Living Treehouse
by Christine Lepisto, Berlin on 01.22.06
Here's one to watch: the MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities Group is behind an idea to design houses from living ecosystems. The key names behind the project are leader Mitchell Joachim, ecological engineer Lara Greden and architect Javier Arbona.
The idea is not unique to MIT, as others such as Richard Reames have been playing with treeforming as a means to produce structures useful for human lifestyles. But the activity of a respected leader like MIT furthers the potential for the devlopment of ideas which can break out of the inspiration category into reality.
One major obstacle: to get a living treehouse to raise your budding family in, your own parents would have to contract the "building" at your own birth. Is our mobile, increasingly less family oriented society ready for this step? An alternative vision: instead of developing "mushroom colonies" of identical homes squeezed in to optimize profitability for developers, treehouse communities could be built up and ready to buy into when your savings are ready for the big commitment. Again: what developer is ready to invest today for payback in 30 years?
Nonetheless, we are excited! The little kid in us can't wait to move into the treehouse! And ideas like this will push the limits on materials: windows that can grow with a house, biological filtering systems to provide our clean water supplies...the imagination is the limit. For more details, see Discovery News.
My brother and I did something like this when we were kids. A field behind our parents' house was filled with young white birch saplings. We tried bending them over so the tips touched the ground, but found it worked better when we just interwove the tops of the saplings together to form a dome roof. Being kids, we quickly lost patience with it, but years later the 'dome' was still there and growing. The shade on the inside discouraged branches from reaching in, so it continued to grow branches all over the outside. And best of all, it was unnoticable from five feet away.
I've wondered in recent years if this could be reproduced on a larger scale, but 30 years of growth seems like a long time to wait. I was pondering a meager skeletal structure and woody vines growing up over it, followed by a layer of stucco. Let the vines grow up into the shape of the skeletal form, cut them off at the base, let them dry out, and you have the lath all in place for the stucco. Vines grow a lot faster than most trees. Kudzu might do quite well in the north where it would definitely die that winter, but care should be taken...
There's a long history to this sort of "living" building/funiture/etc. A search on "arborsculpture" will bring lots of good links!
I digg!
You have too many interesing stories!
STOP IT! :)
http://digg.com/design/Living_Treehouse
Thanks for digging it Akira. That's always very appreciated!
Looked at from another perspective, this is the dream of a lot of emergent design. A structure that "calculates" and grows its own support beams as it goes is an architect's or engineer's fantasy.
What about using faster growing species like bamboo or eucalyptus?
Is MIT Media Lab plagiarizing Paul Laffoley?
You be the judge!
http://www.kentgallery.com/lafdas.htm
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/das-urpflanze-haus.html
http://www.dilettantepress.com/artists/laffoley.html
...thanks for the digg.
And to answer RemyC...We don't make a secret of a love and admiration for Paul Laffoley, just like we also have a debt with previous work done by builders in Africa using living trunks. Past research done by Richard Reames, Axel Erlandson and Patrick Dougherty is also incorporated into our proposal, not to mention Living Machines.