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Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022 - Installation Competition Finalist
client: Tallinn Architecture Biennale
phase : shortlisted to second stage
design firm: Maeta Design LLC
principals: Ezio Blasetti, Danielle Willems
As a response to the competition's brief, we propose a hybrid program
between a 'tiny' Artist Studio and a Public Garden. The proposal attempts to
create a multifunctional space that can invite the public to a series of events
over the course of the two years (2022-2024), as well as to invite a small
group of artists to occupy the pavilion in the form of short 'residencies'. The
project will manifest as a lightweight endoskeleton providing envelope and
support for the growth of an organic structural and ephemeral system. This
semi-structural biocomposite scaffold (Robotic 3D Printing of Continuous
Flax Fibre + Hempcrete) will support the internal growth of the garden:
synthetic environments of high definition.
Our proposal explores heterotopic aspects of architectural space in an
attempt to displace its inherent anthropocentric conceptual bias. Historically,
the space of the Garden is a hybrid gradient of public and private, a territorial
buffer that interfaces with the commons and the environment. The Garden
acts as a design space for the care, metabolism and aesthetics of a variety
of species with various degrees of domestication. The project operates
under the conceptual framework for space as a form-of-life itself: Open and
adaptive to change over time, the Garden is an archetypal diagram of a
network open to ecological, cultural and economic feedback mechanisms.
The design of the proposal builds upon the research of our studio in
robotically prefabricated biocomposite modular elements with embedded
micro-processors. The modularity of the proposal will allow for multiple
variations and the partial reconfigurability of the pavilion, as well as its final
disassembly. The building parts can have a second life after 2024 as small
assemblies that continue to support their plant life. Over time the two
systems - organic and inorganic – will merge into a single ecology. Fibrous
structures, complex nets with embedded processors and positioned in
larger assemblies, will attempt to map spatial and temporal patterns and speculate on the computational infrastructure that would allow for real-time
sensing and processing of the data of the Garden.