Every year, the association ORBI, supported by Dinesen and the Royal Danish Academy, hosts a summer school. It invites architecture students to work hands-on with Dinesen wood and explore its expressive and structural possibilities. In summer 2020, the focus turned to Vrå’s rural landscape in Southern Jutland and to Hærvejen, an ancient hiking route stretching along the Jutland ridge.
Hærvejen, dating back to the Middle Ages—and probably even earlier—has served as a lively corridor for trade, migration, military movements, and leisure. Within the ORBI summer school framework, it became a conceptual and physical spine: a link connecting histories, landscapes, programmes, and atmospheres.
Against this backdrop, a small but meaningful architectural intervention took shape. On the foundation of a fishing hut that had burned down by the stream, Gram Å, near Vrå, The Fishing Hut was designed and built as a new place of rest for hikers along Hærvejen.
In preparation, a two-day design workshop took place in Copenhagen, where students collaboratively developed the basic form and timber-frame construction of the hut. On-site, 22 architecture students participated in a two-week construction phase, working from their own drawings and plans to build the cabin from the ground up.
Throughout the project, students engaged in full-scale experimentation. Using drawings, model tests, and 1:1 mock-ups, they explored the connection between architecture, material, and landscape. The construction combined traditional and industrial wood techniques—focusing on joinery, tempera-painted surfaces, and clay plaster walls.
A bell, designed by the students and cast in collaboration with the Danish Bell Museum in Sommersted, was added to the project—a poetic detail evoking ritual, time, and care.
Today, The Fishing Hut quietly sits along Hærvejen, not far from the Dinesen Country Home. Surrounded by nature and crafted from Dinesen wood, it offers a place of pause and protection—a shelter where trail history, timber, and learning meet.
More than just a building, The Fishing Hut reflects shared knowledge, craftsmanship, and care—the result of small-scale architecture rooted in time, place, and purpose.
