The limestone district of the Yorkshire Dales is home to one of the rarest orchids in the UK, the Lady’s Slipper Orchid. This orchid was believed to be driven to extinction due to over picking and hunting in Victorian times. Orchidelirium was the name of the mystical haze that the exotic shapes and colours of the Lady’s Slipper Orchid evoked at this time.

As well as supporting this orchid, the Yorkshire Dales contains other complex ecological systems. The project’s ambition is to enhance and protect these ecosystems as well as protect the rare orchid.

The project proposes a systems of structures, which aim to work with the ‘Friends of the Dales’ community and to explore how architecture can enhance their desire for ecological awareness. This desire includes balancing the conflicts between tourism, quarrying industries, farmers and locals within the protected landscape.

Using the Lady Slipper Orchid and the concept of Orchidelirium as a framework, the proposed architecture seeks to provide a new means to understand the site of the Yorkshire Dales. The project seeks to create a new appreciation of the landscape at both the scale of the orchid as well as the wider ecosystem of the Dales.