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Back to the Trees
circletimessquare writes "This story should excite the nerd in anyone. Build a luxury treehouse! The New York Times reports on an entire subculture devoted to an idea which sounds funny at first... but really, why not? Much serious discussion in the article about the technical considerations involved in treehouse construction. Also mention of 'treesorts' at the bottom of the article (one being called 'Lothlorien Woods Hide-a-way' lol). I hunted down some links to two of the big players mentioned in the article, TreeHouse Workshop Inc. and the World Treehouse Conference. No mention as to whether or not they support Banyan VINES (sorry, I couldn't resist)."
I especially like the integration of Solar Power. Plumbing may be a bit of a challenge. But armed with an effective WIFI-solution, one could stay up there for hours, days even, with food.
'ta
I've been working on a project over the past few years in my back yard every summer. I've built a large treehouse with electricity and running water in to my in to the the /massive/ walnut tree in my back yard. It is currently a luxurous 2 levels, and I'm considering adding a ground level to it.
Reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's short story "The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent" from "The Club of Queer Trades". A character (Lieutenant Drummond Keith) is involved in a scuffle and disappears. He has left his address as "The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey", but when some aquaintances go to look, there is no house of that name. The hero of the series, Basil Grant, then goes along and finds him in a tree-house in an Elm tree on Buxton Common. He then has the great line:
"The second [thing] is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have believed it.'
Project Gutenburg has the book
Now, all I need is sharks with fricking laser beams attached to their heads, and my plan for world domination will be complete!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I would prefer a hobbit hole. Nice and cozy, fireplaces, but plenty of natural light. Maybe staffed by underpants gnomes.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Some friends and i built a crazy treehouse back when we were in high school...
:)
-It had twin skylights (made from a storm door),
-The walls were made from the giant political sign they would put up in vacant lots around town. (basically just particle board),
-we had two full rooms AND
-a small porch where we could sit and look over the "valley" (there was a stream nearby, just down the hill).
-A full size door connected the two rooms, and the front room had a window.
-we also had a rope swing off the porch which was WAY cool.
it was roughly 6 feet off the ground (the tree we built it on was one of those three-trunked varieties, kinda strange.)
Needless to say, some punk kids found it like 6 months later and trashed it... of course our craftsmanship was so good, all they really did was smash out the windows!
oh well, good times.
~Matt
Years ago I read about a family living in a treehouse somewhere in Montana or Wyoming who was being hunted by the "housing code police" because they wanted to check the treehouse for construction code violations, etc. I wonder if the family was ever found? Also in the same article I read about a family living in a cave who was also being hunted for the same reason. More power to these people who want to live the alternative housing lifestyle! I hope they never got caught.
When I was visiting some of my in-law's relatives in China in 1997, one apartment had a section that reminded me heavily of a tree-house. It was clearly "hacked" together in bits over time with winding hall-ways. I don't know about it's safety, but it was pretty cool to walk around in. If you want to make some changes you just get some boards, nails, and a hammer. No need to call in contractors and get permits, etc. I have never seen anything like it before. I suppose you could call it a "multi-level shanty town".
Table-ized A.I.
They use extra strength bolts, and use them as sparingly as possible, spaced at least a foot apart. They also claim that the trees will adapt to the house, growing to support it rather than putting pressure on it. I'm not 100% sure if I believe that last bit, and clearly this is not what you want to build if you want a house you can pass on to your grandkids. Still, I think it's obvious that they know a hell of a lot more about building treehouses than you or I do.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
So, I grew up in an underground house, and it's actually a mixed blessing. On the minus side, you have to mow your roof, it can be freakin difficult to move furniture into/outof the house (unless you have an access garage or elevator), and people generally think you're nuts. On the plus side, underground houses tend to be fire/earthquake/tornado/blizzard proof, and the utility bills are rather low, because of solar and geothermal energy, and you also get to live in a hobbit-hole of sorts. The biggest problem, however, is that there is no market for underground houses, because Muggles/Sleepers/Luddites don't understand the concept... the best real-estate appraisal we can get is about $100K, because we can't get the house un-registered as a "basement house"... never mind the fact that it's got marble, custom stone work throughout, can withstand most any natural/unnatural disaster, etc. We've sunk way more money into the house than we're ever going to get out of it.
If you ever find/buy a dormant volcano, contact me and/or my brother, and we'll build you the undergound volcano fortress. We got the architectural blueprints already...
Anyhow, in an attempt to make sure that this post isn't ranked as a troll or flame-bait, I'll point out the story of the wolf and the three pigs who made their houses out of straw, wood, and brick. Better to make your house out of brick/stone than out of a treehouse, it seems to me...
I had an idea a while ago - with the advances we've been making in DNA, is there any way that we could get "treehouses" to grow naturally in a few years? Make sure the roots are good and deep on a good foundation to prevent it from falling over, then do "spot-DNA-splicing", where you'd insert the appropriate DNA instructions into the appropriate places over the course of years to make the tree grown into the appropriate shape. Could you make branches grow into a perfect staircase by tricking the tree into thinking that they're actually spaced according to how the tree would normally space its branches? Could you get the tree to make them flat?
A lot of questions, and a lot of unknowns, but - like the space elevator - I think we may find it within our reach in our lifetimes.
Last post!
Last fall I visited a friend on Maui and we stayed in the "Treetops" treehouse at Tree Houses of Hana. It was fun, but we were a little unprepared, as at least in this case, it was basically camping with a roof, a bed and a hot shower. Not much in the way of walls, but a roof ;-) I enjoyed it, but it's not for everyone. They do have one that is much less rustic as well though.
There's a book I read years ago, Copernick's Rebellion (Leo Frankowski), where a mad-scientist-type produced genetically engineered giant trees that would grow into nice houses, with rooms inside the trunk and enzyme-filled composting toilets and so on.
Seemed like a good idea to me at the time. The only problem with the trees in the book was that sometimes toilets would sprout in the middle of beds and digest people in their sleep.
My wife and I stayed in the Cedar Creek Treehouse on our honeymoon. It has a kitchen and living area downstairs, a sleeping loft with skylights upstairs, a bathroom with a toilet, and a sunroom with a hammock. Solar powered to boot. It was the first weekend of November, and we were just about the last that would stay in the treehouse that season as it was beginning to get rather cold. The wind swayed the trees at night as we, uh, slept. Yeah, slept. It was something I'll never forget. Oh, and the owner of Cedar Creek Treehouse is building an observatory 80 feet up in another cedar that will be connected to the main treehouse by suspended walkways. How cool is that?