Anya Moryoussef Architect . photos: © Félix Michaud
Situated in Ontario’s expansive Algonquin Provincial Park, AMA’s Smoke Lake Cabin is a modular, de-constructible, off-grid sleep cabin colloquially known as a ‘bunkie’. The modest structure measures 51 square metres and is designed to minimize its impact on the land. Constructed almost wholly of dimensional timber and douglas fir plywood, the structure can be easily deconstructed at the end of the mandated twenty-year lease period without leaving any permanent trace on the site. At that time, the majority of the bunkie’s components could also be cleanly salvaged for reuse.
The client, a landscape architect, commissioned AMA to design a building that would inventively interpret the stringent design guidelines of the park, which dictate such aspects as colour, material, wall height, and roof pitch. In addition, with boat access only and a steep, heavily treed topography to contend with, the bunkie had to be designed so that all components were compact enough to be transported on a 15 square metre aluminum barge and light enough to be hauled uphill by a small crew and makeshift hillside trolley. Nestled discretely among the coniferous tree canopy of hemlocks and tamaracks, the bunkie draws on the vernacular of the park dating back to the 1950s while presenting an element of the unexpected — an elevated, compact series of unfolding rooms.
A gentle ramp invites the visitor up to an open-air deck, then a screened porch, and finally to the fully enclosed living and sleeping quarters. A one-metre module, expressed as structure, solid and void, wraps the building inside and out, creating a series of layered thresholds that frame, mirror, and mediate the cabin’s surroundings through varying degrees of enclosure. A corner cut in the form frames views in four directions – land, lake, sky, and structure – while the sleeping quarter huddles within a dense array of trees.
Layers of light and shadow emphasize and contrast where the interior and exterior treatments – raw and finished, light and dark – interlace and unravel around the open-air room. Here, the sun is invited directly into the structure, imbuing the amber grain of the natural fir with a supernatural glow. From a distance, the cabin perches above the lake, a curious beacon amidst the gentle, smoky shadows of the Canadian wilderness.
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