Grounds of the Estonian Road Museum

The open-air exhibition grounds of the Estonian Road Museum are a mixture of many layers. Not only does it operate on an informative level, but it also incorporates opportunities for leisure activities and for experiencing artificial and natural landscape in a compelling dialogue. The environment that has been created is playful and effective. It functions not only as an exhibition environment, but also as a piece of landscape art. This ambivalent character makes it very intriguing. 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. As a museum environment it continues the main exhibition of the museum through the idea of making the somewhat monotonous subject matter interesting through engaging presentation.