Thinking about joining the living structure to other things

The strength and coherence of any structure is a result of the attachment of different materials and elements by appropriate methods.

In constructing a living building, there are several areas where attachment is not the same as in any other building. These are:

• The trunks/stems entering the soil
• The joining of trunks together - the same method is variously called "pleaching", "approach grafting" and "pressure grafting".
• The support of a waterproof surface over the whole (i.e. roof!)
• The integration of fixed size components into the living structure - e.g windows, steel shape enforcement
• The use of supports to either temporarily or permanently take some of the load to the ground through the living structure.

I'll put up a post for each one.

Where it all started

Many years ago, as a child stuck indoors while on a wet family holiday in Wales, I was reduced to reading an Enid Blyton book - which my father would never have allowed in our home - but was luckily on the bookshelf in the holiday place.

The book was Enid Blyton's "The Secret Island" and in the book the runaway children constructed a shelter from willow wands, thrust into the earth and woven together, that then sprouted and made a 'living' house.

The idea of sticks broken from a tree being able to turn into trees themselves by just by being pushed into the ground captured my imagination and I loved the idea of being able to make a green living structure in such a simple way.

In following years I tried several times to replicate the process but oddly enough, weeping willow twigs pushed into hard summer earth of our back garden, never gave the desired results .

An old book that describes living buildings

A nearly 50 year old book that describes a galaxy wide market in houses grown from seed. The term Genetically Engineered didn't exist when Jack Vance wrote this book but that could be the only modern interpretation of the methods the Iszic of the planet Iszm, use to create their harvestable houses.

The book implies that immense financial  rewards await the person that can corner the market in these cheap ready-grown habitations......

Techniques - Bracing

Bracing can be used to support a damaged tree during its recovery to full strength but more interestingly, for this blog anyway, it can be used to modify the form of even quite substantial branches.

http://www.tree-consult.org/images/pdf/eng/BracingISA.pdf is a full description of modern approaches to this technique.

Bending has a good chance of success up to a 60 degree angle.