Up in the Trees

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Tree houses offer a symbiosis with nature that we strive for in a society of bustling movement always on the go. A new reflection in architecture of this notion of hideouts and nestled places for individuals to retreat has become very popular. These new innovations offer up a romance with nature and a new appreciation for craftsmanship. Tree houses symbolize a childlike freedom from supervision, a fantasy of the world’s greatest living sculptures. Places of refuge offer the shelter a city dweller needs with the geographic location and the individual character. As children we are connected with nature and the more we become adults the more we will have a longing for nature. There is a self-realization in needing a private space for ourselves: a view of the sky, a piece of ground, a presence of nature and animals. A set of signs and images for a journey of self-realization is responding to us with establishing what our needs, and exposing ourselves to humanity as to what our needs are as such. The human begins to appear and we can see ourselves through the architecture. Tree houses act as a device within these ideas against the house of the future, how can these things exist, emerges through this idea of separating yourself from the outside world.
From ancient civilizations to the present day –the tree house has taken on many forms. The idea of a tree structure goes back to primitive times of humanity as one of the earliest forms of architecture. In his Natural History Pliny the Elder wrote of “the Emperor Caligula, who on an estate at Velletri was impressed by the flooring of a single plane tree, and benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches, and held a banquet in the tree.” In history monks used to build small houses in trees but it was the Renaissance that sparked the creation of spectacular, unimagined spaces. In his book Tree Houses, Anthony Aikman

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