country life

olivino, latvia



2018

Country Life is a shared cabin in the dense forest of Olivino, Latvia along a rugged hiking trail. The project explores a place of shared living in a non-urban setting - a domestic landscape embedded in the forest. The cabin borrows familiar features and materials from the cabin typology such as shingle cladding, wood framing, gabled roof, thatching, and punched openings. This familiarity gives way to an alluring strangeness which develops as these forms and materials transform through shifts such as multi-directional shingles, the thatch roof growing on the interior, and the dissolution of the extruded bar.

As the form opens up to allow people to move freely between its spaces and the site, it promotes a quality of spillage between gradations of inside and outside. This openness encourages travelers to drift through the structure and find multiple areas for relaxing and spending time together. The relationship between materials and landscape become amplified through the growth that crosses the boundaries of what could be considered interior. The plantings blur the reading of what is natural and what is not in order to create a synthetic condition of a new wildness. The raw plantings follow the geometry of the form creating a flickering condition between natural outcroppings and the evolution of geometric precision into wildness. The thatched grass roof, common of the local vernacular, slips from top to side and eventually becomes volume in the creation of a new organization from a familiar material application. The thickened walls of growth allow one to inhabit nature rather than being sheltered against it. The plumbing becomes embedded in the thermal masses acting as the hearth of the cabin while everything else flows more fluidly without fixed purpose. The cabin acts as a place to engage with nature, local materials and building traditions to promote interest in creating a community connected to both people and nature.