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."

Comments

Tree houses ...

[drpimp]

Gives a whole new meaning to "Got Root"!

Myst

[fractic]

That rendering of the tree-house could have been a screenshot from any of the Myst games.

Survive Earthquakes and Tsunamis: yes... But

[Anonymous Coward]

what about forest fires?

Re:From the article

[ColdWetDog]

As long as you have a good water supply, good soil, and a community that is liberal enough to allow such structures

... and several decades to grow anything larger than a park bench. Come now, this would require planning a structure many years before you could use it. 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.

Structural stability of man made design?

[cojsl]

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?

It's entirely possible

[Selanit]

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.

Re:It's entirely possible

[32771]

Thanks for the link. Apparently this tree shaping business reaches back to the 16th century at least.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/foer.php

I can see it now...

[NeuroManson]

No longer would we have to call Dutch Elm Disease a disease, we can just call it "Urban Renewal".

Re:From the article

[ColdWetDog]

Oh, you might be able to do something that was standardized (? standardized trees), but you're likely going to get into some big problems 1) moving the things and 2) replanting them. Remember, one of the benefits touted is the ability to withstand major environmental insults such as water and earthquakes. The reason that trees (sometimes) do this is because of their extensive root systems. Said root systems are the product of many years of treeness.

If you grown a structure, then dig it up, then put it back the root system is going to be fairly fragile for some relatively (in terms of the classical building trades) long time. It just doesn't strike me as very practical for very much. Perhaps some edge conditions or smaller things. You would need to combine this with some genetic engineering for really fast growth in order for this technology to be generally useful.

Re:Last time I checked

[morgan_greywolf]

I didn't have long pointy ears or hairy feet.

But you do now?

Not necessarily

[Moraelin]

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.