The Reading Room In the Forest
The Reading Room is a retreat space located at DeProef, a new art & ecology hub in the arboretum of Fredriksoord, a UNESCO-listed site in Drenthe, Netherlands.
In the 1700s, this region was part of a social experiment to eradicate urban pover- ty by relocating people into tightly controlled agricultural colonies. While conceived as utopian, the scheme soon turned rigid and colonial. In resistance, some settlers formed “pioneer colonies,” building improvised homes from salvaged materials: stacking peat walls and lighting chimneys overnight to claim protection under a law forbidding eviction from a smoking hearth by morning.
Inspired by this legacy of resilience and self-building, Studio-Method reinterprets these material cultures for today’s ecological urgencies. The Reading Room is a fully circular, low-tech structure made almost entirely from reclaimed materials (fastening material and the semi-transparent roof are new). It applies what the studio calls contingent design, a methodology that embraces improvisation, tri- al-and-error, and bottom-up construction within a classical design framework.
Designed and built by Studio-Method, an independent architecture practice founded in 2022 in Rotterdam, the project was realized through a slow, hands- on process without contractors, consultants, or prefab systems. With a modest €15,000 budget, it became a living-lab for architectural autonomy, material ethics, and radical reuse. The pavilion achieves a 98% recycled mass rate, sequesters an estimated 7 tonnes of CO₂, and records a Milieu Prestatie Gebouwen (environmental performance of building) score of 0.16 — far below the Dutch legal threshold of 0.80, which is expected to be halved in coming years as part of an ambitious national effort to lower carbon emissions.
Materials were sourced hyper-locally, with 30% salvaged directly from the DeProef site. Components include waste wool from farmers’ discarded fleece, reused mineral wool from building renovations, greenhouse extruded acrylic panels, concrete rubble, and salvaged wood from previous constructions. Every element was manually cleaned, restored, and adapted: from washing raw fleece by hand to carefully retrofitting old window frames and scrubbing decades-old acrylic. The process prioritized care and slowness, treating architecture not as production, but as repair — shifting toward an economy of maintenance and reconfiguration.
