A New Wood: Walking Through Little Red Riding Hood as Landscape Architecture

What happens when you stop illustrating a fairy tale and start building it? A New Wood takes the story of Little Red Riding Hood and dismantles it into spatial operations: curving circulation, thresholds of visibility, timber interiors that shift from comfort to enclosure. The forest is not depicted. It is constructed as a landscape visitors physically walk through, encountering the narrative structure of departure, initiation, and return with their own feet on the path.

Designed by Reyhaneh Rabiei and Belén Butragueño, the project was shortlisted in A New Wood, a competition that challenged designers to reimagine woodland environments. Rather than treating the Brothers Grimm story as a series of scenes to illustrate, the proposal translates its narrative arc into paths, buildings, materials, vegetation, and changing spatial conditions. Little Red Riding Hood's movement through the forest becomes a metaphor for the journeys people experience throughout life, where curiosity leads to uncertainty, uncertainty creates experience, and experience gradually produces knowledge.

A Closed Circuit That Mirrors the Hero's Journey

The site plans reveal the project's organizational logic immediately. Winding paths thread between mature trees and building footprints, forming a circulation network that refuses straight lines. The route is structured around three phases: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Critically, these phases form a closed circuit rather than a linear path from A to B. The end of one experience becomes the beginning of another, reinforcing the idea that learning is continuous rather than final.

The aerial perspectives show how pavilion buildings are embedded within the tree canopy rather than placed against it. Architecture and landscape are not separate systems here; the buildings appear as events along the route, partially visible through gaps in the vegetation. This controlled visibility is deliberate. It encourages forward movement while sustaining a sense that something remains just beyond perception, turning landscape architecture into a tool for anticipation.

Getting Lost as an Architectural Strategy

A figure in a red cape walks along a white curved path through a park of mature trees. The image captures the initiation stage of the project, the phase that corresponds to Little Red Riding Hood wandering off the expected route. Here, the circulation network deliberately breaks away from conventional direct paths. Routes curve, intersect, divide, reconnect, and loop through the woodland. In traditional circulation planning, efficiency determines the shortest connection between two points. This proposal takes the opposite approach.

The design intentionally gives visitors multiple possibilities for exploration, arguing that the route and the destination are equally important because each gives meaning to the other. Getting temporarily lost becomes part of the architectural experience. The journey is neither completely path-centric nor completely goal-centric. It is both, and that ambiguity is the point. The solitary figure on the curved white path captures this perfectly: the walker is clearly somewhere specific, yet the destination is nowhere in sight.

Timber Interiors and the Shift from Safety to Enclosure

Inside the pavilions, the material language shifts to dark timber flooring and vertical wood paneling under diffused natural light. The atmosphere is warm but slightly compressed, a spatial quality that mirrors the narrative tension of entering the wolf's domain. The vertical paneling creates a rhythmic texture that recalls the density of forest trunks, collapsing the distinction between interior and exterior, between shelter and the woods themselves.

Light enters from above, filtered and indirect, reinforcing the sense of being beneath a canopy even when standing inside a building. The design does not rely on dramatic darkness or overt theatrics. Instead, the interiors use proportion, material, and light quality to produce an emotional register that shifts as visitors move deeper into the narrative sequence. The familiarity of wood becomes subtly unsettling when the spatial proportions tighten.

Diagramming Narrative into Copper, Path, and Plan

The conceptual diagram sheet pulls the project apart into its constituent systems: axonometric drawings of the site paths, floor plans of the pavilion structures, and a copper material palette that anchors the buildings' exterior identity. The axonometric views make visible how the path network operates as a branching, looping organism rather than a hierarchical circulation diagram. Floor plans are compact, organized around the narrative moments they serve rather than programmatic efficiency.

The copper palette is a noteworthy choice. It introduces a material that weathers and transforms over time, echoing the project's central argument that experience changes both the traveler and the environment. As the copper oxidizes, the pavilions will visually merge more deeply with the surrounding woodland greens and earth tones, blurring the boundary between architecture and landscape in a slow, seasonal performance.

Why This Project Matters

Narrative architecture is easy to propose and difficult to execute without descending into literal illustration. What makes this project compelling is its refusal to depict the fairy tale. There is no wolf statue, no grandmother's cottage replica, no red signage. Instead, the story is translated into spatial operations: controlled visibility during departure, deliberate disorientation during initiation, and the cyclical return that reframes the familiar as something newly understood. The architecture communicates through the experience of moving through it.

Rabiei and Butragueño demonstrate that landscape architecture can carry emotional and narrative weight without abandoning rigorous spatial thinking. The looping paths, timber interiors, and weathering copper surfaces work together as a coherent system, one that respects both the fairy tale's structure and the discipline's capacity to shape experience through topography, material, and sequence. In a competition field asking designers to reimagine the woods, this entry found its answer not in the trees themselves but in the act of walking among them.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: reyhaneh rabiei, Belén Butragueño

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Project credits: A New Wood by reyhaneh rabiei, Belén Butragueño A New Wood (uni.xyz).