People along the Rhine have long understood that rivers don’t just pass through, they return. Floods arrive with the seasons, sometimes gently, sometimes not. Damage, here, isn’t a surprise; it’s part of the rhythm. Homes are patched, bridges rebuilt, materials gathered again. Over generations, this has become more than a way of living. An architecture of maintenance, not resistance.
This project builds from that ethos. It follows timber as it moves from alpine slopes to river plains, as a seasonal presence. Up in the mountains, there’s more wood than can be used. Snow and landslides break trees loose. Spring meltwater and gravity send them downhill. Rather than clearing these forces away, the design lets them carry the material where it’s needed. A lumber mill is placed not where where the river naturally delivers.
Set along the Rhine, the mill uses water not just for power or setting, but as a tool. Timber arrives soaked, weathered by current and cold. Here, traditional water logging and seasoning aren’t revived as quaint gestures, they’re simply the most fitting approach. The building works like a lung for the land: taking in the raw material shaped by weather, preparing it, releasing it back into the cycle of rebuilding.
The building carries this process into its own bones. The structure doesn’t separate itself from its purpose: it’s made from the same offcut timber it processes. Gabion walls are filled with rough, rejected logs and inverted trusses, layered from this same material, lift the roof while nodding to alpine techniques in form. The building wears its function visibly. Every timber has a past, marked by snow, by current, by impact, and that memory is left intact.
Rather than pursuing permanence, the design accepts change as a constant. It doesn’t aim to withstand every flood or defy decay. Instead, it offers a rhythm of use, repair, and return, just like the land around it.
