Amber Road Trekking Cabins

The success of the second place proposal lies in its ability to simultaneously delineate the privacy of the individual and promote a collective ethos within a very compact footprint. On the interior, the organization of notched and stacked raw timber walls pinwheel to alternately generate nooks for sleeping and desks for contemplating the landscape. These private spaces surround an open central area for communal cooking, eating, and conversing. The architecture allows the temporary inhabitant to choose between seclusion and company without resorting to the total isolation of autonomous rooms. On the exterior, the stacked timber walls are painted a deep red, and their rotation about the center creates a thickened space with private exterior benches and storage cubbies for firewood.

A simple pitched roof exerts a strong presence over this pinwheeled poché, clearly demarcating the space of sanctuary and transitory shelter from the elements. The project looks to Latvian vernacular building types as formal reference to evoke images of pastoral agricultural structures already present in the region while the red of the exterior wood establishes a familiar and visible language that does not detract from the color palette of the natural landscape. The simple but potent parti of the proposal and the iconic stature of the form combine with the sensitivity of its construction details to produce a proposal that is ultimately buildable and architecturally responsible in the context of the Latvian wilderness.