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."

Tree houses ...

Gives a whole new meaning to "Got Root"!

Last time I checked

I didn't have long pointy ears or hairy feet. The only trees that will be used for MY house are ones that are cut down and milled into high-grade timbers.

Leave the tree and hill homes to the Elves and Hobbits.

Re:Last time I checked

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

But you do now?

Keeping warm

I have have an Ewok fur coat. And I belong to the animal welfare group, People Eating Tasty Animals. We believe in the welfare of humans. :P

Moya

Is that you Moya?

A plug for my favorite author

Jack Vance : "The Houses of Iszm" and "Slaves of the Klau". Both feature grown houses.

Myst

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

From the article

The image used in that article looks to be the same that was used in a similar article about houses made from shaped trees in Popular Science a few years back. It really is a neat concept as wood is a fairly good insulator. As long as you have a good water supply, good soil, and a community that is liberal enough to allow such structures, it looks like a good alternative to houses made from chemically treated wood.

Re:From the article

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.

Re:

Do you really think it's impossible considering our current practices of obtaining wood? Many houses are built from pine wood grown on government subsidized pine tree farms that take 20+ years to grow before they are able to be harvested. The same can be done with houses grown from trees on farms. It would take a powerful act to get a system such as that created for growing houses, but considering the current paradigm shift towards using energy efficient materials and the current energy crisis, I don't con

Re:From the article

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:From the article

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.

It's entirely possible

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 [treedome.com] 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

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 [cabinetmagazine.org]

Re:

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 so

Survive Earthquakes and Tsunamis: yes... But

what about forest fires?

Perfect for my great grand children...

Trees don't grow on... Well, yes they do, but Rome wasn't built in one day either.

Would be nice, but it's too slow for any of us now living to use it.

Structural stability of man made design?

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?

Hobbits?!

FTA: "Tolkien's hobbits would feel right at home in new dwellings made out of living tree roots and designed to protect inhabitants from earthquakes."

Wut? I'm no expert in Tolkein, but don't hobbits live underground?

I can see it now...

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

Lothlorien!

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).

Trees are strong because...

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.

"After earthquakes and after tsunamis..."

...that still survive are trees" might be true. But usually not the case after hurricane.

Also, if the tree get sick or infected, it might be very hard to treat. Just days before in Hong Kong, a heavily infected tree fell down, one pedestrian was killed.

Damn straight and thank you--

Finally- the last comment.

Hmm-- let's see- trees remain after storms... so that's great!
-- so lets change trees, so they aren't treelike, but houselike

but still trees! so they will stay! perfect!

what a bunch of f**knuts

Not necessarily

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.