OPENING - TAB Pavilion + Installation Competition + Capital-A Affordable Architecture + A Matter of Scale

Resonance

The Installation Programme Competition “Budget Bougie” invited architects to rethink notions of luxury through the lens of limited resources, proposing a temporary outdoor pavilion in front of the Estonian Museum of Architecture in Tallinn’s Rotermann district.

The winning proposal, Resonance by Aru Ma- Architects architectural practice founded in 2021 by Cheng Hao Chung and Zhang Jie, with team members Cui Jiakai and Matteo Minnicelli, and based between Shanghai and Tokyo, was selected for its reinterpretation of luxury as an intensified spatial and atmospheric experience created through ordinary materials and structural ingenuity.
Conceived as a quiet courtyard detached from the intense and noisy atmosphere of Tallinn’s traffic island setting, the installation combines rebar, ropes, limestone, and plywood to create a space of intimacy, resonance, and temporary retreat. Through a carefully balanced tensile structure anchored by a central stone core, the project transforms strict economic and material constraints into an immersive architectural environment shaped by light, wind, sound, and gravity.

Budget Bougie

The Installation Competition Exhibition presents the top 30 submissions selected by the curatorial team for the TAB 2026 Installation Competition. The outdoor gallery presents proposals that show how thoughtful design can transform the everyday into something architecturally significant.

Capital-A Affordable Architecture

Affordability has long been part of political and architectural discourse, yet carries renewed urgency in the context of increasing inequality, housing crises, material scarcity, climate pressures and the growing privatisation of the built environment today. Built into these realities are demands for cheapness and conditions of constraint, yet affordability has shown, time and again, how limitations can also spur ingenuity, situated approaches, social responsibility and long-term thinking. Under these conditions, architecture does not operate at the margins, but at the centre of spatial and social transformation. It is therefore necessary to recenter Affordability as a core spatial question and concern, rather than a peripheral economic one. 

The international studio Capital-A Affordable Architecture addresses this question through the double meaning of its title: “capital” as a linguistic marker of importance, and capital as a literal financial force shaping the built environment. Through this framework, the studio examines how architecture negotiates value and how design can critically engage with systems of production, ownership and distribution.

Universities participating in the studio: University of Applied Arts Vienna / die Angewandte (AT), UMPRUM – Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (CZ), Royal College of Art (UK), Kharkiv School of Architecture (UA), Estonian Academy of Arts (EE). 

A Matter of Scale: Tallinn

The quality of life in European cities is inseparable from their human scale.

The twenty projects collected here have examined this very problem in Tallinn, where human scale is constantly challenged by buildings and urban plans of very different sizes. Layers of Hanseatic, modern, Soviet, and contemporary market-driven developments coexist as much as they clash in Tallinn, conditioned as they are by the city’s distinct natural and cultural conditions.

By integrating analytical and design-based research, the group of young architects presents Tallinn as a blooming urban context in need of permanent restoration, careful densification, and targeted innovation; through strategies of modularity, reprogramming, and completion; and by combining familiar as well as innovative architectural languages and building techniques in the city’s consolidating centralities. Tallinn also appears as a city of contrasting textures; of coarse limestone, timber and ceramic tiles, which are complemented by the smoothness of glass, steel and concrete.

Students: Adrienne Woo Woon Cheong, Agne Daugintyte, Bas Molenaar, Beate Verbeek, Bálint Duma, Daniel Friedrich, Daryln Sia En Lyn, Eline Habraken, Eline de Winter, Ginger Kant, Hao Feng Chuah, Jarl Stok, Liza Verdonk, Marieke van der Linde, Matas Šukys, Neema Gohari, Rojin Sanati Masbughi, Ruben Afman, Samuele Pesce, Tanyadhorn Dumrongkijkarn, Tjitske Henstra, Yan Kiu Lam

Tutors: Jorge Mejía Hernández, Klaske Havik, Matthijs Klooster, Pierre Jennen

Local Partners: Andres Ojari – Estonian Academy of Arts / Laura Linsi and Roland Reema – LLRRLLRR