Treehouses!

What could be more biophilic than a treehouse?

In October, Tow Vanderbilt reported on the treehouses designed by Takeshi Kobayashi (“A Treehouse Builder Who Creates Impermanence:  Japan’s Takashi Kobayashi Has Found Freedom in the Canopies,” 2023, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/t-magazine/takashi-kobayashi-treehouses.html  ).

Vanderbilt shares that “Treehouses stir some primordial instinct; the protohuman Australopithecus erected night nests in trees. Our shoulders seem built for brachiation, and the human hand today, with its ridged palms and the ability to grasp between the thumb and first digit, still bears the traces, notes Frank R. Wilson in ‘The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture’  (1988),  of an evolutionary move that ‘permitted improved climbing and locomotion along trunks and branches.’ The publication in German, in 1813, of the novel ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ — about a family marooned on a remote isle — sparked the first modern vogue for treehouses. With industrialization, they came to stand as a sort of symbol for the lost vitality of our engagement with the natural world.”