FORESTONE

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Completed:

2025

Use:

Cabin

Team:

IAAC MAEBB Cohort 2024-2025

Forestone is a 20-square-meter timber cabin designed and built by the 2025 cohort of IAAC's Master in Ecological Architecture and Advanced Construction, situated in the Pyrenees Mountains in Alinyà, Spain. The project was conceived within the Bio for Piri initiative — a regenerative forestry program focused on sustainable forest management practices in Catalonia. The brief was broad-reaching, but simple: design and construct a cabin in dialogue with sustainable forest management for the region.

To fulfill this brief, our cohort studied the existing context to discover key materials that speak to the broader regional bioeconomy: fire, wood, wool, and stone.

Fire — considered the single biggest threat to the maturing forest, with increased frequency and intensity of mega-fires in the region, prevention takes multiple shapes: first through sustainable thinning and timber harvesting practices, which decrease the potential fuel for out-of-control wildfires. The exterior pine cladding was charred by the students using the Japanese Yakisugi technique — a process that protects against moisture, insects, and decay, and speaks thematically to the threat facing the larger forest ecosystem.

Wood — local trees were harvested to form the CLT structure. Inside, structure and furniture collapse into a single material system — custom CLT elements fabricated at Valldaura Labs from locally sourced timber form the bed, seating, and built-in cabinetry, treating the managed forest not as backdrop but as building material.

Wool — ties back to sustainable forest management, as sheep have for centuries played an integral role in thinning the underbrush of the forest — the kindling that starts fires. Partnering with local sheep farmers and Dutch artist Rian van Dijk, our cohort processed the wool and hand-dyed it using natural dyes harvested from the forest to create the textiles and bedding that furnish the space.

Stone — the volume of the cabin itself is conceived as a stone that has come to rest on the slope, its inclined walls and angled roof calibrated to program, climate, and solar orientation while framing views into the surrounding mountains. A hand-carved stone washbasin and stone door handle for the bathroom tie the theme back in materially.

The cabin was designed from the outset as a replicable prototype: dry-assembled, modular, and dismountable — a proposal for how small-scale architecture might inhabit forest ecosystems without foreclosing their futures.

Features

Designboom

Role:

Design
Construction
Photographer

Team:

IAAC MAEBB Cohort 2024-2025

Build Team:

Tallfusta
Fustes Sebastià

Partners:

Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera
MónNatura Pirineu