Tree Shaping - Plantings For The Future

Plantings For The Future

The Fab Tree Hab

Three MIT designers Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona created a concept of a living tree house which nourishes its inhabitants and merges within its environment. The project of Fab Tree Hab is expect to take a minimum of five years to grow the home. The plans are for the interior to by lined with clay and plastered to keep the weather outside and to look normal. The exterior is to be all-natural.

The Patient Gardener

A Swedish architectural firm VisionDivision took part in a week-long workshop at the Italian university Politecnico di Milano. with the students. The result was an 80 year plan of a living cheery tree dome in an hour glass shape and grown furniture. Framing for the dome, table and a lawn chair were build. 10 Japanese cherry trees were planted in a diameter of eight meter circle. Four of these trees are to be living staircases to a future top level. The stair trees will have their branches grafted into each other to form the rungs VisionDivision's architects helped the students and instructors to create an easy maintenance plan for future gardeners of the university.

Baubotanik Tower

Ferdinand Ludwig designed this tower as part of his doctoral thesis with the help of Prof. Dr. Speck. "Speck become the botanical co-supervisor" said Ferdinand. Growing at the University of Stuttgart is a three storey tower of living white willows (Salix alba). This nine meter tall construction is almost fully grown, with a base area of around eight square meters.

The framing of made up of mainly steel scaffolding which is supporting the growing trees, while keeping them to the correct form. They started with 400 white willow (Salix alba) grown in baskets on muiltable levels with one row of willows planted into the ground. Once the trees where two meters tall they were planted at the different levels of the tower. These plants are then trained to the design.

The root system of the bottom level of willows needs to develop large enough to support the willows on the above levels. So that the scaffold becomes obsolete and then it and the watering and ferilising baskets can be removed altogether.

The trees are grafted together with the objective of all the different plants eventually become a single organism. The overall aim is to have s living structure with the strength support itself and to carry a working load. Ferdinand predicts the tower will stable enough to support itself in five-ten years. Ferdinand does state " However, these are only estimates."