Valve Pormeister trained as a landscape architect at the Tallinn State Institute of Applied Art and came to buildings sideways: hired to landscape the slope below the new Song Festival Grounds, she talked her way into designing the exhibition hall as well. The Flower Pavilion that resulted, finished in 1960, made her reputation at a stroke and became the emblem of post-Stalinist architecture in Estonia — light, glazed, low, threaded between trees that were left standing. She spent her career inside the state agricultural design institute and turned its least glamorous programmes into architecture: poultry research stations, plant-protection laboratories, farm canteens, agricultural faculties. Critics read Aalto in her work; she said the influence was Richard Neutra. She is routinely called the grand old lady of Estonian architecture and the first woman to shape it.
