Don't Build Your Home, Grow It!
I watched this video several years ago. However, as TED says, the idea the video delivered remains worth spreading. The idea came from Mitchell Joachim, an architect who is also working as an Associate Professor at NYU (New York University) and EGS (European Graduate School). He proposed a very provoking proposition: "Don't Build Your Home, Grow It!" The complete video can be watched on TED website or below.
A simple message: Don't build your home, grow it!
Mitchell Joachim's vision is to embrace the possibilities of achieving a sustainable way of constructing homes by literally growing it. The notion of organic architecture is brought to the extreme by Joachim. The architecture can be literally organic. It can be made of entirely growing living things such as trees and, peculiarly, meat.
Beginning his presentation by reminding the audience about the "unremitting state of trauma" faced by the Americans today (unsustainable lifestyle represented by McPeople, McCars and McHouses), Joachim addressed that he, as an architect, has to deal with these very issues. He proposed a method of building homes he called as "Fab Tree Hab". He argued that there is no better way to fit natural environment into our buildings than constructing buildings out of the natural environment itself (growing trees as buildings).
Fab Tree Hab
The method is simple and has been known for a long time in gardening: pleaching. The idea is to grow homes by grafting trees into an intended shape with the help of Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) scaffolding. The scaffolding is only needed at the early stage of the "construction", that is to allow the trees to grow into specific shape. Once the plants are grafted together, the scaffolding is removed and can be reused to "grow" another home, and so on.
A home is finished to build in 5 years (archinode.com)
Although Fab Tree Hab is a hypothetical design, the benefits are remarkable:
- 100% organic living building material,
- positive contribution to the ecosystem (because the home itself is an ecosystem),
- produce foods,
- closed-loop life cycle,
- regenerative (removing negative environmental impacts).
Joachim's vision of a "Veggie Village" (archinode.com)
The second idea that Joachim presented in his TED talk is the possibility to build another variant of the organic house besides veggie house: that is the meat house. He and his team's proposal is to explore the possibility of growing meat as building material in the laboratory. Since everything takes place in laboratory, no living animal is being harm during the process of this meat substance. However, the process of growing meat from pork cell in the lab is a very expensive one with today's technology.
Perspective view and a wall section of Joachim's "Meat House" (archinode.com)
I am not sure about the feasibility of these ideas in today's time. The veggie house is probably more feasible and more promising to develop compared to the super-expensive meat house. Furthermore, the veggie house has more straightforward and convincing benefits to the environment and sustainability. I like the idea of breathing inside a breathing house. Not only breathing as in "natural ventilation", but the house itself is literally breathing through photosynthesis: sucking CO2 and releasing Oxygen.
One thing that can be challenging is to find a way to incorporate the house furniture, appliances and building system as we know it into the veggie house. If the inhabitant is willing to change their lifestyle dramatically (being independent of electricity, flush toilets, etc) and embrace an ancient lifestyle, then the house if perfect. Otherwise, it will be problematic to the veggie house to adapt the conventional house furniture, appliances, lights, fittings, etc).
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