Cambridge, MA, United States

In congruence with ecology as the guiding principal, this living home is designed to be nearly entirely edible so as to provide food to some organism at each stage of its life cycle. While inhabited, the home’s gardens and exterior walls continually produce nutrients for people and animals. As a direct contributer to the ecosystem it supports an economy comprised of truly breathing products not reconstituted or processed materials. Imagine a society based on slow farming trees for housing structure instead of the industrial manufacture of felled timber. The Fab Tree Hab concept resolutely accumulates the inscribed nuances that influenced the American Rustic period. Stemming from the insurgent writings of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Alcott, America defined a sensibility. These authors represent an early mode of intention that was profoundly ecocentric. Their notion of dwelling was envisioned as retreats, poets’ bowers, hermitages, and summer cottages in a Sylvan style. In 1847 it culminated in the self-made assembly of a crooked cedar and honeysuckle summer home by Thoreau and Alcott for their friend Emerson in the midst of a cornfield. This peculiar house severed as our point of departure. Here traditional anthropocentric doctrines are overturned and human life is subsumed within the terrestrial environs. Home, in this sense, becomes indistinct and fits itself symbiotically into the surrounding ecosystem.

Category: Private Houses  Type: Exterior  Views: 4292  Date: 25/07/2005