Would You Rather: Freud's Psyche Becomes a Branching Forest of Architectural Choice

What if a fairy tale forest were not scenery but a diagram of the human mind? Would You Rather? takes Little Red Riding Hood's walk to Grandmother's house and splits it into three distinct architectural routes, each shaped by a different Freudian drive. The forest stops being a backdrop and becomes a decision-making mechanism: a landscape where every fork in the path asks the traveler to choose between instinct, reason, and conscience.

Designed by Raveena Batham, Vaishnavi Desai, and Belén Butragueño, the project received an Editor's Choice distinction in the A New Wood competition. By translating Sigmund Freud's model of the psyche into physical journeys through a forest, the trio reframes architecture as a system of choices rather than a fixed corridor. The destination remains constant: Grandmother's house. Everything between departure and arrival, however, changes depending on which psychological impulse a traveler follows.

Three Psychic Forces, Three Forking Paths

The illustrated site plan lays out the proposal's core logic. From Little Red's home, the forest fans into branching routes that correspond to Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego. Each route generates its own atmosphere, obstacles, and consequences. The Id path, governed by instinct and immediate desire, lures travelers with visual seduction. The Ego path negotiates between competing impulses and external reality. The Superego path enforces conscience and moral restraint. Scattered trees and winding trails make the plan read simultaneously as a fictional landscape and a diagram of consciousness.

What distinguishes the concept from a simple narrative illustration is its insistence that architecture produces multiple possibilities rather than dictating a single route. Forest paths, vegetation, objects, and characters function as spatial prompts, continually asking Little Red to reconsider what appears safe, pleasurable, or correct. The proposal is fundamentally journey-centric: the experience is defined not by the destination but by the cumulative weight of choices made along the way.

The Id Route: Danger Disguised as Beauty

The aerial drawing reveals the Id route's seductive spatial character: organic, pod-shaped clearings connected by curving pathways, punctuated by a fantastical treehouse structure that seems to grow from the canopy. Glowing mushrooms, unusual flowers, and almost dreamlike landscapes make this path the most visually intoxicating of the three. The designers use that beauty as a deliberate trap. Rather than signaling danger through darkness or hostility, the architecture suggests that harmful consequences can arrive through attractiveness, through environments so pleasurable they override caution.

The fairy tale's traditional warning about deception is retained but reinterpreted psychologically. The Id path encourages Little Red to act on what feels desirable in the moment. Temptation is translated directly into space: colourful, mysterious, increasingly intoxicating surroundings that draw the traveler deeper into terrain whose appearance cannot be trusted. It is a sharp observation about how appealing choices can carry risks that remain invisible until it is too late.

Architectural Character: Patterned Facades and Conical Pavilions

Two structures along the routes demonstrate how the designers give each psychological zone its own material and formal identity. A multi-tiered triangular dwelling wrapped in patterned facades and arched openings sits among winter foliage, its ornamental density suggesting the layered calculations of the Ego, where social influence, experience, and moral judgement compete for attention. Nearby, a conical-roofed pavilion stands in mist with musical notation swirling through the air and ornamental plantings at its base, evoking the Superego's emphasis on learned values and cultural order.

Neither structure is purely decorative. Each operates as a spatial prompt within the branching narrative, an encounter that forces Little Red to reconsider her trajectory. The triangular dwelling's complexity mirrors the compromises the Ego must negotiate, while the pavilion's ritualistic quality speaks to the Superego's demand for restraint. By assigning distinct architectural personalities to each psychic force, the designers avoid the pitfall of illustrating Freud as a flat diagram. The psychology becomes inhabitable.

A Vertical Section Through Domestic Life

The sectional drawing cuts through a vertical stack of eight pod-shaped rooms, each labeled with a domestic function and furnished accordingly. The stacking logic reads like a cross-section through a mind as much as through a building: private and instinctual spaces at the base, social rooms in the middle, contemplative zones above. It is the project's most architectural drawing, grounding the fairy tale conceit in real programmatic decisions about how people occupy interior space.

By organizing domestic life along a vertical axis that echoes the Id-Ego-Superego hierarchy, the designers close the loop between narrative and architecture. The dwelling is not just Grandmother's house at the end of the path; it is itself a compressed version of the entire journey, a structure whose internal organization reflects the same psychological forces that shaped the routes leading to it.

Why This Project Matters

Would You Rather? matters because it challenges the assumption that architecture must resolve into a single spatial experience. By branching the narrative into parallel routes with distinct atmospheres and consequences, Batham, Desai, and Butragueño propose that design can be a framework for choice rather than a prescription. The forest is not one place; it is several, and the version a traveler encounters depends entirely on which impulse she follows. That idea has implications well beyond fairy tales, touching on how public spaces, wayfinding systems, and even urban plans might accommodate the diversity of human motivation.

The project also demonstrates that narrative architecture need not sacrifice spatial rigor for storytelling charm. The sectional drawing, the site plan, and the individual structures all carry genuine architectural information: program, circulation, materiality, scale. By embedding Freudian psychology into these tangible spatial decisions, the designers prove that a fairy tale can be a serious design methodology, one that foregrounds agency, consequence, and the irreducible complexity of moving through space.

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About the Designers

Designers: Raveena Batham, Vaishnavi Desai, Belén Butragueño

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Project credits: Would You Rather? by Raveena Batham, Vaishnavi Desai, Belén Butragueño A New Wood (uni.xyz).