TAB 2026 Vision Competition: From Void to Value 2026

Competition Brief

The Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2026 (TAB 2026) Vision Competition, titled “From Void to Value: Revisioning Tallinn’s Old Town”, is an open international one-stage competition organised by the Estonian Centre for Architecture (ECA). It invites architects, urbanists, landscape architects, interior architects, and students in these disciplines to propose a vision for the southern edge of Tallinn’s UNESCO-protected Gothic Old Town, a site destroyed in the Soviet air bombing of 1944 and left unresolved as a planning controversy ever since.

The competition runs alongside the TAB 2026 Installation Competition and forms part of the biennale’s broader programme themed “How Much?”, curated by Stuudio TÄNA with Mark Aleksander Fischer and Mira Samonig. TAB 2026 opens 9 September 2026 in Tallinn, Estonia.

Intent

The competition frames a specific urban paradox: Tallinn’s Old Town is physically cheap at a citywide scale, its medieval street and plot system preserved partly due to historical economic scarcity that prevented large-scale renewal. Yet socially, the Old Town has become expensive and detached from local life, shaped by comprehensive protection since 1966, post-1990s privatisation and neoliberal reforms, and the growth of tourism. The competition asks how this urban structure, despite strict heritage constraints and entrenched market pressures, can be rethought as socially and materially accessible, usable, and integrated with contemporary city life.

Purpose

Participants are asked to treat the competition site not as a single object but as a set of typologies that reflects the Old Town as a whole: the urban void left by the 1944 bombing (Harju Street park and comparable undefined spaces in the bastion belt), streets and public spaces, unused buildings including Rüütli 4 owned by the municipality and Rüütli 6, 8, 10 owned by Tallinn University, and a sequence of hidden courtyards reached via covered passages. The vision must propose programme and function and demonstrate how these materialise in spatial and architectural form. Winning projects will be exhibited in the main exhibition of TAB 2026, and an atlas of selected concepts will be presented to the City of Tallinn.

Requirements

The competition is anonymous. All entries must be identified only by a project code of at least eight alphanumeric characters that does not reveal the identity of the authors. The working language is English. Submissions are digital only and must be sent as a single ZIP or RAR folder (maximum 2 GB) via WeTransfer to info@tab.ee. Each submission must include: an abstract of maximum 300 words; a cover image or up to three key visuals in PNG format at 4,266 x 3,200 pixels, 300 dpi; and an A3 digital project presentation in PDF format with a maximum of 15 pages incorporating all graphic material. Competition materials are available for download via the TAB 2026 website.

Jury

1. Klaske Havik – Architect and academic (full affiliation to be confirmed)
2. Triin Talk – Heritage and conservation specialist, PhD candidate and researcher, Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), Tallinn. Research focuses on the sustainability of historic urban environments with emphasis on Tallinn’s Old Town.
3. Keiti Lige – Architect and Visions Architect, City of Tallinn; member of architectural collective KEHA; curator of Estonia’s pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
4. Siiri Vallner – Architect and partner, Kavakava, Tallinn. Co-author of the Tallinn Main Street project along the edge of the Old Town; recognised for public buildings, heritage sites, and research-based projects.
5. Siim Tanel Tõnisson – Architect, co-founder of Stuudio TÄNA, and TAB 2026 curator. Research focused on Tallinn’s bastion belt and its structural role in shaping the city’s spatial organisation.

Registration Fees

Prizes and Rewards

Total cash prize pool is €8,499.97. All winning and shortlisted projects are exhibited as part of TAB 2026 and included in an atlas presented to the City of Tallinn. The unconventional prize amounts (ending in .99) are a deliberate reference to the “How Much?” curatorial theme of TAB 2026.

Key Dates

✦ ArchUp Competition Review

The TAB 2026 Vision Competition is one of the most intellectually substantive open urban design competitions currently active in Europe. The brief is rare in its specificity and honesty: it does not frame the Old Town as a heritage problem to be solved but as a political and economic contradiction to be interrogated, asking participants to work simultaneously with UNESCO conservation constraints, market realities, social exclusion, and post-war urban void. The jury is locally expert and internationally credible, with Triin Talk’s conservation scholarship, Siiri Vallner’s direct authorship on adjacent public space projects, and Keiti Lige’s Venice Biennale curatorial work providing exactly the disciplinary range the brief requires. The unconventional prize figures ending in .99 are a deliberate curatorial gesture that signals the competition’s engagement with its own theme rather than a mere procedural detail. The anonymity requirement and English-language mandate make it genuinely international. The atlas format, presenting selected entries to the City of Tallinn, gives the competition a real civic dimension beyond exhibition. For architects and urbanists working with historic urban environments, heritage adaptation, and socially sustainable urbanism, this is among the most serious briefs available right now.

Final Thoughts

TAB 2026 “From Void to Value” is a free, anonymous, one-stage international competition with a genuinely complex urban brief, a locally expert jury, a total cash prize pool of nearly €8,500, and direct civic relevance through its atlas presentation to the City of Tallinn. Submissions close 27 April 2026 at 23:59 EET via WeTransfer to info@tab.ee. Competition materials at 2026.tab.ee/competitions/vision-competition.

Registration Deadline

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