Narva City Square

When we set out to design Stockholm Square, we were designing into an absence. The site had once held the beating heart of Narva's baroque old town — a dense fabric of buildings around the town hall — before it was levelled in World War II and left, for decades afterward, as an empty lot, partly given over to parking. We didn't want to simply fill that gap. We wanted the square itself to carry the memory of what had stood there. We kept the town hall and the University of Tartu Narva College in mind as the square's two anchors throughout the design — we didn't want to compete with them, but to let them dominate the space the way the old buildings once did. So we traced the footprints of the lost baroque structures using graphic, rounded forms and volumetric elements in the paving, letting the ghosts of the old town resurface underfoot rather than rebuilding them literally. We told the story of Narva through water. Sitting on the Narva River, shaped by its border position and its long relationship with the sea and the Baltic trade routes, the city's history felt inseparable from water and flow. That's why we chose a predominantly blue palette for the entire square, and why we interlaced the rounded forms with linework that echoes ripples circling around stones — we wanted people walking across the square to feel that same fluidity underfoot.