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Live Architecture — Grow Your Own Home
Ostracus writes to share a new take on the word "treehouse." Engineers and plant scientists from Tel Aviv have taken the application of tree shaping to the next level, designing everything from streetlamps to houses. "A home built from trees, the researchers said, would be a natural storm protector. 'After earthquakes and after tsunamis the only structures that still survive are trees,' said Yaniv Naftaly, director of operations at Plantware, a company founded in 2002. Naftaly told LiveScience the same sturdiness should apply to tree-made homes. Eshel and TAU colleague Yoav Waisel are working with Plantware to commercialize the leafy designs. The team found that certain tree species grown aeroponically (in air instead of soil and water) have roots that don't harden. Once the malleable, so-called soft roots grow long enough in the lab, they are molded around metal frames in the shape of a playground or park bench."
That rendering of the tree-house could have been a screenshot from any of the Myst games.
what about forest fires?
What happens when you take the inherently strong natural shape of a tree, and modify it to suite the shape a human needs to be useful? Is there still a benefit over say, concrete block? Or does the unnatural shape so foreign to the strengths of the plant, that the benefits are mitigated?
Unless they have created some industrial strength Miracle Grow, this is going to remain in the realm of park benches, custom picnic tables and cheesy 3D graphics programs.
So it'll take a long time. Didn't stop Konstantin Kirsch from planting tree domes several years back. The oldest video on that page dates to 2001, and it'll be years yet before the walls he's woven out of separate trees grow together enough to form a solid surface. But it's entirely feasible. All it takes is a green thumb and lots of patience.
Mind you, it'd be cool if we had some way to accelerate the process, but that'd be tough.
Finally, my dreams of living like an elf in the aerial city between huge trees is coming closer to the reality. Next item on the agenda; immortality (i know people are working on that as well).
And yet, at the point of harvesting, they can be used to build any structure you want, which is the fundamental problem with growing a house. Are you really certain you can predict - 20 or more years out - which cities will grow and which will not? It's fine for small things like park benches, but there are a lot of far simpler green construction methods for large structures.
Not to say that we'll have a solution to that particular problem anytime soon, but technology advances in unexpected ways all the time. For all anyone knows we're just a simple, "Hmm... that's interesting..." away from being able to rapidly accelerate the growth process of organisms or genetically engineer a tree that makes this easy to accomplish.
We had science fiction writers describing fascinating spectacles that many thought were impossible only mere decades before we'd figured out how to actually do some of the things described in their books. Just because we can't do it now doesn't mean that in 20 years it may be completely viable if not trivial to do. Given the steady increases in computational power that the world is gaining and our increasing understanding of genetics, I think we'll see this become possible within 20 years.
Of course whether our society will embrace such a thing is another matter. This doesn't really seem to fit in well with the densely packed urban environments that we seem to continue expanding. It'll be nice for smaller communities, but I don't expect it to catch on in a big way. We'll have the technology long before we'll have the desire to implement it.
I think you could build a house as strong as a tree can be, if you wanted to pay for it. Instead of a concrete slab covering the ground with a few straps holding the house to the slab, you could have a deeply rooted system in the ground and it would be pretty sturdy. Skyscrapers do this.
This is my sig.
What are traditionally built houses made out of ? Wood.
What is wood made out of ? Trees.
What do termites eat ? Wood.
How do you get rid of termites ? Poison.
What does poison do to living things ? Kills them.
What is a tree ? A living thing.
What happens to old limbs and roots of trees ? they rot.
How do I replace a rotted window sill, or roof branch ?
How do I get rid of pests that take up residence in my tree with me ?
I can repair and reconfigure a traditionally built home, I can't reconfigure the tree once it's grown & repairing it is questionable.
It's a really cool idea, but I don't think it's practical. It's kinda like putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
As well as home gardening and watching your investment grow.
This is probably faster then growing this bar. Maybe more will read Swiss Family Robinson now or again.
Not necessarily. Trees only grow by, well,growing new layers, outwards. That's why you can count the rings and all that. The old wood doesn't change shape or anything. (Though it might rot.) A lot of it in the centre is even dead already.
It's basically like living in a brick house where periodically you add a new layer of bricks to the outside walls. It eventually gets to be on hell of a bunker, but the rooms haven't changed at all.
If you prevent the inner surface from rotting, the rooms in the tree wouldn't grow too. Your walls would just get a little thicker each year.
Or I guess you could periodically shave a thin layer of wood from the inside, keeping the walls at a constant thickness, but having your rooms grow together with the tree. Frankly it isn't an unsolvable problem even then. Just put anything which needs pipes (kitchen sink, bathroom, etc) or wires (AC sockets, TV cable, etc) in the centre, so they don't need to be moved when you enlarge the rooms by 1mm.
But even that is probably over-thinking it, since it assumes an actual house in a tree. All these guys have done, is mould some soft roots into park benches and the like. And their houses, from what I understand, would basically be a layer of roots bent around some panels done out of something else.
Frankly, it's not that huge a progress. We've already known how to bend wood in any imaginable shape. See the curved Roman shield (scutum) for an example that's over 2000 years old.
I don't see many fundamental advantages in doing the same thing out of roots, as opposed to bending planks of wood. Especially since we're talking soft roots, as opposed to wooden ones. It's, almost by definition, a softer and less resistent material than wood.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So , slowly your house will get smaller , unless you cut it regulary.
Congratulation, Sir !
You thus just invented the new craft of "Macro-Bonzais" !
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