Don’t Kill My House
Fall 2019
Tall timber - group project with Susan Musset and Ozan Sen
This project explores radical timber structures in response to the high-carbon footpring in highrise construction and the disconnect between urban living and the ecosystem. Our team proposes using live trees for the main structural support for our highrise prototype to introduce a dependency and awareness of the building materilas/structures people lives in.
The white birch trees planted around the pavilion would evnentually inosculate and grow into a strong exoskeleton for the highrise prototype, proposing an unusual challenge for the human to care and adjust to these uncontrollable factors from natural world. To accomodate these non-human factors, we designed planters, removable collumns,adjustable hight floor joints, and roof-top drainage system. As a result, the building and its interior space become directly related to the trees’ seasonalchanges and growth cycles; the building experiences summer bloom, fall foliage, and dies eventually as a tree would.
The white birch trees planted around the pavilion would evnentually inosculate and grow into a strong exoskeleton for the highrise prototype, proposing an unusual challenge for the human to care and adjust to these uncontrollable factors from natural world. To accomodate these non-human factors, we designed planters, removable collumns,adjustable hight floor joints, and roof-top drainage system. As a result, the building and its interior space become directly related to the trees’ seasonalchanges and growth cycles; the building experiences summer bloom, fall foliage, and dies eventually as a tree would.
White birch planted around the 40ft diameter foundation. On each floor, we place tree plotters for saplings to grow and inosculate with the main trunk. As time pass, the birches would grow thicker and stronger, requiring less interior supports from the removable collumns.
trees’ growth and changes, we designed adjustable joints
that help level floor planes, removable columns that provide secondary
supports, a roof-top drainage system that recycles rainwater
for irrigation, and a cable system that stabilizes the lateral forces.
