“You need to see the space where you can feel infinitely comfortable to know what an architect can do at all”. Interview with Estonian Architect Siiri Vallner

Siiri Vallner is an architect who started her studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts in the early 1990s. She was among the first to embark on exchange studies to Copenhagen and later continued her studies at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. After her studies, Vallner spent a year working as an architect in New York. In 2002 she and her colleagues founded the architecture office KavaKava. In 2008 she received the Young Architect Award and the accompanying travel scholarship which she used to undertake a Grand Tour to Italy, Greece, the Middle East and India. This interview took place in spring 2024 as part of the Erasmus+ funded research project Updating the Grand Tour. Memory and Invention of the European Built Environment and focused on how travel affects architectural studies and meaning-making.