KEEPING WARM

This warming hut for the Forks River Trail in Winnipeg, Manitoba was proposed in collaboration with Kristofer Kelly-Frère.  

Chopping wood, felting wool, shoveling snow, skating - activities that spike your body temperature and fend off cold winter nights.This proposal explores the design potential in keeping warm. The friction in cascading snow cements it into a solid mass, and a team carves room for a hearth and seating. Strangers work together to lay down wool for cocoons big enough to be shared. These pods, felted by skaters dragging bundles along the skating path, are dried by the hearth and then hung in nooks to snugly envelop guests as they warm up. 

This warming hut does what its names implies. Requiring intense activity and inputs of energy from its builders, the building empathically keeps them warm. That work is also embedded in the materiality, form, and character of the finished shelter - thereby extending the warming act beyond itself both physically and temporally.