“Escalated global tensions imposed new tasks on architecture, leaving architects with a reduced amount of resources for the creation of social mobility, diversification and changeability as the usual parameters of conceiving architecture. What approach must we take in such a setting? How to conceive and construct an architectural program that remains stabilising enough to support architecture amidst ever-changing environmental conditions in perpetual crisis?”, queries the curatorial statement of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) 2024, titled Resources For a Future and on view from October 9 - December 1, 2024, at the Estonian Centre for Architecture (ECA) in Tallinn, Estonia.

The use, misuse and overuse of the term ‘sustainability’ had, perhaps, only begun to become a passé discussion when the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent wars and conflicts erupting across the globe retriggered discussions around the subject, albeit in a whole new light. Prompted by the need for social distancing and the imposition on the movement of both people and goods, the subject of discussion shifted, too. The globalised prototypes recommending green roofs and green walls, solar panels and prefab concrete structural units et al were somewhat replaced with discussions around utilising local resources and Indigenous designing and building techniques, as well as designing both public commons and private residences in a manner allowing communal wellbeing for the common populace to be incorporated and ensured. A bittersweet homecoming for many creatives, the happenings during the past few years including the pandemic, wars and inequitable decimations in the Global South birthing a state of pervasive yet latent unrest within the Western world and the subsequent global protests, have also influenced the thematic of many recent symposiums, design events, architectural festivals and international exhibitions, forcing one to re-encounter canonical practices, theories and learnings and envision a just and better future.

The most prominent amongst these within the architectural fraternity is, perhaps, the 2023 edition of Venice Architecture Biennale, titled The Laboratory of the Future. Curated by Lesley Lokko, it appended a non-Eurocentric approach to exploring a sustainable and equitable future. In a similar vein, the second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, entitled The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability curated by Tosin Oshinowo, examined and illustrated paradigms of innovative design that have emerged due to the scarcity of resources experienced in the Global South. Platforming 29 teams from the Global South, the architectural exhibition in Sharjah, UAE, challenged the idea of cornucopianism. Similarly, UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 platformed some dynamic and cognizant dialogues about inclusiveness, equity and sustainability under the thematic of Sustainable Futures – Leave No One Behind.

This forward-looking attitude that seeks to explore an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future for all, also informs the theme of World Architecture Day 2024 with the title 'Empowering the Next Generation in Participatory Urban Design’. Highlighting the important role that young architects have in designing future cities and transforming urban spaces, the event, marked on October 7, 2024, seeks to focus on several key issues such as energy efficiency, waste management, the use of sustainable materials and the improvement of urban mobility. Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2024, then, with its theme of Resources For a Future, akin to the World Architecture Day, is a quintessential architectural exhibition that raises pertinent questions.

TAB, now in its seventh edition, is a biennial architecture festival that began in 2011. The international architecture and urban planning festival hosts a diverse programme promoting architectural culture amongst both Estonian and foreign architects, whilst also platforming an exchange of ideas with the general public. TAB’s general goals include promoting a high-quality built environment, providing an international platform for Estonian architecture and highlighting new ways of thinking and creating a vision in the field of architecture.

Its previous editions, entitled Landscape Urbanism in 2011, Recycling Socialism in 2013, Self-Driven City in 2015, BioTallinn in 2017, Beauty Matters in 2019 and Edible; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism in 2022, served, respectively, as probes in resolving urban problems, reinterpreting Soviet-era buildings in Tallinn, exploring self-driven cars in future cities, transcending the boundaries between natural and artificial realms during the Anthropocene age, celebrating the resurgence of the power that beauty yields and empowering architects, planners and designers to develop systems that can both facilitate circular operations and serve as fodder for it, too.

TAB 2024, organised by the Estonian Centre for Architecture and led by head curator Anhelina L Starkova, along with Daniel A Walser and Jaan Kuusemets, builds on ideas and shared responsibilities for Resources For a Future. It focuses on “how to think, design and build architecture with repurposed and reused resources to shape the future,” as stated by the curatorial team. The core programme at Tallinn comprises three main events—the curatorial exhibition, a symposium and an installation showcase. Scheduled to open on October 9, 2024, the commencing week will host six main events, namely the RAK x TAB Present(ing) Resources Seminar, TAB Curatorial Exhibition, TAB Symposium, TAB Final Networking Event, Installation Competition Programme and a curatorial tour of the TAB Curatorial Exhibition. Further, the city will host a satellite program with conferences, seminars, Open House Tallinn and a couple of workshops.

Soon after the culmination of the previous edition of TAB, the Estonian Centre for Architecture launched a Curatorial Competition to select and appoint the Head Curator and Head Curatorial Team for the next edition. Participants were invited to propose a suitable and pertinent theme for TAB 2024, in a way that was relevant to architecture and urban planning whilst posing the potential for engaging a wider local audience, with the Starkova, Walser and Kuusemets emerging victorious as the curatorial team for TAB 2024.

The curatorial statement for TAB 2024 takes on a tone of accountability and focuses on ways to optimise our resources. Keeping in mind that climatic and political crises influence accessibility to resources and alter optimal working conditions, the curatorial note urges the development of techniques that can help utilise available resources and proffer quality architecture to all. “Architecture serves beyond aesthetic purposes; it’s a powerful transforming tool that creates social life, but for that, we have to raise the building profession by moving it into the architecture of the unseen, unpleasant and hidden,” the note states. “We are facing a challenge to operate within unsustainable and prevailing conditions that need to be converted into resources for the future development of society. Utilising local resources would reinforce existing structures and facilitate the transformation towards improvement and progress. Defensiveness and re-usefulness will be the basis of future construction in architecture,” the curators suggest. With these themes, the festival is designed to examine how the integration of indigenous building practices, cognizant resource usage and durable designs can exist amid contemporaneous economically driven lifestyles.

Head curator Anhelina L Starkova asserts, “With the recent global pandemic and wars, the social distancing we experienced has raised interest in the ‘local’. The need for global awareness and knowledge forced us to come together. Besides my personal life, my work is being affected by the war, as I live in Ukraine. I am closer to the brutally honest reality of how the architecture and the infrastructure of a city are designed not only for public crises and health issues but mostly by the destructive power of war. In my curatorial concept, I wanted to highlight that architects don't control the building system. We are the building system and this system will be the most legitimate foundation of the world to come.”

The curatorial exhibition, eponymously titled after the theme of TAB 2024, highlights the aforementioned subjects via a showcase divided across three thematic sections. The first section, under the moniker ‘Social Intelligence’, platforms Ornamental Records From Tallinn by France-based Déchelette Architecture, and Space of Earth by Switzerland-based Raphael Zuber and Laura Cristea. It queries: “How does social urbanism, forced by the unexpected, keep our cities alive? How can we use our intellect to operate within a city of limited resources?”

The second section within the exhibition, or resource, as it is referred to by the curators, is entitled ‘Building Concept’ and presents the projects Priorities, Needs, Future; Kontiinum; Stubborn Host; Rising Raw; Repair tectonics and Thoravej 29: A Building Repurposing Itself by Switzerland-based Alfredo Vanotti, Estonian architectural office Apex Arhitektuuribüroo, Estonia-based Architect Must, Switzerland-based Gus Wustemann, Laura Linsi and Roland Reemaa’s LLRRLLRR and Denmark-based Pihlmann Architects, respectively. Diverse concepts of building inner modelling, typological logistics and structural retrofitting will be explored in this section. “We will reveal the low geometries of local architecture, constraints of contemporary constructives, probate spatial intricacy of the defensible architecture as well as implode typification and structural possibilities of the existing buildings,” reads an excerpt from the press release.

Lastly, ‘Material Formation’ encapsulates Belgium-based BC Architects’s Networks, Not Products, Switzerland-based Capaul & Blumenthal Architekten’s Erosion and patina, Estonia-based KAMP Arhitektid’s Minecraft, Pihlmann architects’s Reformulating Reuse, ReReRe’s Open House Day and Roger Boltshauser’s Earth Architecture: Tradition and Potential. In addition to examining the impact of material cultures on architecture, the projects question and respond to the inquiry, “How does material pragmaticism dictate urban rules and respond to social crises through construction?”

For TAB 2024’s Installation Programme, the curatorial team hosted a competition ‘For-This-Situation’, wherein they invited architects under the curation of Laura Linsi and Roland Reemaa, to ‘reimagine the joy of killing time in a community space’. The participants were required to develop creative designs for a temporary outdoor installation at Tallinn's busiest local transportation hub, the Balti Jaam, which is located on the edge of the largely intact Tallinn Bastion Belt, which encircles Tallinn’s UNESCO-protected mediaeval old town. The competition, which encouraged ‘participants to explore new ways of using repurposed, reused resources and use bio-based materials to create a durable installation’, was won by Elisabeth Terrisse de Botton from Estonia and Matthieu Brasebin from France, for their project No Time to Waste.

No Time to Waste offers alternative breakout spaces for the city’s residents and proposes an engagement with the proximate square at Tallinn Jam Station. Inspired by the gabion wall constructive system, the architecture pavilion features lightweight steel cages filled with leftover stones or rubble, hence resulting in a design that balances shelter and transparency and leaves room for future extension and/or development. No Time to Waste has been developed by architecture and design students from the Estonian Academy of Arts and will be inaugurated on October 11, 2024, after which it will stay on as a permanent public installation. The other successful entries will also be shown in a separate Installation Programme Exhibition at the Museum of Estonian Architecture in Tallinn.

The TAB Symposium, to be held on October 11, 2024, is one of the three main events during the nearly two-month-long architectural festival. It will play host to various meaningful interdisciplinary discussions by architects, designers, artists, members of TAB’s curatorial team and winners of the installation competition. A few other important lectures during this one-day symposium include Built in Rammed Earth in a Contemporary Urban Context, Black Dot Urbanism and the Imploding City, The Future as a Resource and We, catalysts of timber waste reduction.

Some satellite events for TAB 2024 include the showcase of the Tuhast installation by Augustas Lapinskas; the EKA Arh Conference Building Systems, a film screening of Infinity According to Florian (2022), a mini-seminar discussing The Potential of Coastal Reed in Architecture and Construction, a LINA x TAB 2024 seminar Restart. Transformations in Modern Housing Estates and the RAK X TAB 2024 seminar and exhibition Present(ing) Resources.

Tallinn Architecture Biennale is open from October 9 - December 1, 2024, at the Estonian Centre for Architecture (ECA) in Tallinn, Estonia.