First of all, a great (if small) national architecture museum (then again, Estonia is not large). What it may lack in size, Estonia makes up for in a rugged history that is told skillfully through architectural developments going only far back as the 19th c or so. Maybe with more space they’d dig into the buildings that came of being subject to Sweden and then Russia–not to mention centuries and millennia before that. Subsequent Romantic Nationalism flourished by the time of a brief independence in the 1920s and ’30s, which came to a crashing end by the occupation of the Soviets in 1940 and the Nazis a few years later. Unlike its neighbors Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia shook off Soviet control and recognized its independence in August, 1991–notably, the year that this great little museum was founded.

This very particular history, woven into what is more typically learned of the twentieth century, recasts architectural developments from Modernism to Post-Modernism into a very different context and thus with distinct meaning. The clarity of the exhibitions are skillful in telling Estonia’s fascinating, fraught, and triumphant history through its buildings in a way that I wish we’d see in more capitals.