Despite the fact that she was a woman in a country where architecture had always been a man's profession, she gained wide recognition with her very first work, the Flower Pavilion in Tallinn (1960).
Designed as an exhibition venue, the pavilion became a landmark of post-Stalinist architecture with its organic, light appearance, its transparency and its affinity to nature.
In her Café Tuljak (1964), an extension to the Flower Pavilion, Pormeister was also inspired by Finnish trends, this time by rather heavier, right-angled style with dark wooden cornices.
[1] Pormeister's next important project was another Nordic-styled work, The Administrative and Research Centre for the Kurtna Experimental Poultry Farm (1966).
She also built two important buildings on the outskirts of Tartu: the Livestock Breeding and Veterinary Scientific Research Institute (1984) and The Faculty of Forestry and Soil Improvement of the Estonian Academy of Agriculture (1984) on the banks of the Emajõgi River.
[1][3] Her early style in the 1960s was influenced by the soft Nordic modernistic trends developing in Finland, one of the few countries Estonians were permitted to visit at the time.