Kai Art Center

This guide to Kai Art Center in Tallinn starts inside a former coppersmiths' workshop and works backward to 1912, when oil magnate Emanuel Nobel and machinery manufacturer Arthur Lessner built a submarine works on this shore and fused their names into Noblessner. You'll hear how workers assembled a dozen state-of-the-art submarines here between 1913 and 1917, and how an empire's collapse left the yard silent for most of the Soviet century. From there it traces the slow shift from sealed naval property to gallery space, asking what a building engineered for secrecy becomes once artists and their neighbors move in.