Opening of the Vision Competition Exhibition: “From Void to Value: Revisioning Tallinn’s Old Town”

The Vision Competition Exhibition “From Void to Value: Revisioning Tallinn’s Old Town” presents proposals addressing one of the most contested urban sites in Tallinn’s historic centre: the southern edge of the Old Town, where an unresolved urban void continues to interrupt the spatial continuity between the medieval core and the surrounding city.

Tallinn’s Old Town is exceptionally well preserved partly because historical economic scarcity limited large-scale renewal. Modern street grids did not replace the medieval street and plot structure, and later façade updates often retained medieval load-bearing systems. Through continued use and conservation, the material costs of the area have been amortised over time, making the Old Town physically cost-effective at the urban scale.

Socially, however, the Old Town has become expensive and increasingly detached from local everyday life. Comprehensive heritage protection, post-1990s privatisation, neoliberal reforms, tourism and commercialisation have shaped its current condition. The competition frames this tension – between low long-term physical cost and high social cost – as its central problem.

The competition site lies on the southern edge of the Old Town, forming a connective axis between the medieval core and surrounding districts. It is one of the few blocks destroyed during the Red Army air bombing of Tallinn in 1944, after which the city lost approximately one third of its building stock. Since then, redevelopment debates have repeatedly returned to the site, making it a persistent planning controversy.

Today, the area functions as one of the Old Town’s few green public spaces and is also used seasonally as an ice rink. At the same time, the open void interrupts the spatial continuity valued in the Old Town’s urban structure and weakens the connection between Town Hall Square and Freedom Square.

Participants were asked to treat the site not as a single object, but as a set of typologies reflecting the Old Town as a whole. The competition invited proposals for a coherent strategy for urban resilience and social sustainability in a historic context. Submissions were expected to propose programme and function, and to demonstrate how these could materialise in spatial and architectural form.

The exhibited projects:

1st Place – A PLACE RECLAIMED by Valerii Krinberg, Martin Sepp, Kaari Maria Tirmaste, Mikael Ristmets, Patrick Liik
2nd Place – REAP WHAT YOU SOW by Fred-Eric Pavel, Karmo Viherpuu
3rd Place – URBAN HOME by Michal Romaniuk

Honourable Mentions:

• The Living Void – Salvatore Settecasi
• PARK4ALL – Arnd Dewald
• STITCHING THE SEAMS – Lisa Kaufmann
• GRAFTING DOMESTICITY – Endèma
• AT LEAST 101€ – Zhiyuan Jiang, Meiling Chen, Yu Chen