Pavilion, 2024
Tallinn, Estonia
Design: ZHANG Jie, YANG Chen
For Tallinn Architecture Biennale Open Call
This project, created for the 2024 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, is a pavilion on a 45m x 5m vacant lot in front of Tallinn Station.
Before diving into materials, forms, or the spatial design of this temporary installation, we aimed to establish a deeper narrative connection to regenerative design and the local context. For us, regenerative design is not just a marketing buzzword for niche markets—it should be a core element of daily life and urban history. Rather than crushing, painting, or reprocessing recycled materials, we seek to reuse them in their original form, giving them a shared destiny within the city.
We’ve named this initiative The Circular Experiment of 27 Concrete Prefabricated Slabs. It’s both a construction plan and a public participation project.
The concrete slabs, recycled from Tallinn and its surrounding areas by our official partners, will each be tagged to signify their entry into the city’s circular lifecycle.
These slabs will initially form the structural base for a temporary pavilion in the station square. After the exhibition, we will explore how they can be repurposed for other city infrastructure, such as public seating, landscape features, and bus shelters. The public will vote on the most popular uses, helping determine the slabs’ next chapter.
This project poses an important question: In an age where new materials are easily used for one-off projects, only to be demolished afterward, what does circularity truly mean for our cities? Can it become an integral part of urban life and a modern legacy, rather than just a marketing gimmick? Can it inspire people to rethink everyday construction practices?
Over the coming years and decades, we hope this circular construction experiment will spark a broader citywide embrace of circularity.
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