We wanted to explore the familiar image of the cabin and question what it might become: a piece of microarchitecture, an installation, a sheltering pavilion, a place of passage, or a place in which to gather.
Set within a clearing at the intersection of two hiking trails, particularly busy at weekends, the site led us to reinterpret the archetypal woodland cabin of childhood. We imagined a shared place, open to all: a shelter where hikers can pause along their journey, and where residents of the neighbouring villages can come to read, meditate, meet, or simply contemplate the landscape. Through these free and spontaneous uses, the cabin becomes a pavilion for everyone. The project takes its name, The Hearth, from the idea of a shared centre around which people gather.
Beyond its function as a shelter, we considered the sensations this microarchitecture might evoke. How might it alter our relationship with our surroundings? How might it make us conscious of our own scale when confronted with the vastness of the landscape? How can such a small space, paradoxically, reveal the magnitude of nature?
Within the Annecy landscape, where three mountain ranges of the Western Alps, the Bauges, the Bornes, and the Aravis, converge, a small grove occupies a clearing.
From this point, the imposing Dent de Cons dominates the landscape. At the foot of the mountain, the young trees that form the grove reach towards the sky, echoing the taller, denser forest that surrounds them.
From the centre of the clearing, the landscape unfolds. Each tree is part of a larger system; together, they form the forest.
The pavilion constructs a void around one tree, revealing it as a singular presence within this system. It sets the tree apart from its surroundings, allowing it to be observed and understood anew.
The visitor can therefore perceive the tree as either the starting point or the culmination of a journey through the successive layers of the landscape: the mountains and waterways, the valley, the forest, the clearing, and finally the grove in which the pavilion gathers around the tree.
Without the tree at its centre, the pavilion ceases to exist. Without the pavilion around it, the tree ceases to exist as an individual.
To make this encounter possible, the pavilion establishes a ritual of approach. It compels visitors to slow down, lower themselves, and cross the threshold alone before gradually discovering the tree around which the structure is organised. This attention to gesture, and to a sense of humility in the presence of the living world, echoes the chashitsu, the Japanese pavilion traditionally dedicated to the tea ceremony.
Usually built of wood and slightly raised above the ground, the chashitsu maintains a delicate relationship with its surroundings. The pavilion reinterprets some of these principles: raised on slender supports, it minimises its impact on the ground, while the tall, abundant herbaceous layer conceals its structure and lends it a sense of lightness.
The chanoyu (japanese tea ceremony) originally took place in small, restrained spaces entered through a very low doorway known as the nijiri-guchi (entrance door), which required guests to bow as a gesture of respect and humility. The pavilion translates this principle into a single, deliberately low opening through which visitors enter one at a time.
Within the pavilion, the tree becomes the central character. It takes the place of the traditional fire: a living hearth that draws visitors together.
Visitors are invited to sit within the inner chamber as the tree gradually reveals itself. Only then, seated on the edge of the pavilion, their feet suspended above the ground, do they find themselves momentarily alone with the tree, in an almost solemn encounter.
The narrow openings created by the structure provide a succession of vertical, fragmentary views across the landscape in every direction, without ever revealing it in its entirety. The inward-sloping roof further intensifies the presence of the tree: light filters through its foliage and diffuses into the central space, while rainwater is channelled towards the centre of the open patio.
Upon leaving the pavilion, the visitor’s gaze rises from the ground, having been directed downwards while passing through the low entrance. The scale of the landscape and the surrounding mountains is suddenly revealed once more. Initially perceived as an isolated individual at the centre of the structure, the tree regains its place within the larger system to which it belongs. Around it extends the grove, then the forest, before the gaze reaches across the valley towards the mountains.
The pavilion thus reveals the passage from the individual to the system: from the tree to the forest, and from the forest to the landscape that contains it.
