Dolmen, a forest folly by Space Encounters in Arnhem, blurs the boundary between architecture and landscape, merging sculptural form with ecological intelligence and quiet habitation.
Perched lightly on a wooded ridge in Arnhem, Dolmen by Space Encounters is a quietly radical intervention in the Dutch forest. Neither wholly architecture nor sculpture, this enigmatic tree hut refuses easy categorization. It appears less as a constructed dwelling and more as a fragment of speculative archaeology—a floating monolith held aloft by three oversized, hollow columns that resemble relics from a bygone or imagined future.
Dolmen is situated within Buitenplaats Koningsweg, a site known for its complex layering of nature, military heritage, and contemporary artistic gestures. Within this context, Dolmen operates as a habitable folly: part bird observatory, part woodland hideaway, part planetary lander. Its square form is simultaneously foreign and familiar, abstract yet finely detailed, its half-open cladding providing subtle shelter to both human visitors and the forest’s wild inhabitants. In this hybrid role, it becomes a sculptural node in an ecological web.
The structure’s material palette is rigorously local and ecologically sensitive: preserved wood and circularly sourced steel assembled into prefabricated components. More than an aesthetic exercise, Dolmen is also a self-sufficient organism. A heat pump nestled into one of its load-bearing trunks works in concert with discreet solar technology to power the structure. As its wooden surfaces weather and its presence is slowly subsumed by the forest, Dolmen promises not stasis but evolution—a living monument shaped as much by biology as by design.
