Research's IaaC - TREE-LAB (Treehouse)

Introductory Design Studio I - ArboReal Home (Treehouse)

Faculty: Areti Markopoulou, Luis Fraguada
Advisor: Gerard Passola
Guest Tutor: Michel Rojkind
Students: Moises Gamus Duek, Jessica Yuen Chi Lai, Gianluca Santosuosso

TREE-LAB

OBJECTIVE
A tree is no less than a reactive living organism, continuously adapting to its environment. Whilst it acts as a site for a house to be built upon itself, it also reacts -respectively to all external forces.

The TREE-LAB aimed to establish a closer dialogue between the human and a tree. It deals with a reactive and adaptive behavior. The house is a research tool, a living organism spatially and structurally related to the tree, always moving and shifting its shape following environmental conditions and the behavior of the tree. The TREE-LAB is designed to allow for its adjustment in form in responses to the movements of tree, external forces and internal human activities, but more essentially its form is prepared to be transformed with respect to the evolution of the tree in a longer sense of time.   

THE BUILDING (refer to sequence diagram)
Sequence of the structural/envelope systems are developed as follows:

1. VOLUME Based on the digital model of the tree that we have generated in the earlier phase of the project, an optimum volume of space between branches was obtained as the basis of our house.
   
   
2. FLOOR Floor slabs were placed at every level where tree branches supports are located in the closest proximity;
   
   
3. ENVELOPE The envelope structure (mullions) were then connected floor-to-floor at perimeters of floor slabs by ‘roller joints’ – that allows a flexible movement in all directions. Every spherical ‘roller joint’ can further be developed to a device that assist to collect and translate numeric data;
   
   
4. OUTER SKIN STRATEGY initially we evaluated the density of the tree house’s exposure to solar radiation through our preliminary solar study. By employing Grasshopper we were then enabled to strategically locate the points for solar devices along the perimeter of structural rings that is determined by our solar exposure study. Vertical connections (ropes) were then drawn from level to level and therefore became our outer skin fabric. (pictures to describe);
   
   
5. INNER SKIN fabric that attaches to the envelop structure that follow the movement of building.

The skin is a sensitive envelope that reacts to the tree as well as the environment: its substructure is defined by a parametric system that monitors climate conditions and reacts to them, becoming a mechanized organism able to interact with its environment, bringing closer the dialogue between human and nature.