Cohabitation

A tree house in New Zealand is crafted as a restaurant. It was created for a ‘reality’ TV advert as an off the wall functioning restaurant. Hanging on a Redwood tree, which is over 40 meters high and 17 meters in diameter at the base, the structure is shaped like an onion. With an open plan, it is accessible through a 60 meter tree-top walkway trailing behind it.

It was conceived along humble functional requirements, considering its organic setting and unusual location. Requiring only 18 seats, a bar with a waiting staff, it fits the wrapping plan proficiently. However the kitchen, catering facilities, and toilet are located on the ground level. The vertical lines draped around it make perfect camera angles and unobstructed views into its natural surroundings, which it blends with effortlessly. It is a necessary quality considering the demands of filming the advertisement. Almost 10 meters wide and over 12 meters high with an overwhelming natural exterior the onion-shaped tree house can almost be an unmistakable fruit growing out of a tree trunk.

Looking past its foremost intention, a film-advert-architectural-piece, this architectural feature suggests a promising potential. Perhaps an organic-producing developed society which may only be existent in science fiction or it can also possibly be a lost civilization in Amazon. No wonder it displays such architectural promise and excellence it weave itself with nature effortlessly without dominating its immediate surrounding. Again, beyond its intention we could easily see and imagine this seemingly delicious-eye-warming-idea of an advanced society cohabiting with the trees, like a literal exchange of natural processes between living organisms, as if a clean polished architectural fantasy already existing in science fiction.

Extending this architectural fantasy there can be fruit farms just lying at your backyard that may become as common as the usual green patch that we are all familiar. The main road is then transformed into a bustling hanging bridge with sturdy supports on the rich green and very much alive grassland below our houses. Work can be forests away and you may have to take a few zip lines to get to it. Malls would be these intricate weave of spaces hanging under and over bridges. It is like setting technological proficiency to match that of nature’s will and ability, never toning it down but leading it to a way in which it ‘grows’ with the natural processes.

Then the presence of animals would already be inherent to us, in which we approach our lives and our daily solutions with their consideration or because of them. And perhaps limits would have to be necessary in order for them and us to survive. Vegetation would be everywhere. On ground level, on bridges, on our houses, that the over all picture it conveys would be a park, a market place, a farm, a house, a bridge and a corporate building (with natural ventilation evidently), mashed up into an organic sculpture that grew on its own. Finally it can be as optimistic as branches reaching out for sunlight or as predictable to that of opening windows for letting some air in on a hot day. El Vim Cabazares