Around the Campfire
2024|Strafford,New Hampshire,USA
Status: Project
Every camp deserves a special place to gather around a fire and share stories. Huddled together in camaraderie, these stories transport campers to other worlds. From haunting horrors and silly skits to fantastical tales, cryptid legends, and local lore, Around the Campfire is a space where magic truly comes alive. This proposal reimagines these cherished experiences by merging them with an earth-sheltered design on the shore of one of the camp’s ponds, creating a new stage and gathering space that harmonizes with the beautiful New Hampshire forest.
Above the pavilion, a suspended wire net structure sways in the breeze, supported by tube steel posts emerging from the walls and ground. Draped from this structure is a canopy of banners, rendered as warm-toned blank rectangles (18” x 6”) that offer shade from the summer sun and create an infrastructure for future camp rituals/traditions. Each year, cabins/small groups/work teams/etc can design and sew a single banner using materials and recycling scraps from the textile stations. These new banners will replace the blanks, gradually transforming the pavilion into a vibrant visual repository of past campers’ creativity and experiences, while continuing to provide a space for current campers to tell stories of their own.