Shirin Yoku _ Urban Meditation Cabin
Doni Hallko
We come from central Italy, a provincial context where architecture emerges from small villages, teaching us to be attentive to the existing landscape and the environment. Graduating in 2024, we began our professional path working in small local studios, where we learned to appreciate the value of modest, context-driven architecture. Seeking to broaden our horizons, we then looked beyond our territory to explore the international architectural discourse: today, Debora works in Paris in an international architecture studio, while Doni is based in Italy in a young office collaborating with international partners. Alongside our professional experiences, we actively take part in competitions to stay engaged with contemporary debates and socially driven design.
Our proposal is an invitation for citizens to question their built environment, suggesting within its form and function a possible response.
By holding the our built environment up to the mirror, the project urges citizens to stop and to reflect on their condition within the urban habitat, the effect that this habitat has on all of us and relationships to one another, wondering if there's something we left out while we dictated, over centuries, how to build the environment in which to live and interact with on another.
A small door invites you to discover if behind this pure geometric shape there is a possible alternative to the landscape that it reflects.
Inside the cabin offers a welcoming but immersive natural environment, to experience a rare intimacy, where you can spend some time carefree, in a protective shell that keeps out the evils of the modern city, and that reconnects us with ourselves and with nature.
"The Shinrin-yoku Urban Cabin"
Our project takes its name from the „Shinin-yoku"; literally „benefiting from the atmosphere of the forest", but more commonly translated as „baths in the forest". It is a Japanese practice that consists in abandoning nature and being reconciled with it in order to get the psychophysical benefits, moreover widely documented by recent scientific research.
With this cabin we aspire, at best, to stimulate a debate on the city and the built environment, but the project fulfils its duty in full, even by simply giving a fifteen-hour escape to one citizen at a time.