Since the establishment of PART in 2015, Sille Pihlak and Siim Tuksam have been instructing the students of architecture and urban design as well as interior architecture at the Estonian Academy of Arts and supervised several studios and workshops.

Pihlak and Tuksam’s academic work aims at merging research and practice based on the conviction that by combining algorithmic design, planning and production under the architect’s leadership allows to boost the role of the architect back from the mere executor of standards and regulations to the pioneer of constructional processes.

Inclusive methods are employed to kick off the term either in the form of an introductory task, field visits or experiments with models that are further developed into algorithmic tools. The students learn to transform geometry into complex and structurally solid bodies. In the second half of the term, students learn about the digital production possibilities both in the form of models and prototypes that are often constructed in cooperation with the timber industry. The aim is to introduce students to their supervisors’ vision of modern timber architecture in which an important role is played by a good command of algorithmic tools and rapid prototyping and the supporting theoretical concepts.

Toomas Tammis, Professor at EKA Department of Architecture and Urban Design:

“Sille Pihlak and Siim Tuksam represent the young generation of EKA lecturers who seamlessly combine research with their daily practice and instruction. One of their research focuses is on finding and applying new possibilities in the local timber industry and in the specificities of the use of wood. Here architects are often at the forefront in manipulating space and material by means of highly refined digital skills that in reasonable combination with the enhanced technological capabilities provide the opportunity for a considerable leap in development. The systematic use and development of digital means with the respective possibilities in spatial thinking and structure as well as in the materialisation of the design is undoubtedly an area that has changed and will change for some time the ways of creating architecture and its physical representation. Sille Pihlak and Siim Tuksam are definitely pioneers on this road.”