THE FOREST TOWER

National Geographic has visited Camp Adventure to film the Forest Tower from above.

Feel the thrill in your stomach. Above the architecture of the Forest Tower, the South-Zealand nature and the magnificent view from the top of the tower high above the treetops. For here – in the midst of Gisselfeld’s forests – you get a sensory experience, from the first time you see the 45-metre high tower, until you stand in the lookout tower’s top and gaze out over the South Zealand landscape. With its 45 metres, the Forest Tower is the highest lookout tower that Zealand and the whole of Scandinavia has to offer.
The experience starts already at the old water mill, when you first step onto the elevated boardwalk of a total length of 3.2 kilometres, which winds through the forest, around the trees and over the streams, until the Forest Tower suddenly appears between the trees. Then the ascent begins, and for each time you have walked a round in one of the 12 circles toward the top, you will discover that the nature around you changes together with the architecture.
Up, up, up, until you reach the middle of the lookout tower, where the hour-glass structure is tied so tightly together that you can touch three beech trees which grow in the middle of the Forest Tower. Finally you step out onto the viewing platform 140 metres above sea level with views over forest and fields, and where on a clear day you can see all the way to Copenhagen and Malmö more than 50 kilometres away. The stomach-drop is unmistakable.

The 45-metre high tower was designed by EFFEKT with the ambition to create an aesthetically beautiful structure and a unique experience with nature in focus. The Forest Tower’s iconic architecture is inseparable from the hour-glass shape, which is drawn from a cylinder form where the base and top are maximised, while the middle is constricted into a so-called hyperboloid form.
This narrowing in the middle of the construction is important for the experience in the Forest Tower, as here you come very close to three beautiful beech trees growing in the centre of the structure. The rotation that you sense in the vertical corten steel tubes is created by the fact that the vertical steel tubes rotate 120 degrees. As you move up through the tower, you also experience that the distance between the ramps changes, until you reach the viewing platform 140 metres above sea level, where you have a 360-degree view over the landscape.
The main construction is made with maintenance-free corten steel, and the ramp is made with local South Zealand oak from Bregentved Estate and Gisselfeld Monastery. All wood is PEFC-certified.
The Forest Tower has won several architecture awards and was nominated for the EU’s architecture prize, the Mies van der Rohe Prize, in 2022.