m²ft architects Stacks Forest Pruning Waste into a Habitat Tower on a Former Tennis Court in Cesena

In the Romagna hills above Cesena, an asphalt tennis court has sat abandoned for decades while the forest slowly takes it back. m²ft architects, led by Flavio Martella and Maria Vittoria Tesei, placed a 10 m² pavilion exactly where the hard surface meets the regrowing trees. They built it with pruning waste and dry branches collected from the adjacent woodland, working with forestry consultant Beatrice Tesei. HUT-SPOT is small enough to dismiss as a garden folly. We think it deserves a closer look.

The interesting part is not the branches. It is the argument the branches make. The designers frame HUT-SPOT as a refuge shared by humans and other species, an answer to habitat fragmentation, and a structure that is meant to change through decay and natural succession. Most architecture treats deterioration as failure. This pavilion treats it as the brief. A timber rack holds the forest's own offcuts in place long enough for insects, fungi and the occasional reader to move in, and then the forest gets to finish the job.

A Tower at the Line Between Asphalt and Forest

Seen from across the clearing, the pavilion reads as a single slatted tower set against a dense wall of evergreens. Its placement is the first design decision and probably the most important one. The edge of a forest is an ecotone, where two habitats overlap and species diversity tends to concentrate. Putting the structure there, rather than deep in the woods or in the middle of the open court, places it where wildlife is already moving through.

The loose pile of cut branches on the mown lawn shows where the material came from. Forest management produces this waste continuously, and it is usually chipped, burned or left to rot in heaps. HUT-SPOT turns that heap into something legible: the same biomass, sorted and held at human scale.

A Frame Packed with the Forest's Offcuts

The photographs settle a question the project description leaves open. There is a structure underneath the branches: a pale timber frame of posts, rails and battens that forms stacked bays, each packed with bundled twigs. The modules step within a rectangular grid, giving the stepped, ziggurat-like profile the architects describe, and a translucent corrugated sheet caps the whole thing.

This division of labor is honest. The timber does the structural work and the branches do the ecological work. Nobody is pretending that dry twigs can carry load. The frame works like a bookshelf for biomass, and the front elevation, with a seated figure framed in the central bay, makes clear that people are only one of the occupants it was designed for.

Room for One Reader

The human program is modest. A central bay becomes a seat, with shelves of stacked twigs on either side, and the narrow passage through the frame opens onto the clearing beyond. A reader holding an open book between the branches is the image the architects clearly want you to remember. It is a pleasant one, but it also tells you something about the hierarchy here: the person sits inside a habitat, not the other way around.

There is a quiet pleasure in that inversion. You sit at the scale of a bird box enlarged, with the smell of drying wood and whatever happens to be crawling through the bundles behind your shoulder. The pavilion asks you to tolerate company.

Straps, Brackets and a Plastic Roof

Up close, the detailing is frankly utilitarian. Diagonal braces, metal brackets, an orange beam and bright orange straps hold the frame together, and the roof is a translucent corrugated fiberglass sheet. None of it is disguised. The orange gives the structure a site-equipment quality, closer to scaffolding than to craft joinery.

That candor fits a project about process, though it also exposes a tension. The branches are meant to decay and return to the soil, while the fiberglass roof, metal fixings and synthetic straps are not. We would like to know what the end-of-life plan is for those components. A habitat built to rot gracefully has to decide which of its parts get to leave, and when.

Grounding on Pallets and Concrete Block

The tower sits on a pallet platform over grey hollow concrete blocks, which keeps the timber off the damp ground and lifts the stack clear of standing water. The blocks also add something useful: their hollow cores are the kind of cool, sheltered crevice that amphibians and invertebrates look for at ground level.

The end view shows how thin the frame really is. It is a narrow slab more than a hut, and this keeps the branch bundles shallow enough to dry out and stay ventilated rather than compacting into a soggy mass. Whether that was a deliberate decision about moisture or simply a result of the module size, it is the right proportion for a structure that relies on air moving through dead wood.

Tenants with More Legs

A rhinoceros beetle crawling along a timber rail, with an ant close by, is the strongest evidence that the idea works. Saproxylic insects, the ones that depend on dead and decaying wood, are among the groups that suffer most when forests are tidied, and a vertical stack of branches gives them a dense, sheltered supply of exactly what they need.

The image of a hand pulling a branch from a bundle hints that the filling is not fixed. Bundles can be removed, replaced and topped up as they break down, which turns maintenance into a seasonal ritual tied to the forest's own pruning cycle. Lit at night in the dark clearing, the rack looks almost like a lantern. That is a reminder that the human visitor is temporary, while the structure's other occupants keep their own hours.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reduces the pavilion to a small black footprint inside the rectangle of the old court, ringed by canopy, and the sections place the slim tower on a sloping, fenced hillside. The assembly diagrams are the most revealing drawings in the set. A base module and a central seat module are built in nine steps each and then joined under a roof in six more, which suggests a kit that could be repeated or relocated across other clearings.

The exploded axonometric lists every layer by number, from concrete blocks to battens, twig filling and the fiberglass roof. The final diagram surrounds the tower with birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, fungi and bacteria tied together in a biomass cycle. It is the project's real elevation: a drawing of who lives here and how the material moves.

Why This Project Matters

HUT-SPOT is tiny, and its claims are larger than its square meters. Still, it gives a concrete shape to an idea that often stays abstract in conversations about multispecies design. Rather than adding a bug hotel to a building, it makes the habitat the building and lets the human use fit inside. It reuses waste the site already produces, it occupies a degraded surface instead of fresh ground, and it accepts decay as the way the project will develop over time.

The open questions are worth asking because the premise is strong. How will the synthetic parts be removed when the branches have gone back to the soil? How should success be measured: by beetle counts, or by how much of the old court the forest has reclaimed? A modular kit like this could become a tool for forest managers anywhere pruning waste piles up. We would like to see it monitored and repeated, and allowed to fall apart on schedule.

HUT-SPOT Pavilion by m²ft architects (Flavio Martella, Maria Vittoria Tesei), Cesena, Italy. Area: 10 m². Completed: 2026. Forestry consultant: Beatrice Tesei. Photography by Flavio Martella.

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