Botany Building: Grow Your Own Architecture
According to Der Spiegel, three young German architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, including a pavilion for concerts in downtown Stuttgart. Oliver Storz, Ferdinand Ludwig and Hannes Schwertfeger call their new specialty ‘Botany Building.’ They are part of a research group at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Basics in Modern Architectural Design.
Ferdinand Ludwig grows trees on trees. That’s what he does. And he has grafted together – trunk to top, top to trunk – seven young willow trees.
At the moment a scaffold supports the young architect’s unusual tree tower. The roots of individual trees protrude sideways and into containers of soil. But soon the roots will be cut off. And ‘at that point,’ the young architect says, ‘the trees will finally have merged into a single organism.’
To construct this type of architecture, he uses one-year-old willows that are a minimum of 10 meters (33 feet) long and those that are are thin and flexible. When they have matured to full strength, the trees will be able to support an 8 meter (26 foot) tower that he plans to build in south Germany at the end of this month. Furthermore the pioneers are planning to build a ‘green room’ in downtown Stuttgart. The project, dubbed ‘Satellite,’ will consist of a 120-square-meter (1,290-square-foot) pavilion for exhibitions and concerts.
The group have already built some structures such as the ‘diagonal support frame’ for a bird watching station in Bavaria.
Each of the developers have built structures built from plants, studying the elasticity of trees and researching how effectively willows can grow around steel pipes. They feel that trees are building materials equivalent to steel and concrete.
The beginning of any ‘arbo-architecture’ project requires the architects to build a conventional support structure. Once this is done, young, flexible trees are attached to the structure and over the course of time the branches and trunks are manipulated into desired shape. As they grow, they begin taking on more of a load-bearing function. After they have been harvested this way for a few years, the support structure can be removed and the architecture of the trees can stabilize themselves, and the potential for roofs and floors can be installed.
Image courtesy of development society for Botany Building and Der Spiegel.
Read the whole article on www.spiegel.de.
hi.. i’m an architecture student, and still learning to be a good one..
wow! this concept is amazing!
but are those trees still alive?
could it be possible to build a high rise building with this kind of structure?
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