A Swedish architecture studio has built a shelter from spruce bark loosened by bark beetle infestation, wrapping the layered material around a living spruce that doubles as the structure’s central pillar. That is according to Ulf Mejergren Architects (UMA), whose Spruce Bark Hut is sited in Grödinge, southern Sweden, in a region where the European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) has killed millions of cubic metres of Norway spruce since the 2018 drought triggered Europe’s worst recent outbreak.
Sweden’s 2025 UNECE Market Statement puts the cumulative loss at just over 34 million forest cubic metres of spruce since the outbreak began, with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) recording 362,000 m³sk of fresh damage across Götaland and Svealand in 2024, a 95 per cent fall from the 2021 peak. As Wood Central reported, Germany’s Harz National Park has lost more than 90 per cent of its spruce to the same combination of drought and beetle pressure sweeping Central Europe and Scandinavia.
The design logic for Spruce Bark Hut, as drawn by Ulf Mejergren Architects, maps the project’s two-insect reference: the spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus), which separates bark from trunk, and ants, which use a living tree as a structural core and build outward through accumulation. Construction tools shown include a staple gun and cordless driver, with the final tent-like form wrapped around the living spruce at bottom left. (Image Credit: Ulf Mejergren Architects)
UMA’s design draws on two insects, one that destroys and one that builds, with the bark beetle separating spruce bark from the trunk, whilst ants provide the structural method, using a tree as a core and accumulating material outward. Spruce bark, thinner and more paper-like than pine bark, folds and overlaps into a softer envelope that behaves more like a skin than a rigid cladding.
A lightweight frame of timber studs clad with Masonite boards forms the secondary skeleton around the living spruce, with individual sheets of bark layered and fixed with a staple gun and screwdriver, producing a tent-like form with a narrow entry. Inside, the hut functions as a simple observation shelter, enclosing a small interior positioned almost within the tree itself, beneath its outer skin.
In Grödinge, where Sweden’s Ips typographus outbreak has driven a 34-million-cubic-metre cumulative spruce loss since 2018, UMA founder Ulf Mejergren has built Spruce Bark Hut from the fallen outer layer of one tree and wrapped it around the intact core of another — with the living spruce inside carrying the roof above.
