Quasar Forest: Pipes as Architecture on the Moon and Beyond

What if the entire complexity of sustaining life in space could be distilled into a single architectural element? Quasar Forest answers that question with the pipe: a form that simultaneously structures, circulates, and connects. Pipes carry air, water, and electricity. They frame views. They hold the building up. They multiply across the site like vertical trunks in a forest, casting shadows that ripple across the surface of an adjacent river. It is a project that treats infrastructure not as something to hide behind drywall but as the primary spatial and aesthetic generator.

Designed by Catinca Joita and Stefan Palaghia, Quasar Forest was submitted to the Moontrip 2019 competition. The brief asked participants to imagine architecture tied to the idea of lunar or space travel. Rather than designing a literal moon base, Joita and Palaghia proposed an earthbound structure that operates under the logic of a space colony: every resource must be secured, every system must be visible, and every form must justify its existence. The result is a long, linear building raised on pillar-like tubes along a curved waterfront, somewhere between science center and speculative outpost.

Circular Corridors and the Language of the Pipe

The section drawings reveal how thoroughly the pipe governs interior experience. Corridors are not rectangular passages but circular tubes, their curved walls wrapping around occupants in a way that immediately signals departure from ordinary architecture. Technical sketches alongside the figure study show how these tubes branch and intersect, creating a network of interconnected microcosms radiating from a central spine. The logic is legible: a linear main artery punctuated by perpendicular tubes, each one terminating at a panoramic viewpoint overlooking the surrounding cityscape.

A second section exposes the building's relationship with the ground. The structure is raised on stilts, with a stepped foundation descending below grade. Vertical pillar-like tubes extract and channel resources from the earth, maintaining what the designers describe as a constant energy exchange. The raised posture is both practical (freeing the ground plane for the riverfront landscape) and conceptual, suggesting a structure that hovers between its terrestrial site and some other, more distant territory.

A Structure Reflected in the River

The elevation rendering makes the forest metaphor concrete. A horizontal volume sits on a grid of slender columns, its underside reflected in the water below. The repetition of vertical elements across the facade creates a visual density that mimics the organic layering of tree trunks. Light passes between the columns, and the play of shadow and reflection generates a surreal urban park condition. The building does not merely occupy its riverfront site; it doubles itself in the water, creating a symmetry that blurs the line between built form and natural surface.

A companion drawing introduces a large sphere hovering above the columnar field, reinforcing the cosmic narrative. The partial section beneath it shows how the building's internal volumes nest within the structural framework, their forms dictated by the pipe geometry. The sphere reads as both a programmatic element (perhaps a projection room or exhibition space) and a symbolic anchor, a celestial body grounding the project's speculative ambitions in a recognizable icon.

Plan and Elevation: Angular Roofs Over a Fragmented Interior

The main elevation and floor plan together expose the project's programmatic ambitions. Visitors enter through a grand staircase into a lobby that functions as a distribution hub. From here, one direction leads to conference rooms, a food court, and retail. The other direction opens into experience rooms, laboratories, training sessions, projection rooms, and exhibition areas. The plan is deliberately fragmented: spaces are not stacked into a compact block but strung along the central spine, each one legible as a distinct episode within the larger journey. Angular roof forms rise and fall across the elevation, breaking the horizontal datum and injecting a restless energy into the silhouette.

Siting Between City and Water

The site plan reveals the project's urban strategy. Quasar Forest occupies a curved waterfront zone, mediating between the dense urban fabric on one side and parkland on the other. The building's linear form follows the bend of the river, creating a threshold condition: the pipes and columns establish a permeable edge that invites passage between city and landscape. Rather than turning its back on either context, the project uses its raised structure and forest of vertical elements to weave the two together, allowing light, air, and pedestrian movement to flow through.

Learning Through Immersion, Not Observation

The programme is not a museum. Joita and Palaghia insist on the distinction. Laboratories, training areas, and hands-on exhibition spaces replace passive display. The designers invoke Einstein's dictum that "learning is experience; everything else is just information." Space exploration remains largely abstract to the general public, and Quasar Forest attempts to close that gap through physical engagement. Walking through a pipe-shaped corridor, feeling the curvature of the walls, looking out through a tube to see the city framed at the far end: these are spatial experiences that communicate what a lecture cannot.

Why This Project Matters

Quasar Forest works because it commits fully to a single idea. The pipe is not a decorative motif layered onto a conventional building; it is the building. Structure, circulation, services, spatial character, and urban image all emerge from the same element. That kind of disciplined reductionism is difficult to sustain across an entire project, and while the speculative nature of the competition allows some details to remain unresolved, the consistency of the proposition is impressive.

More broadly, the project raises a question worth asking: what happens when the logics of survival architecture (resource efficiency, systems visibility, structural minimalism) are applied not to a remote colony but to an urban waterfront? The answer, according to Joita and Palaghia, looks like a forest of pipes reflected in a river, a place where the rigour of space travel meets the fluid messiness of life on Earth.

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About the Designers

Designers: Catinca Joita, Stefan Palaghia

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Project credits: Quasar Forest by Catinca Joita, Stefan Palaghia Moontrip 2019 (uni.xyz).