This project explores an extended notion of balance in our built and natural environments, a place it historically ‘grew’. A series of speculative research exercises unearth the forgotten lessons and spatial patterns of aliveness found in peatlands; architecture to date has transformed these landscapes into monocultures and eroded the connections between people, plants, and place. Following how sphagnum moss engineers the architecture of peatlands, the resultant vernacular inhabits the interface between bodily and planetary metabolisms—where the earth meets the sky.

These lessons are developed in a proposal for a crofter’s inn which choreographs a series of scalar balancing acts on the Isle of Skye’s Sleat peninsula. The largest act is an agroecological crofting system across three sites, balancing ecological, agricultural, and architectural functions. The architecture on each site facilitates an experience of their unique environments and engages with inn guests’ physicality and proprioceptive senses to build awareness and physical relationships with other bodies that inhabit these landscapes.