Tower Made of Hundreds of Living Trees

Posted by anthonykuo , Sep, 2009 @ 10:31 am

I found out early this week that the University of Stuttgart in Germany has a group of architects creative enough to come up with a first of its kind tree house. They built a unique tree house out of living trees. Known as the Baubotanical building, it is 9 meters high and 8 square meters wide in its base. White Willows Plants are fused together in such a way that they would grow into a gigantic tree.

Plants at the base of the building were plugged into the soil, while others were placed in containers attached to temporary steel scaffolding. When the root structure is strong enough, the plant containers will be removed. And once the structure can carry three steel platforms, the scaffolding will be taken down. The whole process is expected to take between 8 and 10 years, but a green wall should sprout coming year.

Like any project or research the baubotanical building has its own objective. The architects wanted to study the trees’ elasticity and if trees can grow on steel supports the architects were very resourceful but this won’t work for bridges and other structures.

What about the tower’s application upon completion? The architects haven’t really thought that far – they’re more interested in the growth of trees. But if the trees sprout as expected, I think the tower would serve as a nice bird watching station and a tourist attraction. Unfortunately, the method isn’t the most practical for modern life – we can’t practically wait 8-10 years for a bridge to finish, for example. Or maybe we should learn to wait that long for buildings to complete. In our race for development, we’ve destroyed a lot of the world.

But regardless of sustainability, this is one hell of a tree house.

Tags: architecture, green, tower, tree house, trees