Spiral up a wooden ramp to the top of a beech forest without climbing a step

An hour south of Copenhagen there is a forest with a tower in it, and the tower has no stairs. One ramp goes around the inside twelve times and comes out at 45 meters, above the tops of the beeches. Anybody who can move along a flat surface can get to the top of a forest, which is the reason it was built this way rather than the happy result of it.

The tower is at the end of a walk rather than at the end of a parking lot. A boardwalk runs out through the trees first, over wet ground and around the trunks, so the forest happens before the tower does. Then the shape comes through the canopy: wide at the bottom, pinched in the middle, wide again at the top, which is structural rather than decorative.

Going up is the strange part, because none of it feels like climbing. The gradient never changes and the turns are long, so the forest arrives at a steady pace the whole way, trunks and then branches and then, somewhere around the eighth turn, the tops of the trees at eye level. At the top, southern Zealand lies flat in every direction. Everyone in the group gets there at the same time, which is not what happens on a staircase.

The tower is 45 meters tall, the ramp is 650 meters long in twelve circles, the boardwalk through the forest is a little over 3 kilometers, and the platform is 140 meters above sea level. It stands in Gisselfeld Klosters Skove, a preserved forest of lakes, creeks and wetland. Its architects describe the curved profile, a slender waist with a wider base and crown, as what gives it both stability and a larger deck, and the continuous ramp as what makes the forest reachable regardless of physical condition.