Trip

Trip is inspired by the main oeuvre of architect Raine Karp--the concert hall designed for the city of Tallinn between 1975-1980. Considered the most important building realized in Estonia, Linnahall is a time capsule preserving the utopian ideas of centralized power and of egalitarian modernism, and an example of how architecture can stir public emotions in our times of corporate dominance.

A new episode in the Emotional Architecture series, Trip introduces Linnahall as an archaeological accident, as a stranded space ship and as a shrine for Soviet Union nostalgia. The voice of the architect, breaking facts about his ambiguous profession, the hallucinogenic wandering around the building, the nightmarish exploration of its guts--all are pleading for architecture as one of the drugs of this time, when drugs are part of life style. Tripping through architecture can be as fascinating as a night out--and potentially as dangerous.

The film pays tribute through its treatment and sound to Andrei Tarkovsky, and to his famous Sci-Fi failure, Solaris. While Linnahall was built for the glorification of the Moscow Olympics of 1980, some 500m from the construction site Tarkovsky was working on his masterpiece, Stalker.