2-stage installation competition for tab 2024

To build, not to build, how to build?

Resources are scarce – or are they? With the increasing attention to lowering construction industry’s carbon footprint, big business seems to be shifting its focus – circular construction, adaptive reuse and biogenic materials seize to be a niche. This is a positive tendency, until they become a technocratic solution, numbed with numbers, inflexible in Excel sheets and flattening resourceful creativity, only to further extract materials, skills and labour.

In light of this critical note, we want to offer room for inventions that stem from togetherness and enchantment of being humanly agile, open to trial and error, on-site decision-making, as we go. With this competition, we want to celebrate creative endeavours that are not (yet) formalised – informal methods, naive creativity and quests that don’t rely on future promises, but on available resources today.

Make Do with capital letters

This situation requires agile solutions. What opportunities lie in alternative practices that shape resilient architecture? For this competition, we seek critical, clever and creative proposals that put regenerative architecture in the forefront. How to plan a design process with materials yet to be harvested from demolition sites, leftovers or overlooked resources? With whom to engage with if making things is a collective effort? What does architecture look like if it is not shaped as a finite object but as a performative act of maintenance, care and repair? How can we plan extensions or dismantling for future use, and how does this manifest in details, joints and materiality? If these or similar questions are at the heart of your practice then we would like to hear about your ideas!

Tallinn Architecture Biennale has been bringing contemporary ideas to the architectural discourse since its inception in 2011. With this year’s 2-stage Installation Competition, we wish to continue this path, by firstly formulating an ambitious thesis in the form of a conceptual proposal, and secondly, constructing a real scale design fragment of it. After the biennale, the project will be considered for a full scale public design project by Tallinn city government.

For the final design proposal the brief asks for an urban break space in Tallinn that offers shelter from weather and a waiting area for buses, trains, trams. It should be robust to withstand the seasons and public use, while offering spatial qualities to the area. How these qualities manifest in conjunction with the larger vision of regenerative design is up to the participants to imagine and propose.

• The first stage looks for a vision. How to design public architecture regeneratively? What could be the methods, materials, aesthetics for it?
• The second stage invites 10 shortlisted teams to develop their vision further as a design project for a public shelter in Tallinn Baltic Station.
• For TAB 2024, a 1:1 mock up of a fragment of the winning design will be built on the site.
• This real scale design fragment will form a base for a participatory process, design improvement and further detailing with the aim of a full construction in 2026.

To experiment with regenerative modes of architecture by creating real physical work, which allows prototyping with alternative resources, materials, and construction techniques. We encourage to question and experiment with the architectural processes such as:

• How are the construction materials sourced?
• How to engage a wider public or authorship into the process?
• What is the afterlife of the structure?
• What new knowledge is it creating for your practice and wider architectural discourse?
• Does a refreshed architectural approach come with new aesthetics?

How

We expect a high level of visionary concepts on material sourcing and engagement processes in order to open the discourse on regenerative design to a wider public as part of the TAB 2024 events. As an open call we don’t limit materials palettes or parties involved, and expect proposals that could also guide the production process according to the successful winning proposal. Nevertheless we would like to see clarity in narrative and ideas that have ‘feet in the ground’.

The production team has preliminary agreements with local timber manufacturers (Thermory), second-hand material handlers (SRIK), and potential collaborators from quarries, forestry, waste management departments to ecological building material competences. These collaborators are subject to the proposal and cannot be predefined in the first stage of competition.

Where

The competition site is on the new square of Balti Jaam or Tallinn Baltic Station. It is the main railway station in Tallinn, Estonia and also a public transportation hub for inner city buses, trams and trolley buses, as well as a destination for regional buses. Balti Jaam is located on the edge of the still largely intact Tallinn Bastion Belt, which encircles the UNESCO protected medieval Tallinn Old Town. It is a busy area that on a daily basis brings together a wide array of Tallinn’s residents who commute between the centre and further residential areas, who live in the nearby residential neighbourhoods of Kalamaja and Telliskivi, students of the Estonian Art Academy, visitors to the Balti Jaam market and many others.

The particular site in front of Balti Jaam Station sits on a recently completed public realm project of Vana-Kalamaja Street, designed by renown Tallinn-based Kavakava architects. This street project fundamentally restructured the user hierarchy of this area, foregrounding pedestrian comfort and accessibility. It is built out of granite and concrete pavers, unbound gravel paths and includes seating and trees framed with corten-steel pavement grilles to allow rainwater infiltration into the ground. The chosen site for the competition is steps away from the waiting shelters for the local buses that connect Tallinn city to its outer suburbs and region making it a busy junction for pedestrians. The competition area for the pavilion borders the pedestrian area and the asphalt covered bus manoeuvring area. Originally a long canopy along the given competition area was planned to frame the square physically and conceptually – while this is not yet built, it is now one of the starting points of the competition.

As the area was rebuilt very recently, latest satellite or Google Street views do not provide accurate depiction of the area, please refer to CAD drawing and photos within the Annex section.