Beach Lake, Pennsylvania

NOW AVAILABLE: Rare archival footage of the construction of Lightning House 2001. Click here for details.

I am continuing with the theme of revisiting old projects as a way to reflect on my current trajectory, see old friends, and make new discoveries. This past fall I traveled to upstate Pennsylvania to assess the condition of a tree house I built in 2001 at Mildred’s Lane Historical Society, the home and experimental rural project of my good friends the artists J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion .

I had received a distressed message from Morgan that the host tree, a 100 year old white pine, had been struck by lightning and that the tree had died. Though one trunk of the forked tree fell to the ground, my tree house had survived unharmed. Morgan wanted me to come East to assess the damage and consider designing a new project around either preserving or salvaging the tree and tree house in its dramatic state of decline.

I was not surprised by the news. The tree bore the scars of having been previously struck before I built the structure, and the secondary trunk was already leaning at a rakish angle. I chose to use the tree regardless at the time, due to its visual proximity to the main house, aural proximity to the stream, and its austere presence in a meadow criss-crossed by dry-laid stone walls. I designed the structure to cantilever off of the main trunk in anticipation of the leaning trunk eventually falling, and made only one supporting connection to the leaning trunk. I did not anticipate the death of the tree from lightning and was startled by the haunting rawness of the bare tree and newly exposed tree house against the cascade of autumn colors.

My thoughts turned immediately to an operational strategy I developed in the course of building the tree house, oddly confirmed by these recent events, which is the fourth axiom in the Deep Craft manifesto:

ENTROPY ADDS VALUE

The functionality of a thing by definition incorporates/embodies its decomposition.

I had built the tree house in ten rainy days in May 2001 with the help of a crew assembled by Mark and Morgan for the final push over a long weekend . The crew included the artists Bob Braine, Alison Smith, Hope Ginsburg, Brian and Rebecca Purcell and several others who came up from New York for the tree house festivities and Morgan’s famous Southern hospitality.

I had developed the tree house program after completing several ambitious public projects, culminating in the Tool Barn at the Edible Schoolyard. While these projects allowed me to experiment, they were taxing in that they required the complex management of multiple entities, including funding organizations, public institutions, neighbors, municipalities and permit processes. I wanted to radically loosen the reigns on design requirements so that emphasis would shift to the real time relationships at the heart of collaborative, community-based making. The tree house projects began as a ‘thought experiment’ by observing what conditions put people at their best, regardless of their background or skill set. I wanted to see what a small group could build together as an extension of simply hanging out over a few days with no distractions.

Everybody knows exactly what to do when the parameters of tree house construction are narrowed to the use of hand tools, materials found within walking distance in the forest, and no penetrations to the tree. Some people forage, some climb, some cook, some entertain. The actual building emerges as the boid-like residue of hanging out, talking and strategizing, and survives as the record of its own making, containing the memories of a shared, lived experience in and around a tree.

For the un-making of Lightning Tree House at Mildred’s Lane, I would like to gather the same group of people, disassemble the structure, document the parts as anthropological artifacts, and incorporate them into a new and more inhabitable structure in a related white pine. I hope to achieve this as artist in residence at Mildred’s Lane in 2009, and will maintain a daily log of the process on these pages while it happens.

Over the coming months, I will be featuring products I have developed through this and other tree house projects, some of which will be available for sale as GOODS.

Tagged: , alison smith, bob braine, hope ginsburg, mark dion, mildred's lane, morgan puett, tree house

Berkeley, California (photo: Richard Barnes)

I recently had the good fortune to spend a day working with photographer Richard Barnes. Richard is helping me document my work for the Edible Schoolyard over the past decade as I develop a book proposal about this and related Deep Craft projects and philosophy.In Spring of 1998 I was commissioned to design and build a tool shed for the nascent Edible Schoolyard with a grant from the Center for Ecoliteracy, a Berkeley-based non-profit founded by physicist Fritjof Capra. The project gave me a unique opportunity to test some ideas I was beginning to develop about vernacular architecture, in response to the urban fabric of the San Francisco Bay region, where Ene and I had recently settled. The tool barn was a model project, with many nuances and object lessons, and its story will form the foundation of my book. I will be outlining the story of ‘Tool Barn at the Edible Schoolyard’ in detail in the PROJECTS pages of this site as I compile documentation.

East elevation (photo: Richard Barnes)

Working with Richard gave me a chance to revisit the project and see it with fresh eyes. Richard is an astute observer, with a profound understanding of Arts and Crafts architecture and a gift for ‘forensic’ documentation. Our collaboration consisted of translating what for me is a process-driven approach to architecture into visual artifact.Following several email exchanges where we found aesthetic common ground and many shared connections, we met on site in January to plan a shooting strategy based upon how the tool barn had been adapted to daily use. I was relieved to find Richard to be witty, affable and frank, and we got along immediately. Anything resembling a strategy grew out of our wide-ranging conversation over afternoon tea, prompted by Richard’s penetrating questions.

We met again a few weeks ago on the eve of the planned shoot, and continued the conversation over a three hour dinner at Chez Panisse. We decided to let the following day unfold in response to the weather and shifting light patterns. We would simply carry our conversational collaboration to the site and make a day of it. I would be Richard’s assistant, and he would tell me what to do. The next morning I brought coffee and sandwiches, and we spent a delightful day in the garden, talking to passersby and making photographs in a logic that asserted itself automatically, informed by our late night musings.Though I had visited the tool barn sporadically over the years, I had not spent a full day in the garden since I built the structure some ten years ago. I was able to recapture the visceral sense I originally had on site, and remembered how this translated into the conception of the building. I remembered the feeling of just standing there before anything was built, smelling the air, hearing the birds and feeling the warmth of the sun over a cool breeze coming off the bay to the West. It was an oddly moving experience, a ‘time out of time’. I remembered how I thought of each elevation as a kind of portrait of the cardinal points of the compass, tuned to the site and its proposed use patterns, and how I graded the material accordingly. I remembered how my work force consisted mostly of middle school students with ‘learning disabilities’, for whom school offered no reward system for their kinesthetic talents.

gloves dry in the sun (photo: Richard Barnes)

I was deeply touched by the way the building had been adapted by the gardeners, evidence of the cyclic and interdependent relationship between design, making and use I had theorized. The building had earned a purposefulness that I had only imagined and left open to the forces at play. Seeing it all working so well prompted me to recall another adage of mine which guided the structural/material program for the building, which forms the third axiom in the Deep Craft manifesto:

The functional lifespan of a constructed thing should mirror the lifecycle of its principle material.

The building is framed with timbers from the top 50 feet of a single, storm fallen Coast Redwood, locally milled from a thousand year old tree. It is made to be easily disassembled and re-used if necessary, as it is pinned together with oak ‘trunnels’, which were hand-tapered and pegged in place by the students. The building is an homage to that specific tree, and might last a thousand years if its evolving design continues to influence the forces of entropy that have thus far shaped it into something beautiful.

framing detail (photo: Richard Barnes)

Tagged: edible schoolyard, green architecture, richard barnes photography, timber frame