Australian duo Simulaa and Natalie Alima have won the competition for the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale in Estonia with an installation made of mushrooms. Titled Burlasite, the structure's base will employ 3D printing technology that will be taken over by mycelia over time. The proposal highlights repurposing and reusing local materials, and how humans can create sustainable designs with invention and environmental adaptation. The Tallinn Architecture Biennale will open to the public on September 7th, 2022, and the installation will be on display until 2024 in front of the Museum of Estonian Architecture.
The curators of the installation proposed a sustainable and human centric approach towards construction that demonstrates the durable potential between the living world, reusing local materials and fabrication, and architecture. Their design was based on the archetypal hut, taking the base structure of Martin Heidegger’s abandoned hut as a foundation and building upon its timber frame. Waste material from the local timber industry will be combined with a biodegradable polymer, which will then be 3D printed to form the foundation. The base frame will be “injected” with mushroom fibers, which will eventually cover the frame and take its final form.
This project curates an uneasy alliance between biological transformations and the performance of a generative algorithm. Through this measured process, the project seeks to heighten this state of flux, expressed in the object’s material decay that is in tension between emerging and eroding form. -- Simulaa and Natalie Alima
The 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale's theme “Edible. Or, the Architecture of Metabolism” highlights the relationship between the natural world and the domain of cities and buildings. The main objective is to revise and reimagine the logic of circular economy and the ways in which it migrates to the fields of design, architecture and the production of urban environments. The curators' aim was to “nourish local craftsmanship, better utilize available materials, respond to environments over long time scales and enhance bespoke design expression.”
The Estonian Centre for Architecture had announced last year that the 6th edition of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) has been postponed until 2022 “due to the postponement of the Venice Architecture Biennale as well as the uncertain times that international cultural events are facing because of the coronavirus outbreak”. The selected head curators are architects Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou in collaboration with co-curator Ivan Sergejev, who according to the organizers, "aim to empower architects, planners and environmental practitioners to develop a proactive stance on architecture’s expressive capacity to perform circular operations, to produce resources – generate food and energy- as well as to decompose itself".
Generating synergy between Estonian and foreign architects, as well as between architects and the general public, the Tallinn Architecture Biennale promotes mainly architectural culture. Through five main events, all curated by TAB Head Curator, consisting of a Curatorial Exhibition, a Symposium, and the Tallinn Vision Competition, an International Architecture Schools' Exhibition and the Installation Program, the Biennale encourages the exchange of ideas across borders.
Project team:
Anna Jankovic, Andre Bonnice, Bryn Murrell, Tommaso Nervegna-Reed and Natlie Alima
News via Architecture Australia
