Конкурс проводится в рамках Таллинской биеннале архитектуры. На примере одного из районов Таллина участникам предлагается заново изобрести жилой квартал или микрорайон – с упором на автономность (производство продуктов питания для жителей, частичная выработка энергии, управление отходами и т.д.).
The CIRCULAR BLOCK competition explores architecture’s expressive capacity to convert waste to energy or matter via circular operations from the micro to the macro scale.
Through the design of an urban unit that operates as a circular system in its resources and economy protocols—as well as in the cycling of its materials,—the aim of CIRCULAR BLOCK is to define new productive and socially cohesive urban models that question the traditional linear and discrete consumption and production systems in cities.
In Estonia, buildings are responsible for around half of the nation’s energy consumption and about a quarter of the country’s carbon footprint. With similar numbers in the built environment in different geographic regions, architecture’s response to provide for alternative design, construction and operational models is critical. How can microbial fuel units, anaerobic digesters, bacteria tanks, green cultivations, algae units and other building elements be retrofitted to existing housing units and the building block as a whole, so as not only function as engineering infrastructure, but also as inhabitable space? What are the aesthetic questions of infrastructure and how can such questions be instrumentalized to foster a creative design process?
In the competition, participants are asked to reinvent the block and its buildings as mediators of environmental flows, as well as material and activity flows. How can an urban unit convert matter to energy and provide simultaneously a vital space for the community? From the micro scale—investigating material conversions—to the macro scale—analyzing the dynamics of urban exchange and environmental flows,—participants are encouraged to develop strategies and models for recirculating matter and energy based on principles of distribution and localization.
Operating at three distinct scales, the CIRCULAR BLOCK Vision Competition invites participants to consider Tallinn’s Lasnamäe as a territory to investigate design strategies that allow urban blocks to use their surface to produce food for its inhabitants, generate required energy partially off the grid, use waste for generating energy or products, increase urban density using demolition waste, or implement blockchain technology for locally managing energy or material resources, among other possibilities.
Proposals may be focused on one (or all) of the following topics: FOOD, ENERGY, WASTE, MATTER, and on one of the following scales: HOUSING BLOCK, URBAN BLOCK, MIKRORAYON. Competition encourages participants to think experimentally and to develop proposals that crossbreed between different themes and scales. It is also important to note that competition is specifically interested in how technical innovation has political ramifications, that is how the reinvention of the mikrorayon can substantially impact living and working patterns and offer new employment opportunities and/or new protocols of trade.
Although the competition is site-specific, the submitted concepts could be designed in a systemic and scalable way to be possibly implemented in other locations in Lasnamäe, Tallinn, or other similar urban arrangements elsewhere. The collection of submitted proposals will be assembled into the CIRCULAR BLOCK ATLAS and presented to the City of Tallinn as part of the upcoming 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale.