The summer was in the city. My injured foot had gotten better and I often enjoyed long city tours on my bike. It was getting late, almost 11 pm, when I caught sight of this.
A beautiful, luxurious modernist villa was standing on a plot of wasteland between half built streets and brand new blocks of flats. It seemed inevitable, that its days were numbered.
The villa already had brand new neighbours. A quick check of the city zone map revealed, that another block of flats was to replace the villa. It just waited for the demolition crew.
The windows were tightly boarded shut but I started walking around the place in the hope of finding a way in.
There was no back door.
The windows didn’t offer much hope either.
Time to try out the front then.
A-ha.
I was only armed with my phone, which wasn’t very useful. But there really wasn’t much to photograph either. Everything had been taken away, including electric outlets, most cables and even floor boards and water pipes. What was left was loads of debris and construction waste.
It’s really hard to imagine how this place looked in its prime.
The windows hadn’t been removed. They were smashed inside the building.
Someone had taken the effort to remove even the staircase. This I would call dedication.
A quick look upstairs, which was inaccessible.
The only part of the building displaying its former glory was the pool room. The pool, sauna and shower occupied an entire wing of the building.
Another interesting feature was the wing. I counted five garages, which was pretty excessive.
All in all it was a very interesting place. And I think it hasn’t revealed all of its secrets to me just yet.
The spring of 2015 dawned as warm as ever. When the temperature for the first time allowed me to leave my jacket home, I took a long walk by the riverside. The result: my face was instantly burned, and three hours later it was aching.
More was to come the following day. My feet didn’t like the long walk at all, and the strain was too much for them. A tendon in my sole took the worst hit, and the following day I couldn’t walk. I was forced to go to the hospital, where they prescribed me painkillers and gave me crutches.
What a perfect set up for a family holiday in Tallinn.
Despite my condition, we left. We took a walk downtown, but it was painstakingly slow, as I had been walking all day and my hands and arms had started to hurt. The sun was already setting, when we checked in to our hotel room, but when I looked out of the window, I was immediately in for an adventure.
That is the parking lot of our hotel and behind it is the strangest and most spectacular brutalist structure I had ever seen. I did a quick googling to find out more about it.
The place was Linnahall, a sports and culture complex built in 1980 for the Moscow Olympic Games. Originally called the V. I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sports, it was built, when Tallinn hosted the main sailing event of the games, as it was impossible to sail in Moscow.
The complex housed a skating rink, a concert hall, a heliport and a ship terminal. The skating rink closed in 2009, the concert hall in 2010. The place, a national monument was left largely abandoned.
Time had really done its damage. The place was crumbling down despite being derelict for less than five years. This, I guess, is Soviet construction quality.
Some might call the place ugly. Personally I find it being a masterpiece of Soviet architecture. Although the architects were Estonians Raine Karp and Riina Altmäe.
The quality of the photos is a bit bad as I only had my iPhone 5 with me during the trip.
The entrance to the skating rink was blocked by a steel net.
A closer look reveals the mess a bit better.
Steel net had also been used to block access through holes in the building’s facade. The Linnahall was just 35 years old during my trip. The quality of construction was extremely bad.
The entrance to the concert hall was not only blocked by steel net but also by barbed wire. They really didn’t want to let people in.
The place was a strange maze of stairs, catacombs and different levels.
Below the entrance to the concert hall was the entrance to the administration department. The lights were on, but I wonder if anybody was home.
The place wasn’t fully abandoned after all. On the lowest level there were some garages, where people were fixing cars.
The access to the other side had been blocked by a barrier.
There were several different ways up the building.
But some of the ways were strictly off bounds.
I wonder if that thing actually can still receive something.
The building just seemed like a big set of stairs.
If the shape of the building (and the weather) would have been better, I could have imagined lots of people enjoying a picnic on the grass. To add to my previous description: the place was like a massive set of stairs in the middle of a park.
We’re slowly reaching the top.
A look back towards the city. Can anybody else hear the tunes of the Soviet national anthem?
So we are at the top and have reached our prize. It’s raining in Tallinn, but here we can bath in a golden sunset.
Another look back towards the city. The chimney looks interesting. Perhaps there is something more to explore down there.
Back in 2015 the Linnahall was still used as a terminal for Linda Line, a small shipping company operating between Helsinki and Tallinn.
What made the view even more special were the cruise ships arriving in Tallinn harbour.
One final look at the devastation. It looks like the whole facade has collapsed in one section.
And just a quick reminder, that I really wasn’t in a very good shape for an adventure. The walk around the building and up to the top took around 35 minutes. And it took at least 15 minutes more to cross the parking lot to get back to the hotel.
This time I was unable to gain entrance. But a nice gallery from Linnahall has been published here. There are also currently plans to restore the building to its former glory.
The place really seemed to be the home of long lost jackets.
Paint had fallen off the roof on the upper floors, and everything was covered in this white dust.
This common room was one of the few on the boys’ side to have art on the walls.
Something in that colorful pattern pleases me.
This floor was red.
And of course it meant that all the cupboard doors were red too.
Basically they were all the same again in every room.
Another interesting find in one of the dorm rooms.
Another mess.
More sold stuff.
I told you I liked the pattern.
The last red room, I promise.
The door up front is the one to the attic of the old dormitory. There’s one more floor left to explore on the new side.
The view from the top wasn’t really that bad. The cranes in the horizon are building a large mall on the spot of two of the buildings featured in this post.
A small top floor room with cleaning equipment and a laundry basket.
People in Oulu are really crazy about hockey. It’s a miracle there wasn’t more memorabilia in the building.
An orange floor here?
The walls are bubbling. A strange effect.
Yup. Orange it is. And the most luxurious piece of furniture found in the entire building.
We’ve pretty much seen this, haven’t we.
But in case you missed it, the rooms in the building were like this.
Most of the dorm rooms were locked. The ones which weren’t were broken into.
This is the last dorm room from this building, ever. I promise.
The vocational school is the red building on the backyard of the dormitory. It is no more. Everything, I repeat everything on the premises apart from the oldest and protected building was demolished in 2019 to make way for new housing, which is currently being built.
It’s time to say goodbye to this staircase for good. But there still was time to take one more photo – the strangest of them all.
The final photo I took in the dormitory was of this old magazine, when going downstairs. It’s a very old magazine with news about a railway strike in Britain, a march for peace from Helsinki to Minsk and news about a restaurant burning down.
When I opened these old photos for editing in the spring of 2021, I found something oddly familiar about this photo. It took me a while to realize, that the building where the burned restaurant was located became my home four and a half years after I took this picture. It was just a coincidence, yet chilling.
This was all I had from this house. You can see all the photos in the gallery.
Another funny detail in the building was, that the main staircase of the new annex building was actually located in the old building.
The second floor common room. The boys had much more comfortable couches than the girls, but they had to share the kitchen and living room with a much larger group of people than the girls. Personally I’d have preferred the smaller amount of people to share space with.
The dorm rooms up here were pretty much the same.
The main difference was the colour. On the first floor it was green, on the second orange.
The colour coding went as far as the dorm room closet doors.
The annex also had its own staircase. Apparently it was colour coded, too.
There had been lots of vandalism, but what I wonder, is where the insulation comes from. The roof was intact.
One poor unauthorized visitor had forgotten their coat. Hope they didn’t catch a cold.
It really was a good idea to leave the soil here.
The doors don’t quite seem to be original, so apparently there was some renovation done in the 80’s or 90’s.
The tiles look pretty familiar from somewhere.
The floor in this room was once again totally different from all the others in the building.
Another interesting piece of art.
A commercial for a competition, where you could win an 800 euro travel gift voucher.
Well, at least it was intact.
Up we go again.
The door between the old stairway and the new dormitory annex didn’t look too tempting. I mean somebody called this their home door once.
Another common room. I once again can’t help feeling like I was in a GTA Vice City cutout.
What a shade of green. Perhaps this is a hint of things to come later.
Oh yes, definitely a hint of green.
Would you like to see some more photos of dorm rooms with green cupboards?
You would? Well Here’s one.
Here’s two.
Beauty contestant number three.
And number four. This room even had an own fridge, although I’m not sure if it originally was here or did someone bring it here later.
My bad: there had indeed been insulation in the roof. The vandals had just ripped all the roof tiles away on the lower floor.
We’ll start our tour on the dark… I mean the old side with a cupbord under the stairs, where the local Harry Potter has hidden Christmas flowers and a bottle of brandy.
The basement was a mess just like everything else. On the floor there are construction drawings, but what interests me the most is the floor. The red and white combination was actually pretty cool and was in no other place in the building. The doors matched the red pretty well.
So where’s the machine gun?
These shelves contained office equipment. The tiny pink bottle contained stamp ink.
This seemed like the old boiler room. I would be surprised, if the original form of heating hadn’t been oil. It had been replaced at some point by district heating.
These would have probably qualified as antiquities. A lot of the furniture in the dorm rooms was from the 1970’s and 1980’s. This is just a guess, but maybe this was the original furniture from the 1950’s when the place was originally built.
There wasn’t much point in exploring the rooms very thoroughly. They were just a complete mess.
The funny thing is that the TV sets stored in the basement were more modern than those in the girls’ dorm rooms.
This basement room had been a popular bar.
The dorm even had a VHS player, but it was apparently for special occasions only, as there were none in the dorm rooms.
The end of the corridor housed some storage cupboards, which were mainly empty. Oh the irony.
Another office room. Note the ultra modern computer even by 2008 standards.
The office of Välkkylä (or Väläkkylä in Oulu dialect). As the pupils were moved from this old dormitory to Välkkylä a couple of kilometres away in 2008, I believe that this was a temporary solution, which had something to do with the move.
The corridor did seem to serve as a bowling alley. This explains the bowl I found early on in my adventure.
Another plastic carpet style. I have already lost count on the number of different floors built in this dormitory.
Random installation, unknown artist. Materials: a sink, a fridge shelf and a beautiful Finnish forest scenery. Embedded.
So, how are you feeling today?
Nice art probably made by the pupils. But why put it in the basement?
A dirty room with tempting jars.
There was even a gym for the inhabitants in the basement.
At the end of the corridor was the home of the bowls. There was no bowling track, however, so I guess it had been the corridor floor then.
The original purpose of all of these rooms was a bit difficult to see.
This one resembled a flea market a lot more than a dorm basement.
A strange cart. Wait, does this have something to do with laundry?
A football! Wonder if my touch is still as it was in my teens when I played it myself. Probably not.
I’ve always wanted to sneak to the women’s sauna.
So this is the women’s shower room. A pity the women aren’t here anymore.
Yup, there really is a sauna in a student dormitory building. This is Finland.
Close the door, the sign says. But someone doesn’t believe in signs.
Back in the side staircase. And time to go finish exploring the upper floors of the annex building.
The first room down here was the graveyard of bikes.
A dusty electic piano has been left behind.
Behind the piano was a corridor very similar to the one on all the floors above. But I didn’t expect to find apartments here.
The rooms here were larger and were apparently used by the pupils for their hobbies.
The piano was a great hint. This one was used as a band training room. The boxes have contained music equipment, which have somehow strangely vanished.
The setlist of a band was written on the blackboard along with the chords of Kaija Koo’s Tinakenkätyttö. I’m pretty certain this band was a girl band: most of their songs were by female lead singers like those of Jenni Vartiainen and Stella.
A strange office like space with an odd mixture of instant coffee and badminton rackets.
This place looked like a mattress storage.
And this one like an ordinary dorm room. They really weren’t that short of space that they made pupils sleep in the basement, were they?
Another messy storage room.
I hadn’t seen school desks anywhere else in the dormitory. Either the school used the basement as a storage or then these were used as classrooms.
They had clearly started cleaning, but somehow forgotten it.
What, a second basement below the basement?
Not really. The old part of the dormitory had a different room height than the new part. They both had separate basements, which were connected. And now it’s time to go back once again to the original building and see what was hidden below it.
Just another kitchen, but this kitchen looks very different from the identical ones in all the previous posts. This means, that I have left the original dormitory building and entered the newer annex.
The first room I entered was very pink and very bright. I somehow doubt that this was the original colour of the walls.
Here the layout was very different from the old wing. The building had one long, narrow centre corridor. On each floor there was a kitchen and a bathroom and lots of rooms that were absolutely identical.
The bathrooms weren’t very cozy. A couple of toilet cubicles, a couple of shower cubicles, that’s all.
A view of one of the dorm rooms. As you will soon see, these were all identical apart from the colours and the stuff left behind.
The corridor wall had been decorated with a large snowboard themed mural.
The rooms had two shelves, the table had positions for two chairs. Could it really have been that these tiny dorm rooms were designed to accommodate two people? Where was all the privacy in that case?
The layout of this room was a bit differend with the desk on the side of the room. I just hope that the school got to its senses and allowed just one pupil per room.
The poor bike seemed a bit misplaced. It was also missing parts.
It’s not everyday you feel the need to rake inside an abandoned house.
Now let us take a moment to appreciate the true beauty of standardized architecture.
Yes, these are all different rooms. I think there were about eight of them on each floor.
Another bulletin board with lots of instructions.
The first bulletin has instructions in emergency situations written on it. It includes the contact information of the dorm manager, security guard and caretaker as well as the emergency number.
The second bulletin reads as follows:
Boys: Everyone takes the thrash from their own room to the container on the parking lot. You take turns to empty the thrash cans of common spaces. Each room does this on their assigned week. The thrash must be emptied from the living room, toilets and bathrooms on tuesday and thursday evenings. The turns start from the first apartments on each floor.
So the interesting thing about the board was, that apparently the old dormitory was for girls and this new dormitory for boys.
The third bulletin has instructions for those who leave before the semester is over.
Clean up your room
Take all the bedsheets (apart from the mattress) to the laundry.
Fill in the departure form and the new application to Välkkylä
We’ll send a more detailed announcement to everybody from Välkkylä.
Ps. We need all free beds for the spring and if someone only needs a place for the last week, that will be arranged.
I still think the old wooden elevators were much more classy than more modern steel ones.
As the dorm rooms here were so interesting, I’ll now show you pictures of all of them on the second floor.
Just kidding. In my next post we’ll be going to the basement.
I did threaten to leave at the end of my last post, didn’t I? Well, forget it. I’m not quite done yet. But before new adventures, we’ll have to go back where it all started from.
The lobby / common room once again. It’s not very well visible here, but the 40’s and 50’s built houses had a feature I really loved. You could know the location of the lobby or restaurant of the buildings by the different windows. All the other ones in this building were square shaped and equally apart, but the ones on the left were rectangular and closer to each other.
I took a look at the canteen in the common room and found these texts which puzzled me a lot. The only “Tane” I could think of was Kolikko-Tane (Coin-Tane), a former seaman known for roaming the strees asking for coins in his special way. He turned 56 in May 2011, so it may well have been possible that this was a tribute to him.
The canteen was a mess. It was close to the main entrance and because of that a lot of unauthorized people were hanging out there.
A strange feature of abandoned buildings: gatherings of coffee machines. I’ve seen a bundle like these elsewhere, too.
Welcome! Leave your coat and feel at home.
Instructions for the common room: Close the windows, shut the lights during holidays and don’t take the newspaper away.
Is that the lights? Or the air conditioning? Wonder what would happen if I pressed a button.
This means business: The dormitory office.
The dormitory manager has left a note telling he’s going on vacation. It seems like he never returned.
While the manager’s been enjoying his vacation, he had a break in.
He seemed like a popular man, the manager. Lots of cards from different vacations and important days.
There were a few office spaces on the first floor. The box claims to contain 90 catechisms, so the spirits of the pupils were safe.
It really has been quite some time since OTP was a force in Finnish football. Almost 30 years around now.
I’m quite puzzled again.
A kitchen and all the medication and vitamins of the last inhabitant.
Somebody left all their photos behind.
Overall this kitchen looks like a very messy place. And in case you haven’t noticed, it’s different from all the other kitchens in the building so far.
Someone has actually written a book about using a slipstick correctly? If something is vintage, this is.
The library was a really strange space. It occupied most of one side of the building but was very narrow.
A weaving loom? In a former school dormitory? I wonder, what the box contains.
The walls in the attic have suffered a lot more than downstairs.
The other half of the attic opposide the library was just a cold space
That’s enough calls for now, children.
What a cozy corner to hang out. I actually wonder why this one existed, as there was a much lighter and comfortable common room downstairs.
I just love the happy and colorful bugs.
This table was selected to move with the students to the new dormitory very close by. The students left, the table was left alone. And it’s probably in the junkyard by now despite waiting for all those years for a saviour.
The frozen mirrors look pretty creepy.
The closet and the bench match perfectly.
Of course even the attic was fitted with toilets.
Another familiar object. The darker green thing on the left is a Christmas tree stand and the one my family had was extremely similar.
The empty chair is waiting for a good ass.
The final carpets woven in this building have stayed here for years. I’m not really sure about the colour eye of the maker, though.
The exit signs were pretty funny. It can’t be seen here, but the arrows actually had heads to three different directions and there was a door and a man on both sides of it. When hanging the sign up you could then remove the right parts so that it displayed correct. Imagine making a mistake here.
But this is the same door that I entered through. I surely do not plan to exit quite yet, do I?
The attic was very different from the lower floors of the building.
You really couldn’t be too careful when moving around. Everything on the floor, whether it was remains of a plate, door glass or wall glass, was very sharp.
This room looked almost like it was reserved for hobby crafts. Did teens do that sort of things in the 2000’s?
This room was just a random mess. The floor tiles have started to loosen.
The first thing looks like a sewing machine, but what are the other two?
There was an impressive collection of fabric to play with.
The one who made these did have some talent. If I didn’t have the principle of never taking anything with me, I’d have loved to rescue the happy clown to my kitchen.
Poor Sibelius.
Painting and decorating china seemed to be a popular hobby here. Someone didn’t appreciate this, though.
The next room behind the glass walls was the dorm library.
It had been pretty extensive. In addition to youth literature it contained lots of books for studying.
Someone had really put in lots of effort to thrash the place.
I really would love to have one of those. I’d sit in front of my desk, drink whisky, smoke and write all my blog posts with it.
So someone comes to the library, thrashes the place and leaves all grammar books intact? If I had the urge to break things up, I’d have started from here.
Perhaps the roof windows gave this library a cozy light, who knows. Now it was completely dark, because they had been blocked by snow.
I was pretty puzzled by everything the attic had offered me so far. And there’s more to come in the next post.
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