Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022 Installation Competition “Slowbuilding”

The Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022 (TAB 2022), which takes place from September 7th – October 31st, 2022 (Opening Week: September 7th – 11th, 2022), has presented its Installation Programme Competition Slowbuilding.

The open two-stage competition – with a first stage submission deadline on April 22nd, 2021 and second stage deadline on September 10th, 2021) challenges participants to develop creative designs for a temporary outdoor installation in the heart of Tallinn. Located in front of the Museum of Estonian Architecture, and housed in one of Tallinn’s most outstanding examples of industrial architecture, the site consists of a lively pedestrian green area along one of the busiest streets, connecting the two sides of the city: the harbour and the centre.

Through the concept of slowness, the Installation Programme Competition s with TAB 2022’s main theme “Edible. Or, theArchitectureof Metabolism”. The Slow Food movement emerged as a response to industrialized “fast” food production – one that recognized the need to preserve traditional and regional styles, enable local food production, limit loss of material diversity, fuel local economies and focus on human nourishment rather than crop yield. As architectural design services and the construction of buildings are increasingly automated, capitalized, globalized, and standardized, the goals of the Slow Food movement are as applicable to the production of space and shelter as they are to food.

The Installation Programme Competition curatorial team (Gwyllim Jahn, Cameron Newnham, Soomeen Hahm and Igor Pantic) explain: “As a counterpoint to the prevailing trends towards high-speed industrialized construction, the competition invites participants to explore the relationship between digital technology and slowness. A useful framework for developing not only alternative means of food production but also design and construction, slowness emerges in a world of finite physical resources and exponentially increasing computational capacity.”

The 2022 TAB Installation Programme calls for proposals that take a long, romantic and human-centric view towards construction technology, demonstrating designs and processes that extend and expand learning and mastery, traditional craftsmanship and analogue fabrication, repurposing and reuse of local materials, human invention and improvisation, environmental adaptation and responsiveness, wonderment and delight.

As TAB 2022 Head Curators Areti Markopoulou (Spain) and Lydia Kallipoliti (USA) assert: “During the pandemic, the fragility of our production processes, and the mobility networks that transport resources and food have urged new forms of localization and the design of circular economies.In parallel, the production of buildings predominantly follows a model of construction, which is intensely resource-consuming and contaminating, with the building industry accounted as one of the heaviest waste generators on a global scale.
It is in this light that we need to ask more of architecture. We invite participants to envision a more localized and circular approach to construction by rethinking the use of digital and automation technologies combined with creative expression.”