Paldiski: Landscape + urbanism

Part of the course of landscape architecture, every year a workshop is being held. The habit is to go directly to the site and have a direct contact in the creation of landscape(s). This year the place was Paldiski, which was a former closed military city. Different from previous years was that together with students of architecture, the course was open to urban studies people. The rooms were provided by local municipality. In Paldiski we had bicycle excursions in the city and around the peninsular.

The purpose of the workshop was to find different ways to approach urban landscape and the method was named ‘prototypical’. Which meant, that students formed groups which each looked at one landscape topic such as: 1- geology, plants, climate; 2- new clear plant, pollution; 3- ports, infrastructure; 4- fauna; 5- industry, services; 6- build environment. Then they had to extract the strongest element of their topic and tune it to maximum. Landscape prototype should be seen in this context like any other prototype. Like for example in car industry, where prototypes are made to test certain characteristics and look at different performative aspects. Students were asked to concentrate only to their topic and make “no compromises”. In this way a bottom-up approach was tested, where particular landscape characteristics were enhanced.


6 Groups were mix of 2nd and 5th year students of architecture, to provide more internal discussion in the department. Chair of Urban Studies was represented successfully by two students. The course of landscape architecture is managed by Katrin Koov and the workshop was tutored by her and Kalle Komissarov. Guest critic was Lilia del Rio.

Time of the workshop: 22-24.09.2006
Nr of participants: 25

Text by Kalle Komissarov, photos by Tarmo Stöör