House Made of Trees - The Fab Tree Hab!

If you've never heard of the Fab Tree Hab - Then you should!

The Fab Tree Hab is a hypothetical ecological home design developed at MIT by Mitchell Joachim, Javier Arbona and Lara Greden.

It would be built by allowing plants to grow over a computer-designed (CNC) removable plywood scaffold. Once the plants are interconnected and stable, the plywood would be removed and reused. MIT is experimenting with woody plants that grow quickly and develop an interwoven root structure that's soft enough to "train" over the scaffold, but then hardens into a more durable structure. The inside walls would be conventional clay and plaster.

An earlier project of ours treenovations supplied the kind of trees that would be needed to actually implement a fab tree hab!

There are many advantaged to a house made of living trees:

- Local material sourcing

- Carbon sequestration

- Is not a burden on the environment

- Reduces Urban Heat Island effect

- Can repair itself from minor injuries

If these houses were to be implemented in bonsai (miniatures) they could be studied and these advantages could be quantified.

To this end, we installed and Aeroponic Growth Chamber at Terreform One