Socialist architecture as today’s dissonant heritage: administrative buildings of collective farms in Estonia

The heritage studies of the socialist built legacy of the former Soviet Socialist Republics have mainly concentrated on the buildings and monuments representing the political ideology of the socialist era due to their evidently controversial character, while the more mundane and ordinary legacy has seldom been the focus. The administrative buildings of collective farms represent a particular socialist architecture of the 1960s–1980s in Estonian rural areas and small towns. These prosaic buildings, which used to play important role in the Soviet-time rural life, have become a dissonant heritage today, although their controversial nature lies in the complicated contemporary environment they fell into after the collapse of the socialist regime, rather than in the fact that they were constructed for ideological purposes. This paper examines the dissonant processes and the present contexts that affect the re-use and preservation of the administrative buildings of collective farms, as well as the acceptance of them as a meaningful part of Estonian history that should not be ignored or forgotten.