http://www.inhabitat.com has a compelling story on a community of tree dwellers. As a good Canadian living in the land of forests, the potential of tree-house living is evident. The baumraum web site describes their work as:

A treehouse! A promise of adventure for the kids, a retreat for the adults, a romantic hideaway close to nature. These special little dwellings installed up among the trees fire our imagination and rouse our curiosity, bringing back childhood memories, and with them the desire to climb up and enter a magic world amongst the foliage. To be spellbound again, to witness the different sights and sounds up there by day and night and throughout the seasons. To play up there, to work undisturbed, to relax, to daydream…

It's easy to imagine communities of environmentally sustainable dwellings in private wood-lots across the province. Even the Don Valley might accommodate tree dwellings for students to study the local environment from memorable vantage points.

1. That’s a beautiful looking structure, but “environmentally sustainable”? Sometimes I think there’s a misconception that environmentally sustainable means “near the environment”, when nothing could be more opposite. If communities of these were built, the forest floor would be covered with parking pads, with paved roads salted in winter, while nesting opportunities for birds and the continuity of the forest canopy would be broken. Not to mention the driving from your forest to the 7-11 in Bancroft for a litre of milk and a Globe every Saturday morning.

   Wanting to be close to nature is understandable, but people ought not deceive themselves about “sustainability” when their actions bring on the opposite. Do you want sustainability? Live in the city, and leave the poor forest and its surviving inhabitants alone.

   Posted by  on  03/06  at  02:43 PM

2. I have to agree with your pessimism Bob. The designer in me sees this as a way to reconnect people to the land – yet, I know that the notion is at best rhetorical because if the type became popular it would end up doing to the Canadian landscape what ecotourism is doing to the forests of Central America – destroying the very thing it wants to celebrate.

   On the other hand, we have to find other models for development. By imagining an ideal type designers promote new ways at looking at old problems.

   Posted by  on  03/06  at  02:51 PM

3. In Britain there are a lot of companies doing high end treehouses for the estates of the idle rich. They do no good for the trees and have no particular environmental benefits and I do not think are worthy of promotion. Much more interesting, also from inhabitat, is the Boase project which rehabilitates brownfields by creating buildings that grow with the trees rather than imposing themselves on existing trees. (click on url to see)

   Posted by Lloyd Alter  on  03/06  at  08:20 PM

4. Even if we admit the waste and arrogance in building treehouses as illustrated, we might also acknowledge their metaphorical value and appeal to memory and desire and to a connection to something beyond ourselves. A treehouse is an invitation to listen and dream and regain a sense of place and perspective. A retreat, in other words, from the frenzied fallenness of everyday life.

   If actual treehouses are impractical in a city like Toronto, there are many things we might do to provide the essence of such places. Houses and apartment buildings blessed with nearby trees give a sense of privacy and the natural; they buffer the city. Parks and open spaces give rest to the eye and (often enough) soil we might work our hands into. Our ravines, if let be, provide edges and peripheries and a sense of discontinuity in the urban fabric, glimpses of the natural city. We might well be encouraged to wander more, even to lie down in the meadows of High Park, wallow in the Humber River, climb trees if their low branches are maintained.

   We tend to operate as though none of these places exist on their own, that they must be designed and planned and fabricated. But the contradictions become overwhelming, and the designer treehouse cannot enable rest but only remind us of its absence.

   In Emerald City (Viking, 1994), John Bentley Mays writes about appreciating the value of “urban thinking places” scattered throughout the many forgotten and derelict spaces of the city. He writes, “within this wilderness of trees and rust are many places to be alone and think, into which one can disappear completely from the crush and rattle of urban existence into a shady nook and consider life, fate, some specific decision or the world.”

   A perfect description of a treehouse, given an openness to listening for the wind in the branches.

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/07  at  12:37 AM

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