There are people who spend their time figuring out how to build dwellings out of living trees, houses that grow and shift with time, houses that are part of a permacultured solution to sedentary sustainability. I approve.
From what I can tell, the theoretical groundwork biotecture was laid in the 1960s by a man named Rudolf Doernach (who dropped the “civilization” word when he wrote about biotecture for permaculture and who also went off on this wingnut thing about how we can live when the ice-lands cometh, an article I would love to read).
Inhabitat.com has an interesting article from 2006 called grow your own treehouse that goes over a bit of biotecture, and the primary contemporary advocate is Mitchell Joachim, who I’m tempted to call an eco-techno-futurist. Joachim’s critique seems to be entirely ecological, lacking any discussion of the nature of civilization, division of labor, or the like, but his ideas on permacultured tree fab houses are the cutting edge of the field. The basic idea is to build houses with clay or plaster interior walls but incorporate living trees as the outer structure, and to build each house into a fairly self-contained permacultured system.
He did a fairly basic but interesting TED talk about growing houses that fairly quickly goes into satire about building houses out of meat. The above link is particularly funny because it is on a right-wing blog and there are lots and lots of comments that don’t get the satire and also make such useless observations as “never trust a man with waist-length dreadlocks.”
Tags: Housing