RE-FORESTED

RE-FORESTED

A WILDERNESS LODGE AT CARIBOU POND

MAINE HUTS + TRAILS

CARABASSETT VALLEY, ME  |  2018 (UNBUILT)

This unbuilt design proposal is for a full-service wilderness lodge located in the remote backcountry woods of Maine’s Carabassett Valley. Part of a 180-mile network of recreational trails intended to facilitate access to the ”wilderness experience”, its design challenges the romantic idea of an “untouched” nature as both a practical and conceptual issue.  The forest in this area is intensively used as both a recreational amenity and an economic resource.   Skiing, camping, hiking and commercial timbering bring tens of thousands of people into the landscape year-round.  Each use impacts the forest ecology by shaping the physical form of the forest, leaving a network of pathways and clearings as scars writ large.

The new lodge reclaims a former logging zone for recreational purposes.  Itoccupies a sloped de-forested clearing at the nexus of old logging roads, along the Caribou Pond ring road.  This linear structure is carefully positioned to re-make the forest edge as a liminal space between a new growth forest and de-forested clearing.  It is an open, one-story pavilion whose elemental form and organization, breezeway and porches, open up to a series of leftover logging roads that will become a new system of hiking and mountain bike trails.  A series of A-frame structures on its rooftop provide panoramic views downslope across Caribou Valley, towards Caribou Pond and Sugarloaf Mountain.

The building is literally made of the forest which it seeks to restore, and it re-phrases the spatial character and tectonic of the forest as an architectural vocabulary of column and articulated canopy.  The design features mass timber construction and is intended as a prototypical building system suitable and reconfigurable for other lodge site locations in the trail system.  Constructed of prefabricated CLT elements, the building maintains a minimal footprint during its construction and use-life, and is able to be disassembled (or moved) in the future, when the surrounding forest has reached maturity and is again ready to be harvested for timber.

Here, relations between resource conservation and consumption are conceived as part of a circular economy between sustainable forestry and building. By facilitating the recreational use of the forest, the lodge actively participates in the restoration and conservation of the forest as wilderness and habitat, which subsequently enables its future viability as a material resource. Expanding the idea of sustainable lifecycles and embodied energy to encompass the use of the forest in its socio-economic totality is reflected in the continuous exchange of forest for timber, buildings for habitat, and “wilderness” for “architecture”.