Tiit Kaljundi

"Väike 2002-2006" contest, I-II place - Staircase in Saka [1]

In 1988 he joined the Union of Estonian Architects and in 1997 he established his own office. During this part of his career, his style gradually shifted away from his style of functionalism and moved towards constructivism and conceptualism, which he used to create his own home in Merivälja towards the end of his career.

In the early 1980s, Kaljundi promoted small town development and was against the Soviet urban development policies of the time. Kajlundi responded to the new mass apartment blocks being constructed by advocating for a polar opposite solution: the post-modernist villa. During this time period, he also worked on landscaping, working on projects including the Rakvere castle hills, Tartu Toomemägi and the Sinimäe memorial. Kajlundi also created other plans for urban development that were later implemented, including the consolidation of the Kuressaare city center and reconstruction of its cultural library.

Early in his career, Kaljundi was an architectural assistant at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He worked at the Estonian Land Development Project for five years starting in 1970, and following that he worked at the Tentrosojuz Project.

He was born in Paide and later and graduated first in his class from Viljandi High School in 1964 and then studied at the Polytechnic Institute in the Faculty of Economics. He attended the Estonian Academy of Arts starting in 1965 and graduated in 1970.

Tiit Kaljundi (4 April 1946 – 1 February 2008) was an Estonian architect and a member of the Tallinn School. He became well known in the later part of the 1970s as a part of a new movement of Estonian architects that was led by Leonhard Lapin and Vilen Künnapu. The majority of the architects in this movement were graduates from the State Art Institute in the early 1970s. This group included Kaljundi, Avo-Himm Looveer, Ain Padrik, Jüri Okas, and Ignar Fjuk, as well as Veljo Kaasik and Toomas Rein from an older generation of architects. After the 1983 exhibition in the Tallinn Art Salon, they became known as the “Tallinn Ten" or the "Tallinn School," a broader term to describe the group used by the Finnish architect Markku Komonen.