Tree shaping
Tree shaping has been practiced for at least several hundred years, as demonstrated by the living root bridges built and maintained by the Khasi people of India.
Early 20th-century practitioners and artisans included banker John Krubsack, Axel Erlandson with his Tree Circus, and landscape engineer Arthur Wiechula.
[3] The living root bridges of Cherrapunji, Laitkynsew, and Nongriat, in the present-day Meghalaya state of northeast India are examples of tree shaping.
Once the network of joints were of substantial size, builders laid planks across the grid, upon which they built huts to live in, thus keeping the human settlement safe in times of annual flooding.
[29]: 117 The befit of using trees to grow a design which is then harvested for furniture, is that these pieces are stronger than the results of conventional manufacturing process.
[9] Shaped tree projects can play a role in mitigating the imbalance of carbon dioxide-oxygen that happens in cities, creating a microclimate that could be soothing to human habitation.
The types of projects that could work in this environment would be playground equipment, road furniture, walkways with over-bridges and bus shelters.
[39] The ancient War-Khasi people of India worked with the aerial roots of native banyan fig trees, adapting them to create footbridges over watercourses.
[citation needed] He started box elder seeds in 1903, selecting and planting either 28[41] or 32[42] of the saplings in a carefully designed pattern in the spring of 1907.
[41] In the spring of 1908, the trees had grown to six feet tall and he began training them along a trellis, grafting the branches at critical points to form the parts of his chair.
[17] Axel Erlandson was a Swedish American farmer who started training trees as a hobby on his farm in Hilmar, California, in 1925.
In 1926, he published Wachsende Häuser aus lebenden Bäumen entstehend (Developing Houses from Living Trees) in German.
[44][45] In it, he gave detailed illustrated descriptions of houses grown from trees and described simple building techniques involving guided grafting together of live branches; including a system of v-shaped lateral cuts used to bend and curve individual trunks and branches in the direction of a design, with reaction wood soon closing the wounds to hold the curves.
[46] Weichula never built a living home, but he grew a 394' wall of Canadian poplars to help keep the snow off of a section of train tracks.
[47] He became inspired by inosculation he noticed in nature and by the growth of tree trunks around man-made objects such as fences and idle farm equipment.
[47] Ladd binds a variety of objects to trees, for live wood to grow around and be incorporated, including teacups, bicycle wheels, headstones, steel spheres, water piping, and electrical conduit.
[48] A current project at the DeCordova and Dana Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts incorporates eleven American Liberty Elm trees grafted next to each other to form a long hillside stair banister.
He became inspired as a child, both by a photograph of some unusually twisted coconut palms in southern Thailand and by a living fallen tree he noticed, which had grown new branches along its trunk, forming a kind of canopied bridge.
[17] His hobby began in 1980 because of his concern the Thailand forests are being ravaged by woodcarvers to the point that one day the industry would eventually carve itself out of existence.
Nirandr Boonnetr has written a detailed, step-by-step booklet of instructions hoping his hobby of living furniture will spread to other countries.
[citation needed] Peter Cook and Becky Northey of Pooktre are Australian artists who live in South East Queensland.
[53][52] They were the featured artists at the Growing Village pavilion showing 8 pieces of grown art at the World's Expo 2005 in Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture, Japan.
[9] According to Cattle, in the late 1970s he developed an idea to train and graft trees to grow into shapes[59] in response to questions from students asking how to build furniture using less energy.
Other artistic horticultural practices such as bonsai, espalier, and topiary share some elements and a common heritage, though a number of distinctions may be identified.
[71] The practice is commonly used to accelerate and increase production in fruit-bearing trees and also to decorate flat exterior walls while conserving space.
[citation needed] Three MIT designers – Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona – created a concept of a living tree house which nourishes its inhabitants and merges with its environment.
[76] A Swedish architectural firm VisionDivision took part in a week-long workshop at the Italian university Politecnico di Milano[1] with the students.
[1][77] VisionDivision's architects helped the students and instructors to create an easy maintenance plan for future gardeners of the university.
"[11] The advantages are trees can improve the habitation by generating more oxygen, giving shade and reuse of waste water creating a micro climate.
Live resprouting shoots emerge from either side of the tree stump seat to form a fancifully twined and inosculated two-story-tall chair back.
