Still at Work Plants a Hay-Walled A-Frame Pavilion on a French Cliff for Cows and Humans Alike

On a cliff above the villages of Faverges-Seythenex, reachable only on foot, a six-square-meter timber frame stuffed with hay stands among grazing cows and alpine wildflowers. Designed by Austeja Judzentyte and Takumi Goto of Still at Work for the 2021 Festival des Cabanes, the Banquet du belvédère Pavilion is nominally a cabin, but it functions more like a piece of landscape furniture: a place to sit, look out over the lake, and share the meadow with whatever animals wander by.

What makes the project worth lingering on is not its scale but its premise. The architects describe the pavilion as growing roots in an existing use of the place: meeting, gathering, appreciating the view. The hay infill panels are not decorative; they are an explicit invitation to livestock and wildlife to approach, sniff, nibble, and treat the structure as part of their terrain. Architecture here is less about enclosure and more about setting a table that nobody owns.

An A-Frame That Belongs to the Field

The silhouette is instantly legible: a steep A-frame with thin timber members that taper to a ridge, standing upright in a forest clearing at the edge of a hillside. From a distance, particularly at twilight, the structure reads as a dark triangular mark against the tree canopy, more like a signal than a building. Its proportions are deliberately slender, almost tentative, as if the pavilion is trying not to displace more air than necessary.

The choice of an A-frame is practical for a temporary festival structure (it resists rain and snow load with minimal joinery) but also symbolic. It echoes the pitch of alpine roofs visible in the valley below, compressing the regional vernacular into its simplest geometric idea. Vertical wood cladding and the bundled straw panels give the walls a rough, agricultural texture that ages into the landscape rather than sitting on top of it.

Hay as Architecture, Hay as Invitation

The straw-filled wall panels are the project's most distinctive move. Bundled hay is packed between timber slats, creating a surface that is insulating, fragrant, and edible. The architects are explicit about the dual audience: the materiality is intended to lure animals to the structure, blurring the boundary between built shelter and pastoral landscape. A deer appears in the elevation drawing, not as a flourish but as a programmatic user.

Detailing is restrained but considered. The straw bundles are compressed tightly enough to stay in place under wind but loosely enough to maintain their organic, almost shaggy appearance. Where the hay meets the timber frame, there is no trim or capping: the transition is raw, letting individual stalks fray outward. It is a smart inversion of architectural polish, one that makes the pavilion feel assembled rather than manufactured.

The Ladder and the View

A timber ladder leans against the structure's edge, suggesting that the pavilion is not just a shelter but a lookout. The interior is spare: a bench, an open roof structure, and a framed view outward through the dense forest canopy. Sitting inside, you look up through the triangular aperture at a lattice of branches and sky, a deliberate compression of the panoramic view available just a few steps away at the cliff's edge.

The open front facade invites entry without a door. There is no threshold ritual, no compression-and-release sequence. You walk in, sit down, and you are already in the landscape. The bench faces outward, reinforcing the architects' idea that the pavilion exists to frame a social act (the banquet of the title) rather than to provide shelter in any serious sense.

Sited on the Edge

The pavilion's siting is its second most important design decision after the hay walls. Perched on a forested hillside above the valley, it commands a view over rooftops, church spires, and the distant Alpine range. The clearing where it sits is just large enough to hold the structure and a small timber deck, surrounded on all sides by mature trees that filter light and frame glimpses of the panorama below.

At dusk, when the valley fills with blue shadow and the structure catches the last warm light, the pavilion's purpose becomes viscerally clear. It is a place to be present at a specific moment in a specific landscape. The architects describe it as "standing in the fields, ringing its bells in concert with the cows grazing around," and that image, however poetic, is also literal. The cows are there. The bells are audible. The architecture simply holds a seat for you.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals how carefully the clearing was read: the pavilion sits on a raised deck oriented toward the valley, with a central stair connecting it to the sloping ground. The section and elevation drawings clarify the steep pitch of the A-frame and its compact footprint. Dimensional annotations confirm what the eye already suspects: this is a minimal structure, barely larger than a tent, whose presence on the site is disproportionate to its actual size.

The axonometric drawing is particularly revealing. Seen from above, the pavilion nearly disappears among the surrounding tree trunks, its triangular roof echoing the conical forms of the conifers. The deer in the elevation is a charming touch, but it also serves as a scale figure that reframes who the architecture is for. Not just festival visitors, but every creature that already uses the site.

Why This Project Matters

Festival pavilions can be throwaway exercises in formal experimentation, built for photographs and dismantled before the novelty fades. The Banquet du belvédère resists that pattern by anchoring itself in something older than architecture: the communal act of sitting together in a landscape. Its hay walls will degrade, its timber will weather, and eventually the meadow will reclaim the clearing. That impermanence is not a flaw; it is the project's central argument.

Still at Work demonstrates here that a six-square-meter structure can carry a genuine idea about cohabitation, landscape stewardship, and the limits of human claim over a site. The pavilion does not dominate its cliff; it borrows a small corner of it, sets out a bench, and waits to see who shows up. In a discipline that often conflates ambition with scale, that restraint is worth paying attention to.

Banquet du belvédère Pavilion, designed by Still at Work (Austeja Judzentyte & Takumi Goto). Faverges-Seythenex, France. 6 m². Completed 2021. Photography by Vincent Tissot and David Foessel.

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