Ecological Rooms
Reframing forest management as a catalyst for playful engagement

This project investigates how strategic forest thinning can become both an ecological intervention and a spatial generator for family-friendly nature play. Working within a densely wooded two-acre site at Breaks Interstate Park, the design challenges conventional assumptions about trails as purely circulatory lines, instead treating them as experiential frameworks shaped by process, structure, and sensory encounter. The three “ecological rooms”—Climb, Creep, and Crawl—emerge from topographic manipulation and canopy adjustment, revealing latent spatial qualities within the forest.

Through iterative modeling and field-based research, the project examines landscape as an active system where management, play, and ecology operate in continuous dialogue. Rather than imposing objects onto the site, each room is formed through the selective removal and repurposing of material, allowing branches, logs, and woodchips to become interpretive elements and pathways. The result reframes thinning not as extraction, but as a generative process that restores forest health while creating spaces for curiosity, movement, and multisensory exploration.