All photos and videos on this page are by the students (Anaïk Jeanjaquet, Thalia Kamp, Line Kurth, Ermanno Zerrillo).

In the village of Densbüren, Aargau, the primary school’s classrooms become unbearably hot on warm summer days. The school’s response so far has been a simple nearby “forest classroom.”

In spring 2026, within the Focus Work of the Chair of Architectural Behaviorology, four architecture students, Anaïk Jeanjaquet, Thalia Kamp, Line Kurth, and Ermanno Zerrillo, designed, built, and installed an extension to this forest classroom.

The project built on “Cohabitation,” a modular wood-and-rope furniture system the same four students had developed earlier in the CAB design studio at Hönggerberg. Its basic principle, a lightweight timber skeleton filled in with locally sourced materials, became the starting point for a structure adapted to Densbüren and to a much younger group of users: 19 to 25 children aged six to twelve.

The students chose to design with the children, not just for them. Their first site visit combined simple yes-or-no questions, open conversation, and a drawing exercise, in which the children sketched their dream forest classroom. The children wanted to spend more time outdoors, valued sitting together, and were far more interested in climbing, hiding, and building than in sitting still.
At the same time, the students also produced a large, Actor-Network Drawing (below), documenting and analyzing the site.

Recurring motifs in the children’s answers — treehouses, hammocks, ladders, swings, hiding spots — pointed to a shared desire, not a conventional, enclosed room, but a semi-enclosed space that stayed playful and connected to the forest.

To translate these findings into architecture, the students ran a workshop for the children, who were divided into three groups. Each group received small wooden cubes representing the furniture system’s modules at 1:10 scale, and built their own version of the forest classroom before adding elements such as climbing nets, woven panels, and a blackboard.

Each group arrived at a different proposal: cross-shaped niches around a playboard, a low enclosed space for sitting together, and a pyramid-like climbing structure. Yet all three shared one idea — a hidden niche children could call their own. From this workshop, the students distilled three structures: for learning, playing, and resting.

The students visited a local carpentry workshop, Husner Holzbau in Frick, where carpenters helped them test joints and mill the timber. After several prototypes, mortise-and-tenon joints were chosen as the most stable. For seating and infill, the students wove old, hollowed-out climbing rope into flexible, comfortable panels.

These findings were compiled into a visual, step-by-step construction guide, covering everything from cutting the joints to charring the foundations for moisture resistance, designed to be clear enough that non-experts, including children, could take part in the actual building process. Children took part in the final assembly in May, weaving ropes and setting foundations together with the students.

On 2 June 2026, the students presented their finished work at the final review of the Focus Work, held at Densbüren primary school, with the school and members of the local community in attendance. The project was shared with a wider audience at the Junior Festival on 20 June.

All three structures were completed and installed directly within the forest: a learning structure integrated into the existing tree-trunk circle with removable blackboards and added seating, a playing structure of stacked modules set between two climbing trees, and a resting structure of mirrored L-shaped forms tucked into the sloped, tree-sheltered part of the site.

Beyond the finished furniture, the process behind this project points to a broader lesson: that children can be partners in design, not merely passive users, and that their behavior and preferences, observed carefully and translated, can shape meaningful architecture. The step-by-step, low-tech construction method also offers a replicable model for hands-on, community-led building in natural settings that could, in the future, be applied to other schools and other projects.

Text: Tazuru Harada