Solaris, Estonia’s brand new state-of-the-art shopping mall/conference center/entertainment complex, suffered a blow yesterday, just a week after its grand opening, when the ceiling of one of its movie theatres collapsed.
Fortunately nobody was inside at the time, and there were no injuries, but there was a lot of excitement — and a lot of questions about why the ceiling of a brand new facility should suddenly collapse. Shoddy workmanship? Unrealistically tight construction deadlines? Poor design? We hope that answers to these questions will be forthcoming.
Õhtuleht has a dramatic photo of the damage inside the auditorium here, and the Baltic Times has a detailed account of incident here.
The surviving tower of Sakala Center
Solaris occupies a prominent location in the center of Tallinn–the site once occupied by Sakala Center, the former home of the Estonian Business School (EBS) and the setting for much of the action in my book, Back on the Map. Sakala was only 7 years old when I first mounted its steps in 1992. It was in Sakala Center that I taught all of my EBS classes and lived many of the experiences that I relate in the book.
At the ripe old age of 21, alas, Sakala was torn down to make room for Solaris. More precisely, most of Sakala was torn down. The architects seemed to retain a soft spot for the former Communist Party Training Center: they preserved Sakala’s corner tower (pictured here) and incorporated it into the design of Solaris.
I provide a detailed description of Sakala Center on pp. 36-37 of my book, and there’s another good photo of the surviving Sakala tower here.
