If a Tree Falls in the Forest - Three Interventions in the Swedish Forest to Come

Abstract: Our thesis project consists of three architectural interventions: The Mushroom, The Gnat and The Snake, fitting into a vision of a Swedish forest managed in a more sustainable way. A future in which the practice of clear-felling has been abandoned in favor of alternative methods falling under the umbrella term Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF). As the biological aspects of forestry is not our area of expertise, we have investigated what this reorganization at large would mean for the Swedish landscape, economy and society. Where it becomes a question for architecture. When the timber industry looses its hegemony over the forest, the forest becomes available to different uses. For life and recreation, and for the production of forest goods other than timber, such as wild game meat, berries, and mushrooms. These activities are able to take place within the same space as forestry, thereby overcoming the spatial separation of functions we see today. Our interventions work by docking onto different points of today’s logistics flow, in order to later replace them. They take into account more of the different values and users of the forest which we have identified. The project follows the flow of goods from the forest as they make their way towards the larger markets. The Mushroom is an outpost in the middle of the productive forest which supplies the surrounding area with the necessary infrastructure in order to extract goods from it, doubling as a recreational dwelling. One of these can be placed every 30 km. The Gnat is a tower structure containing multiple different functions ranging from marking the pick-up spot for the harvested timber, functioning as a hunting tower, shelter and storage. Many of them are placed along forest roads. The Snake is a local processing plant managing small-scale refinement of the goods of the forest close to their site of harvest, thus channeling some of the economical flow back to the communities living of the forest. Together they form a complete series of infrastructure demonstrating how we could organize the future Swedish forest.