Path Linked Forest: A Fairy Tale Becomes a Landscape of Choice and Discovery

What if the forest Little Red Riding Hood walks through is not a threat to survive but a landscape to experience? Path Linked Forest takes one of the oldest narrative tropes in Western storytelling, the dark and dangerous wood, and recasts it as an environment of encounter: flowers, ponds, farmland, orchards, animals, and neighboring communities all woven into a network of paths that lead, eventually, to Grandma's house. The destination is fixed. The journey never has to be the same twice. That gap between a singular goal and infinite routes becomes the project's central architectural proposition.

Designed by Suily and Jieun Park, this shortlisted entry in the A New Wood competition uses landscape architecture as a storytelling medium. Rather than relying on characters or plot events to carry narrative weight, the proposal shifts that burden onto movement itself: every road, clearing, woodland edge, and cultivated field becomes part of how the story is told.

A Gridded Volume Anchored by Circular Pergolas

The master plan drawing reveals a white gridded volume at the heart of the composition, surrounded by circular vine-covered pergolas that mediate between built structure and open landscape. The geometry is deliberate: the rigid grid of the central building establishes orientation, while the curved pergolas soften the transition toward the organic territory of the forest beyond. The plan reads less like a conventional site layout and more like a diagram of intention, where architecture organizes the starting conditions of the journey without prescribing a single route through the surrounding terrain.

Timber Canopies and Treetop Views

Inside, the architecture frames the forest rather than competing with it. One interior perspective shows a generous open space capped by a timber ceiling, with floor-to-ceiling glazing that dissolves the boundary between shelter and canopy. The view is all treetops under a moody sky, positioning the inhabitant at the same elevation as the forest crown. It is an inversion of the fairy tale's ground-level anxiety: here, the forest is something you look across, not something that looms above you.

A second interior reveals a greenhouse condition where a red tree and a green tree stand within a glazed roof structure, viewed through timber framing. The controlled cultivation of living trees inside architecture speaks directly to the project's thesis: the forest is not something to be excluded or feared but something to be invited in, studied, and experienced on terms that shift between wildness and care. These two interiors together establish a spatial range from panoramic openness to intimate enclosure.

Elevations That Reveal Structure Against Landscape

The back elevation places the timber and glass volumes against a mountain range backdrop, with the enclosed greenhouse visible as a distinct element within the larger composition. What stands out is the transparency: the building does not wall itself off from its setting but instead allows the surrounding topography to register through its skin. The gabled section in the left elevation reinforces this legibility, with internal spaces visible through transparent walls facing forested hills. Structure, program, and landscape become simultaneously readable in a single drawing.

These elevations do important conceptual work beyond describing construction. They show an architecture that treats visibility as a design principle. Little Red Riding Hood's terror in the traditional story comes partly from not being able to see what lies ahead. Here, the built environment does the opposite: it makes the forest legible, accessible, and continuous with the spaces of dwelling.

The Visionary Map as Narrative Architecture

Perhaps the project's most distinctive contribution is its conceptual section drawing, which reads as a visionary map rather than a conventional plan. The site is rendered in two parallel strips with path annotations and embedded landscape images, combining geography, circulation, and artistic interpretation into a single visual narrative. The journey begins near Red Riding Hood's house and town, follows existing infrastructure including the L3152 road, and branches toward different environmental conditions: forests, ponds, farmland, orchards, horse-riding areas, pools, and woodland paths, before arriving at Grandma's house as the final anchor.

The designers associate different locations with paintings and imagined experiences, refusing to flatten the territory into conventional zoning. The result is a map that functions as narrative architecture in its own right. It communicates the project's core idea, choice without disorientation, more powerfully than any single building could. Every route reconnects with the larger network, ensuring that freedom of movement never collapses into aimlessness. The goal-centric design strategy keeps orientation intact while multiplying the possibilities of experience.

Why This Project Matters

Path Linked Forest succeeds because it takes a narrative everyone knows and finds genuine architectural content inside it. The distinction between a fixed destination and variable journeys is not merely a literary device repackaged as design language; it is a real spatial principle with implications for how landscapes are organized, how paths are networked, and how buildings mediate between the known and the unknown. Suily and Jieun Park demonstrate that storytelling and spatial thinking are not separate disciplines but can reinforce each other when the forest itself becomes the medium of communication.

At a moment when landscape architecture often defaults to ecological metrics or parametric optimization, this project reminds us that the experience of moving through a territory, the sequence of encounters, the accumulation of sensory information, the quiet agency of choosing one path over another, remains one of the discipline's most potent tools. The forest does not need to be tamed or feared. It needs to be read.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Suily, JIEUN PARK

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Project credits: Path linked Forest by Suily, JIEUN PARK A New Wood (uni.xyz).