Forest House is a minimalist residence located in the Atlantic Coast, designed by Studio Razavi + Partners. The problem Louis Kahn solved at Fisher House in 1960 has never fully lost its relevance: how do you use geometric logic to make a building belong to its landscape rather than impose on it? Studio Razavi + Partners returns to that same compositional question with Forest House, a residence set within a stand of century-old trees rising above 30 meters. The solution is structurally faithful to Kahn’s method – two identical squares, shifted in plan – but the site demands something Kahn’s Pennsylvania woodland did not: a vertical response to near-vertical surroundings.
The shift between the two volumes is the project’s central instrument. Displacing identical squares along a diagonal axis does several things at once: it maximizes usable floor area without expanding the building’s footprint, it fragments the facades into a sequence of interrupted planes, and it opens interior sightlines from one volume into the other. The result is a house that reads differently from every approach angle – not through formal complexity, but through the compounding effect of a single move repeated across plan, section, and silhouette.
Responding to the forest’s cathedral scale required something beyond plan manipulation. The roof lines stretch upward, pulling the facades into tall, narrow proportions that mirror the verticality of the surrounding trunks. This is a building calibrated to its context at the level of ratio rather than mimicry. The darkened cladding – nearly black against the filtered light of the canopy – absorbs the tonal register of bark and shadow rather than contrasting with it. It is the same logic that drives Kengo Kuma’s material subordination strategies, or Peter Zumthor’s insistence on buildings that recede into atmosphere, though Studio Razavi carries it through form as much as surface.
