REFORESTED

WILDERNESS LODGE AT CARIBOU POND

CARRABASSETT VALLEY, ME

This is a proposal for a full-service, off-grid lodge located in the remote backcountry woods of Maine.  Part of a new 180-mile network of recreational trails intended to facilitate access to the ”wilderness experience”, its design challenges the romantic idea of an “untouched” nature as both a practical and conceptual issue.  The forest in this area is intensively used as both a recreational amenity and an economic resource. Each use type impacts the forest ecology by shaping the physical form of the forest leaving a network of pathways and clearings as scars writ large.  The lodge occupies a sloped clearing at the nexus of old logging roads, along the Caribou Pond ring road.  The linear structure is positioned to re-make the forest edge as a liminal space between a new growth forest and de-forested clearing.  It is an open pavilion whose elemental form and organization, breezeway and porches, open up to a series of leftover logging roads that will become a new system of hiking and mountain bike trails.  A series of A-frame structures on its rooftop provide panoramic views downslope across Caribou Valley.  The building is made of the forest from which it was harvested.  The design features an extensive use of mass timber construction and is intended as a prototypical building system suitable and reconfigurable for other lodge site locations in the trail system.    Constructed of prefabricated CLT modules, the building maintains a minimal footprint during its construction, use-life, and is able to be disassembled (or moved) in the future, when the Caribou Pond forest has reached maturity and is once again ready to be harvested for timber, and subsequently reforested.