Fir Hut
Ulf Mejergren Architects (UMA)
ARCHITECTS
Ulf Mejergren Architects (UMA)
STATUS
Built
AREA
0 sqft - 1000 sqft
BUDGET
$10K - 50K
YEAR
2022
LOCATION
Stockholm, Sweden
TYPE
Cultural › Pavilion
Back in the days in northern Europe, branches of spruce and fir were considered to protect against evil spirits and other unknown things.
If you had branches in front of your entrance the dead couldn’t pass as it was thought that they were barefoot and that stinging spruce needles would stop them.
Besides being a good way to keep safe from evil, spruce and fir was always available and in abundance year around, and it therefore became a very common decoration element that people could be creative with, especially during winter time when there really wasn’t anything else in nature that had any scent or color.
Naturally it was also becoming appropriate at Christmas time to decorate the house with twigs and branches, eventually leading up to the rather bizarre tradition to chop down and drag in an entire tree inside the house, which originates back to Germany in the 16th century.
When it comes to Christmas trees one can choose from basically two categories of trees; the common European Spruce or the more exclusive Caucasian Fir.
The difference is that the latter has rounder and wider needles which give the tree a thicker and lusher look. The firs also have the advantage that they don’t shed their needles as much as the spruce.
The downside with the tree is that the wood is pretty useless compared to the spruce since it contains a lot of resin. In order for a fir or a spruce to become a Christmas tree and reach a height of the normally desired two meters, it is usually required that it grows for ten years.
After the tree has served for the holidays it is thrown away at a designated spot, often in a square or a park before it is hauled away to a recycling station where a mountain of trees soon begins to build up.
We made a visit to one of the larger recycling stations in Stockholm where about 300 tons of trees normally are thrown away each year and chose the best-looking trees of the bunch and cut off the branches and transported it to a nearby forest where we built a Fir Hut, using a metal frame wrapped in wire where we weaved in the branches to achieve a furry looking cave.
The hut differs both in color and scent compared to the surrounding spruces, which makes it both blend in and stand out at the same time. The roundness of the needles also makes it quite comfortable, like hanging out in a big fur. The soft intergrated door mat won't probably protect from evil spirits though.