Place of Passage
Ķemeri National Park, Latvia
2018







A long, low timber structure lies horizontal amid the forest’s verticals – its material drawn from the context and its scale calibrated to the clearing it addresses. The building is less an enclosure than a place of passage: positioned as a threshold to the forest, it marks the point where the world of people gives way to the world of nature.
The architecture is experienced as a journey rather than an object. Views are framed along the approach; a sightline beginning at the entrance culminates in the structure’s full length, so that arrival and understanding coincide. The horizontality of the intervention does not compete with the forest — it intensifies its verticality, as a horizon intensifies the sky. What remains is almost nothing: a line to move along and through. And yet that line reorganises the entire experience of the landscape around it.
Information
Type Cultural
Status Competition
Team Madhusudhan Chalasani, Jesús Garrido Valdivia, Carlos Gonzalvo, Vamsi Kundanam, Bharat Kumar Thota, Bob Peniel, Reethi Tallam and Niharika Sanyal