Assistant Professor Alissa North, Director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program, recently visited Tallinna Tehnikakõrgkooli (Tallinn Technical University) to speak to architecture students. Her lecture focused on ideas and approaches to landscape ecology, as demonstrated through the built and proposed works of her firm, North Design Office. Her talk was followed by a workshop, wherein groups of students imagined development scenarios based on an imagined increase of 200,000 people in Estonia with focus on the intervening landscapes. 

The scenarios included single-family housing, city block mid-density development, and high-rise buildings. Students were asked to examine a diagrammatic section drawing and as a group discuss how best to allocate their development scenarios along the section. The section represented the proposed Rail Baltica route from Tallinn, southward. Students redrew their transects across Estonia, with great thought regarding the landscape. Groups then presented their scenarios, outlining the benefits and disadvantages for the landscape, based on their chosen development distribution. The exercise was aimed at getting students to quickly ascertain relationships between building density and landscape typologies, with sensitivity toward principles of landscape ecology. 

While in Estonia, North Design Office — the firm of Alissa and Peter North — was given special mention in the Vision Competition 2015 Epicentre of Tallinn competition for the project Rukkilill. The entry was assisted by MLA graduate Rui Relix, and current MLA 3 students Jordan Duke, Emma Mendel, and Anna Rosen. The aim of the vision competition was to find a design solution for road intersections in the future, when only self-driving cars drive on city streets. The central traffic junction in Tallinn, the Viru intersection, was chosen as a test site.

“The technological efficiencies of the digital revolution allow nature to return to the city with unprecedented diversity and connectivity,” writes North. “In the era of self-driving cars, the chaotic mass of hard-paved roadways transforms to become the tranquil country meadows, sought upon escape of the city.”

For more information about the project, visit: http://vision2015.tab.ee/en/entries/rukkilill/