Hooves walking over packed snow, flapping wings from above headed south for the winter, and wind rustling against leaves. The sounds of the forest are enough to help bring calm to anyone. With 2021 establishing its position as one of the more stressful years for many of us, a forest getaway sounds like the perfect escape. As a result, some of the most innovative tiny homes and cabins have come from the year we’ve spent in quarantine. While many of the year’s cabin designs leaned on floor-to-ceiling windows and more compact builds to bring guests closer to the beautiful sights in nature, somewhere in the dense forest of Zaube, Latvia, a tiny cabin, designed by Gianluca Santosuosso in collaboration with Matthias Kimmel, takes on a megaphone’s shape to bring the soothing sounds of the natural world a little bit closer.
Designed to function as a meditative space, Santosuosso’s Silence Amplifier works like a funnel for audio, similar to that of a megaphone. Silence Amplifier is a cone-shaped micro-hospitality cabin that collects the sounds of the surrounding forest through its large main opening and then amplifies them as they reach the cabin’s apex. The sloped tiny cabin works like a megaphone would so that guests can enjoy a sensuous and audiovisual experience in a natural environment without having to step out into the cold. Santosuosso and Kimmel designed the Silence Amplifier both to offer a place of respite for those of us who’d like to be one with nature and mediate from a distance and to create an architectural organism that blends with nature with a synergistic, collaborative angle.
The tiny cabin’s sloped roof rises with the surrounding trees and following it to its ground-level apex, Silence Amplifier merges with the forest’s floor, hardly disturbing the natural landscape of Latvia’s wood. In order to bring guests and Silence Amplifier closer to nature, Santosuosso designed the roof to allow native vegetation to grow on top of it. Silence Amplifier, constructed almost entirely from locally sourced timber, appears almost like a bear’s den in the middle of a snowy forest. Sustainable wood fiber insulation and a high-thermal-inertia firewood stove keep the cabin cozy. Silence Amplifier comes equipped with all the warmth needed for heating and cooking inside the cabin, so feel free to hibernate like a bear would and let the calming sounds of the forest rock you to sleep.
Designers: Gianluca Santosuosso x Matthias Kimmel
Similar to the way a megaphone works, Silence Amplifier collects the general outside noise through its larger base window and reverberates the sound waves as the cabin’s walls converge closer until meeting at its apex.
Designed primarily for meditation, Silence Amplifier offers a place of respite for guests to enjoy the sounds of silence that emanate from the forest.
“Instead of simply creating a building, we are proposing to create an architectural organism that is able to collect the silence of the forest, channel it and provide it to the person in the cabin in an amplified and customizable manner,” says Santosuosso.
