EDIBLE; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism

Curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, the 6th edition of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022, titled EDIBLE; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism opens at the Estonian Museum of Architecture on September 7 and will remain on display until November 20. The exhibition will be followed by a two-day symposium at the Tallinn Creative Hub (Kultuurikatel) on September 8 and 9.

EDIBLE aims to empower architects, planners, and environmental designers to develop a proactive stance on architecture’s expressive capacity to perform circular operations, to produce resources—generate food and energy—as well as to decompose itself and become food. In this exhibition “food” is approached both literally and metaphorically. On the one hand, EDIBLE explores architectural strategies of local production and self-sufficiency, and on the other, operations that use by-products of urban life, replacing the traditional linear systems of “make, use and dispose” with circular systems that aim to limit material and resource loss. EDIBLE reimagines planetary food systems and transfers the metabolism and experiential qualities of the natural world—like growth, decay, digestion, and nutrient release—to the domain of cities and buildings. 

The spatial and existential connections between architecture and food surface in different scales: from the gut of our bodies, to the ecology of territories, and the technology of building systems. With the different thematic entities of the curatorial exhibition, we address three scales: the micro-scale of materials—From Brick to Soil—, the macro-scale of large-scale territories—Food and Geopolitics—and the meso-scale of habitation—the Metabolic Home—, where domestic programs are designed as ecosystems in a feedback chain of resource exchanges. Finally, the Future Food Deal is an open library that exhibits cookbooks, as well as visionary drawings and manifestos, exploring how architecture may respond to the alienation between people and their sources of food provisions in a time of increasing urbanization.

From new breeding practices, farming food waste, to synthetic growth and degrowth, EDIBLE explores the potential of all natural and technological expressions to mitigate the contaminating and extracting nature of our desires and protocols related to the production of the built environment.

Participants include Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation); Hayley Eber and Mae-ling Lokko (The Cooper Union); Alexandre Dubor and Cristian Rizzuti (IAAC-Advanced Architecture Group); Caroline O’Donnell and Freddo Daneshvaran (Ecological Action Lab, Cornell University); Mitchell Joachim and Vivian Kuan (Terreform ONE); Allison Dring (Made of Air); Sille Pihlak and Siim Tuksam (PART); Lola Ben-Alon and Sharon Yavo Ayalon; Iason and Evangelos Pantazis (Topotheque); Andreas Theodoridis and Christina Ciardullo; Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto (ecoLogicStudio); Annika Kaldoja and Kärt Ojavee (Studio Aine); Siim Karro and Karl Pärtel (Myceen); Chiara Farinea (IAAC-Advanced Architecture Group); Philip Maughan and Andrea Provenzano; SPIN Unit; Mason White, Lola Sheppard, and Kearon Roy Taylor (Lateral Office); Robert Charles Johnson; Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth); Anastasios Telios, Despoina Zavraka, Dimitrios Chatzinikolis, and Georgios Grigoriadis; Lydia Kallipoliti, Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Sanjana Lahiri.

TAB Credits: Head Curators: Lydia Kallipoliti & Areti Markopoulou / Local Advisor: Ivan Sergejev / Assistant Curator: Sonia Sobrino Ralston / Production:  Eve Arpo, Anna Lindpere, Anu Lill, Ronja Soopan (Estonian Centre for Architecture) / Graphic design: Stuudio Stuudio (Mikk Heinsoo) / Exhibition design: kse studio (Sofia Krimizi & Kyriakos Kyriakou)