5/2016

 

May 2016

 

Students’ exhibition garden

EMÜS (Estonian Landscape Architecture Student Union) is every year taking part of annual Tallinn Flower Festival. This year’s official themes where terrace gardens and passions in the garden. Students chose the theme Passions in the Garden and designed a showcase garden what will create a lot of intrigue and passionate arguing. Typical beauty flowers weren’t used because the garden was about plants from which you can get substances that can be harmful for you if you use them wrongly, for example alcohol, nicotine and THC.

The garden raises a question in the context where the alcohol misuse is a big problem in Estonia. How can we improve the health and habits of our society? How could our society be healthier and should we continue to stigmatize specific plants and specific recreational drugs but still allow the promotion of alcohol and tobacco as a lifestyle product? Alcohol and THC are hazardous and addictive substances, so why are we promoting one and banning the other?  

The garden was built by the students in one day but the preparations took a few months. In this time the plan and illustrative visuals and texts where created, tobacco and hop plants grown, building materials and oil hemp seeds with the official legal certificate where bought (growing oil hemp what is grown from seeds without the certificate may be taken down).

 

 

Students analysed impacts of a hypothetical wind farm

As part of their master studies, students of Landscape Architecture as well as Landscape Protection and Preservation had to jointly complete a course in landscape and visual impact assessment. The course, led by prof. Simon Bell, involves compiling a report on the landscape impact and visual impact of a hypothetical wind farm development in the vicinity of Tartu. Report was based on extensive map analysis, site visits and cross-validation using a panoramic real-time landscape simulator. The image shown here is an example of simulated wind farm with technical information overlay that was helping students to retrace the location and proportions of the turbines on the photos taken in real landscape.

 

Presentations of core projects on residential areas

End of May is busy not just for students completing their Bachelor or Master theses. Each semester in landscape architecture programme involves a core project that helps to pull together the knowledge and skills covered in different courses. Here a second year bachelor level student Elina Lobunkova is working on an illustrative plan for the residential area planning course project. The course involves coming up with a layout for a residential area, producing the land use and architectural stipulations and technical infrastructure plans supported by urban context analyses. Students must try extra hard to finalise this project documentation perfectly because of the quirky setup that someone else, chosen by lottery, will have to present their work to the course mates.