Adaptive Tree-Use, Our Fort for Fortlandia 2026

We’re proud to share that our design, Adaptive Tree-Use, was selected for Fortlandia 2026, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s annual exhibition of forts designed by architects, artists and builders from across Central Texas. It opens to the public on Friday 2 October and stands until 31 January 2027.

Fortlandia asks for forts that spark an appreciation of the natural world through play. That brief suits the way we like to work. Our studio’s approach is functional, expressive, regional and minimal, and a fort for children in a native landscape tests every one of those words at a small scale, with a very honest audience.

What a tree is to everything else

The concept starts with a simple observation. To us, a tree is shade, timber or a view. To many other creatures, a tree is shelter, lookout, hiding place and home. Birds nest in it, insects live in its bark, and small animals disappear into it when something bigger comes along.

Adaptive Tree-Use is a small grove of six sculptural tree forms, clad in Ashe juniper logs and strung with netting, that kids can climb into, tuck themselves inside and peer out from. The idea is for them to experience the woods the way animals do, from the inside.

Project lead Andrew Thompson kept returning to that idea while we were writing the fort’s plaque. “That’s what we’re really trying to capture,” he said. “That feeling.”

One big idea

The design didn’t start where it ended up. At an internal pin-up in March 2025, the team presented a central tree trunk with four spokes radiating out from it, one for each season.

The studio review was direct. The trunk was the strongest idea on the wall and the spokes were the weakest. They were too literal, and Central Texas doesn’t have four tidy, symmetrical seasons to diagram in the first place. The feedback was that the idea was most of the way there and the team was overcomplicating it.

So the spokes went, and the tree became the whole project. Rather than explaining the seasons, the design leaves nooks and nests for children to discover on their own, with material and texture doing the work a diagram would have done badly. That kind of editing, finding the one idea that matters and giving it room, is as much a part of architecture as drawing. We do the same thing on client work. The favorite idea goes if it isn’t the right one.

A native tree worth a second look

Choosing the material changed how we thought about the project. Ashe juniper, which most Texans call cedar, has a mixed reputation. It is blamed for winter allergies and cleared from ranches and yards across the region, and some of us had long assumed it was invasive.

It isn’t. The Wildflower Center’s own plant database lists Ashe juniper as native to Central Texas, and it has been part of this landscape for a very long time. It is aromatic, with soft, shaggy bark. It grows straight, and it is durable and rot resistant, which is why it has served as fence posts across Texas for generations. The golden-cheeked warbler, the only bird that nests exclusively in Texas, builds its nests from strips of mature Ashe juniper bark.

That gave the fort a second purpose. Alongside the play, it quietly invites visitors to look again at a native tree they may have written off. David Webber, our founding principal, was already on the tree’s side. “I’m actually one of about twelve people who likes them,” he joked.

The name Adaptive Tree-Use plays on adaptive reuse, the architectural practice of giving an old building a new life. The logs themselves came from a supplier, since a structure children climb on needs seasoned, straight timber that won’t shrink or move. What the name points to is a change in how the tree is seen.

Built in a shop, finished in the field

Andrew came to Fortlandia with no experience building play structures. What he did bring was years of work on modular steel buildings, designing systems that are 80 to 90 percent complete in a factory and then bolted together on site with minimal tools. He also builds forts and fairy gardens at home with his three children.

That background shaped how the fort was made. Each of the six tree modules has a steel pipe frame, fabricated in a metal shop by Red Dog Welding Co. Skelly Build clad the frames in Ashe juniper logs, running them long so Andrew could set the angle of the final cut by eye. Monkeyhouse came in once the grove was standing and fitted the nets on site, attached with removable eye-bolts.

The grove was assembled off site, taken apart and trucked to the Wildflower Center. The central module alone weighs an estimated 1,200 to 1,500 pounds. Load-in began on 21 September, and the pieces went back together in the configuration they were designed for.

Left to weather

The bark is untreated, on purpose. Over the months the fort stands, it will peel, the logs will weather, and the parts kids climb most will polish smooth under their hands. Andrew likes the idea of the fort visibly aging in public.

It is also built to outlast the exhibition. Everything in it is local, inexpensive and easy to replace, and it can be maintained with hand tools. When Fortlandia closes at the end of January, we would love to see it find a permanent home, at the Wildflower Center or in a park or schoolyard where children can keep using it.

The team

Adaptive Tree-Use was designed by Andrew Thompson, Rafael Jiménez, Sofía Carrillo and Diego González of Webber + Studio, and built with Skelly Build, Red Dog Welding Co. and Monkeyhouse. It is our second fort for Fortlandia, following our 2020 entry. We’re grateful to the Wildflower Center for the opportunity, and to our build partners for turning drawings into something children can climb.

Visit

Fortlandia opens to the public on Friday 2 October. Adaptive Tree-Use stands at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center until 31 January 2027. Bring kids, and let them disappear into it.