Zaha Hadid Architects wins competition to redesign masterplan for Old City Harbour in Tallinn

Zaha Hadid Architects have won the international competition to design the masterplan for revitalization of the Old City Harbour in Tallinn, Estonia. The team emerged as a winner from a group of 6 shortlisted teams which included AZPML, KCAP Architects & Planners and Helsinki-based ALA Architects. What made ZHA’s design stand out, to the client, was “innovative and integrated approach to Tallinn’s maritime gateway.”

Valdo Kalm, the chairman of the management board of the Port of Tallinn has appreciated Zaha Hadid Architects for having “skillfully creating a balanced connection between urban space and the port area with some carefully considered access roads and traffic solutions”. He also mentions the diagonals running through the pedestrian footpaths that help the design to create a memorable city.

The design shows the use of water features “designed along Reidi Street and their partial – and very smooth and effective – raising of the areas for pedestrians up to another level”. The addition of greenary and an urban square for the area around Admiralty Basin, which stretches from the front of Terminal A to the front of Terminal D, only helps the designers achieve the integration they have been seeking to establish through their design. What also helped them greatly was their ability to lay out a convincing and realistic projection of the implementation of the Masterplan stage by stage, giving them an edge of strong logistics and property development analysis.

Apart from these, the jury also looked at the final entries with an eye to note the designs’ “cohesion with the surrounding environment, the strength of connection between the port and city, the quality of innovation in the solution and the project’s overall feasibility”.

Zaha Hadid Architects is now expected to prepare a scheme by the end of 2017 while working alongside Latvian architectural firm RemPro, engineering consultant Tyrens UK real estate consultants Colliers Estonia and RLB UK and VA-Render for visuals, for the same. The project is aimed at completion by 2030.