Unprecedentedly sweeping industrialisation of the whole of society took place in Estonia during the Soviet occupation. Questions concerning project design and construction inevitably emerge in the study of the industry of the Estonian SSR, primarily regarding industrial buildings and architecture.

This article considers the establishment of the project design institute known as Eesti Tööstusprojekt (ETP, Estonian Industrial Project Design) and how it became the largest and most important industrial project design institution in the ESSR, focusing on the institute’s formational period from the Second World War to the start of the 1960s. The organisation’s structure, personnel, and objectives stabilised in the mid-1960s.

Needless to say, project design was nationalised and collectivised in the Soviet Union, where private enterprise was precluded. The creation of project design organisations for the Estonian SSR already began during the Second World War in the rear area in Russia. The post-war years of industrial project design in the Estonian SSR were primarily devoted to the restoration and development of the oil shale industry, which was designated as a high priority branch of the economy. Although the structure of the ministries in the union republics copied the corresponding structure in the Soviet Union, the People’s Commissariat for the Oil Shale and Chemical Industry was established for the Estonian SSR as an exception. Within this People’s Commissariat, a small Teadusliku Uurimise ja Projekteerimise Instituut (TUPI, Institute for Scientific Research and Project Design), which was later to become Eesti Tööstusprojekt, was established in Leningrad in 1944.

In the initial years, the primary activity of the Institute’s engineers was the restoration of the oil shale industry, which had been damaged in the war. Their role was more to oversee construction supervision rather than project design in restoring mines and oil factories. Union-wide project design institutes nevertheless assumed the leading role in designing the projects for large, important new objects in the oil shale basin – mines, quarries, oil factories, electric power stations, workers’ settlements, the Kohtla-Järve gasworks, the Leningrad gas pipeline, and other such objects. The Eesti Tööstusprojekt institute for designing the projects for industrial buildings was formed out of the hitherto existing TUPI project design department according to a directive issued by the ESSR National Economy Council in 1958. A total of 680 people were on the Institute’s payroll by 1960. The institution had grown to become a large project design organisation on the scale of Estonia. It worked on designing projects for widely varied industrial complexes in Estonia, and from time to time outside of Estonia as well. It based its work on technology and equipment that had been worked out in Russia. In addition to various facilities, Tööstusprojekt also designed numerous public buildings starting from the 1960s.

After the mid-1950s, when the number of its employees grew rapidly, the relative proportion of architects and engineers who had graduated from Tallinn’s Polytechnical Institute (TPI), which was the primary seedbed for the Institute’s employees, increased to the same degree. Starting from the latter half of the 1950s, architects educated at the Estonian State Institute of Art started being hired in addition to TPI graduates. Interior architects started joining the Institute in 1963.

In the 1950s, architects and engineers who had newly graduated from TPI started playing an ever-increasing role in project design, construction, and management of industry. It is precisely that generation of architects and engineers, who started working in the 1950s, which shaped Tööstusprojekt as it grew from a small project design institute into a large project design organisation that planned industries and industrial complexes throughout Estonia. That same generation carried out the industrialisation and standardisation of construction that characterised the entire subsequent Soviet period. That generation increased the volumes of construction activity to an unprecedentedly large scale. That generation also remained in the leading position in project design and managing the industries of the Estonian SSR until the 1980s, when the negative aspects of stagnation, the wasting of natural resources, and technical backwardness caused by the planned economy emerged to an ever-greater extent.