TeReForm’s Fab Tree Hab
This home concept is intended to replace the outdated design solutions at Habitat for Humanity International. The Fab Tree Hab concept resolutely accumulates the inscribed nuances that influenced the American Rustic period.
Stemming from the insurgent writings of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Alcott, America defined a sensibility. These authors represent an early mode of intention that was profoundly ecocentric. Their notion of dwelling was envisioned as retreats, hermitages, and summer cottages in a Sylvan style. In 1847 it culminated in the self-made assembly of a crooked cedar and honeysuckle summer home by Thoreau and Alcott for their friend Emerson in the midst of a cornfield. This peculiar house severed as our point of departure. Here traditional anthropocentric doctrines are overturned and human life is subsumed within the terrestrial environs. Home, in this sense, becomes indistinct and fits itself symbiotically into the surrounding ecosystem.
A methodology new to buildings yet ancient to gardening is introduced in this design – pleaching. Pleaching is a method of weaving together tree branches to form living archways, lattices, or screens. The trunks of inosculate, or self-grafting, trees, such as Elm, Live Oak, and Dogwood, are the load-bearing structure, and the branches form a continuous lattice frame for the walls and roof.
The seasonal cycles help the tree structure provide for itself through composting of fallen leaves in autumn. Seedlings started in such a nutrient rich bed may provide the affordable building blocks for a new home typology, firmly rooted to place.
Water, integral to the survival of the structure itself, is the pulmonary system of the home, circulating from the roof-top collector, through human consumption, and ultimately exiting via transpiration. A gray water stream irrigates the gardens, and a filtration stream enters a Living Machine, where it is purified by bacteria, fish, and plants who eat the organic wastes.
July 16, 2007 - Category: Architecture - Posted by: Hans - Comments: 0
