The historian considers as the most ambitious the late 1980s when it wasn't yet clear what would happen, while the desire to remake Tallinn in a new and Western image was already there. People wanted to erase everything to do with the Soviet period and jump into a new age. The imagological impulse of imagining a busy, active Western city full of life had been delivered.

"Clients came with all manner of desires. Irina Raud, Tallinn's city architect 1989-1991, has said that you had a businessman walk in the door with a project for a skyscraper in hand every single day," Ruudi said, adding that many fancy projects never went beyond paper at the time.

Among the most incredible was Tõnis Vint's utopian vision of Naissaar as a campus of impossibly tall high-rises (Vint envisioned skyscrapers four times as tall as the Empire State Building) and casinos, as well as a bullet train link between the island and Tallinn. According to Ruudi, Vint saw Naissaar as a free economic zone – a meeting place of Eastern and Western companies and a cultural center.

"Vint drew from Chinese feng shui theory where a high-rise was not a functional but rather symbolic, even esoteric thing for him. He claimed that if the city had skyscrapers, they would function as an acupuncture cure for Soviet trauma. The reality at the time was that the island lacked electricity, fresh water and other kinds of infrastructure," the historian noted.

Despite this, Viimsi Municipality that initiated the Naissaar plan, invited Vint to participate in the process and was willing to partly consider his ideas. "It is something that doesn't really happen anymore where an avant-garde artist comes and offers up a completely utopian vision. It was possible to hold such dialogues in certain circles at the time, even if they seldom amounted to anything."

Vint's fantasy of a city of the future on Naissaar can be viewed here.

Characteristic of the 1990s was the reconstruction and search for new functions for massive industrial buildings, often erected in illogical places during Soviet times. The second half of the decade saw the start of urban sprawl – people had money and could afford to take out home loans. Private residences started going up in fields surrounding the city, with the first gated communities, such as the elitist Tiskre Village, created.

"This betrayed the desire to be surrounded by peers and rule out everyone else. Also to protect oneself – remnants of the first half of the decade when more than a few walked around revolvers in pocket," Ruudi said in terms of the kinds of people who could afford to build houses at the time. The period was also characterized by strong desire to define oneself through aesthetics, paint oneself as successful, modern and Western.

As for many others, the late 1980s and the following decade were a difficult time for architects – you had to adjust to new ways of life at many levels, go along with political change and clients' wishes, new laws, land reform and new materials and technologies. Among general changes for architects was the gradual switch from drawing by hand to using computers, which, in addition to being a technical change, also shifted frames of mind.

In summary, Ingrid Ruudi described the 1990s in architecture as optimistic, full of courage to experiment, open but also controversial. "We saw a clash of the previous society and efforts to catch up to the West both in people and in urban space."

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