spaceship earth timber installation lands at hello wood festival in hungary

Spaceship Earth installation at hello wood summer camp

Hello Wood Builder Summit’s international summer school and festival made its comeback this July after a three-year hiatus, taking place in an abandoned basalt quarry on Haláp Mountain in Hungary. The camp spanned ten days, attracting students, architects, and designers worldwide to stretch their wooden construction skills, collaborate, and engage in on-site design and building. The result sees twelve unique wooden installations, each with its own narrative behind it. The festival serves as a platform that unites individuals from different generations, backgrounds, and professions, promoting a democratic atmosphere.

This year’s focus was on exploring the dualities between construction and demolition, intervention and naturalness, as well as absence and replenishment. By doing so, the event aimed to shed light on the ecological situation in the Balaton Uplands region and emphasize the critical connection between humans, the environment, and the future.

Spaceship Earth is one of the twelve on-site installations made entirely of wood. The resulting structure mimics the silhouette of a UFO spaceship, featuring a rounded body and a flat bottom. The creators ingeniously introduced the concept of ‘interstellar-earthly,’ demonstrating a seamless fusion of two contrasting worlds, in line with the festival’s thematic exploration of dualities.

Reimagining Architecture for Sustainable Life on Earth

The core of the idea centered on the festival site, nestled within the confines of an abandoned basalt mine on Haláp. This unique location served as a poignant reminder of the paradox in construction, vividly illustrating the intrinsic connection between building materials’ production and the necessity of demolition.‘Since our daily lives are fundamentally reinterpreted by pandemics, wars, economic crises and global warming, the issue of demolition and reconstruction is not only relevant from an architectural point of view but from a social one as well,’ describes the team at Hello Wood.

Spaceship Earth installation delves into the profound influence of the Space Race on architecture, raising questions about its own purpose – whether it serves as a spacecraft, a lunar/martian habitat, or a futuristic dwelling here on Earth. Through a strong emphasis on teamwork, it urges imaginative thinkers to view outer space exploration as a means to prioritize sustainable living on our planet. ‘Understanding our planet’s place in the universe is vital for building sustainable, inclusive buildings and cities and preserving life on Earth,’ share the creators.

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project info:

name: Spaceship Earth 

event: Hello Wood Festival: Builder Summit 2023

team leaders: Dorottya Kiss, Seth Martosh
team members: Virág Besenyei, Zofia Kuklasińska-Pogátsa, Dorian Gabler, Blanka Ciborowska, Máté Kovács, Marcus Rowlands, Emil Svantesson, Alana Corrêa

photography: Noémi Szécsi