Everyone as a child dreamt of having a tree house. Ken Shuttleworth, who founded Make Architects in 2004, has taken this dream into adulthood. His practice, with around 100 employees and offices in London, Edinburgh and Birmingham, has won a competition for a visitors’ centre set by the organisation that manages Sherwood Park in the county of Nottingham.

Their scheme proposes a building set on top of an enormous oak tree, like the one that the legendary Robin Hood inhabited. At the top of a 20-metre-high tree trunk, an intricate tangle of branches, the fruit of Arup’s engineering calculations, holds up the building which contains exhibition spaces, shops, a cafe, a restaurant and a spectacular viewing platform. In line with the studio’s vocation to minimise environmental impact and produce clean energy, the centre has been designed to eliminate carbon emissions and be self-sufficient in terms of energy thanks to wind turbines, biomass heating systems and systems for collecting rainwater and recycling waste.

The project has been short-listed for 50 million pounds of Lottery funding that will be given to the best design for a project that restores and makes the most of national architectural and environmental heritage. Elena Sommariva

https://www.makearchitects.com