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in history the relationship between the green and the trees and the city has started by a very strong separation from the historical city centers without any green and the nature outside and then we
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have the trees and the parks entering the city and now it's becoming more and more an amalgamation where it's kind of becoming one normally you have to keep a
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distance between a building and a tween normally you have just the building and our buildings they also act as the Tweed well the idea of the plain cube and what
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you see here now actually it's a child it's not you know it's hard to say that the building is finished because right now what you see is still the first stage of the building and some of this like the pods and part of the three
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structure will go and then this building will mature and it will become a huge design three actually and the idea is that it can build a huge structure with
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small trees she's only three or four years old and it is very strong it's like valid yeah normally you cannot well would you can weld up steel but not
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wood and by using the wood as our living organism we can do it yeah but we have to stick to all the gross rules of trees otherwise everything will die one technique we have weekly inoculation the
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joining of trees so this was two one here one here and when we connect them they merge to one in the second year of merging they create one growth ring and then it is one body of wood and it is
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one organism so in the beginning you have to and we do this with hundreds that we are constructing not with please we are constructing the tree itself what
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we do is we use the trees in a way architects normally use semi finished tutorials like beams or bricks they put a lot of these things together to create one structure and we use a lot of young trees to
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create one big tree structure they just come together because you yeah what do you do to make them well we don't talk to them in this case we use little screws state in between it does not
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really harm it and it simply presses together the two parts and let's merge the back and then the wood and then is one and then they exchange everything here you can see an older element where
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the trees have the trunks has already grown together actually actually here we can see the screws anymore they are overgrown formerly those were four young plain trees one two three four and they have been grown together
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here how long did that take three to four three four years four years here that's what we wrote that it might look like this in 18 years so this is when the trees have overgrown the technical elements for when the trees when it is
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all grown together to one tree the load of this construction will be taken by the trunks of the tree so the tree will become the columns of the construction
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so the idea is that this could be a structure that becomes a building or becomes part of a building happy technically yes we could have facades inside so instead of this walkway you
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could have also balconies and inside here you could have a flag it will not be the only alternative to traditional architecture but it's an element that will be added more and more to
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Architecture multi-dimensional and green wall I think humans see trees differently maybe you can say they have more respect to trees or they are more
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impressed by trees awesome falling nice please of course they have these branches and so it has a three dimensionality that these green walls green facades don't have they can never
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have and they can grow very deep facade so if you are inside the tree you don't have this green wall in front of you but you have this perspective through the branches and the leaves so it's very different you have the same shade maybe
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even better shade but you have a depth of the facade you can can see the the parts and the how the holder how it works actually so yes with the technical
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infrastructure not much but it's a it's for watering the plants so it's an automatic watering system this is just for for the winter I think we leave it on in summer also because so then the
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Sun is doesn't dry out the pot so quickly they're quite some interesting aspects of this instant park a park like this like from the first day it has a similar
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canopy as a fully grown tree so you don't have to wait so if you build a square in the city and you want shade and the volume of a tree right away you could use this structure it is always
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one two three four because we wanted a certain volume from the beginning and also because we don't know if all the plants will survive the process because it it hasn't been done before so we have
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these pots in up to eight meters height in the Black Forest so it's very very cold in the winter a very stormy weather and in the summer it can get quite hot so of course we wanted to make sure that that we have enough plants and of course
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it's always a question of how young are the plans and how long are the plan so in this case we chose quite young plants to be able to form them also around these details so they can integral they can over grow the technical elements we
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don't have a English expression for and if the tree grows around a pipe or something it is a starting and this is after something like 2 years and this is after 5 years for Colin strim equal value
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Govan like throwing over yeah so that's what what is happening here that's what we try to provoke with the detailing and the construction and this is their very
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first building the Barbican exhibition you can really see here what we want to achieve that we want to bring people into the canopy we call it Bal botanic the German term
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and it Bao is building and veronica's botany it says the combination of botany and architecture mainly and we really try to fuse the buildings and trees basically
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[Music] I started very a long time ago and was studying architecture in suka and I stumbled over some historical examples
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in Germany we have a long tradition of so-called hands Linden which means a dancing tree it's a special kind of lime tree which is cooled and formed in a way that you can add a platform in the
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canopy and in medieval times it was very famous it was the only tree in town and people get up there and came up for the spring dance and so on so it was a very
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famous thing and another historical reference is the so-called living route Witches of the car the people in India they do fantastic structures out of the
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roots of Tiger streets and they bend them over the rivers and over time a really walkable bridge appears it's a fascinating thing and almost half of my
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stadium I was focusing on this with the aim to transfer this historical approaches into a modern architecture this is the town of blue textbook it's
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close to Stuttgart this is more or less the main square and it's completely a paste is very hot in the summer it was for it hate the reality of urban
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planning and now we really completely try to change this project here the green living room the idea is to use our bubble tonic approach in combination with these green
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walls to create a kind of urban comfort climate zone so you have fresh air you have shade you have the coolness of the evaporation and all these things the micro climatic effects are very much
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brought by the canopy of the trees which is a very massive because it's only 3 years old yes so normally a tree would be much smaller and plus the wall which is
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having birds and bees and so on and it's all standing on a parking so in fact it's a green roof so there's almost no soil we use the plant addition technique
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to create this big canopy roof which is not possible with the normal tree you can see very well these joining the inoculation here so this is one and these are even two and they are joined
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to one point here right and again here and again here and here and this is a very interesting point because we have this tree coming
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from the the ground and we have another level that is coming from here from the wall and we join them and there's even a third level on top and the idea is that
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it can build a huge structure with small trees it is much more efficient to generate a framework than a solid track I think it was a tea trees they all fuse
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together to one even it is young it's still strong because of the framework it will just take one or two years more this is all one and then they get all
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the water and everything they need from the lowermost ones and the other foods are not necessary at all so we could remove even the wall if we want it's all
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based on scientific approaches so it's all proofed I am trained as an architect officially I am adjust the architect but about having extent of my PhD was botany
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so they're joining techniques so here we have two connections one here one here of two trees you can see at the rest of the school here here state in between after some years we cut the base of the
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second tree here and what the tree is doing it is just adapting when this is kind of where it gets all the water and nutrition from here so by this is going stronger but this still survives and
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gets the water by this connection and this is free coming here is joined to one and three again yes and then we will cut here because this is coming from the
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wall this is coming from the ground in there in the future we will we will cut maybe next year you will cut here yeah and then it is getting all all the water from down here this is
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a very nice it is something that happens in nature anyway absolutely so it is something very natural for example in roots and the roots are going in the soil they sometimes meet each other and they grow over each other and then they
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merge like this so even very many trees of the same species in the forest are interconnected and a kind of network that you can communicate by this network but we just do we use it for designing
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and constructing the trees what we see here that really is not only the bark that is all the wood that is joint yeah we peeled off the bark here see how fundamental it is yes it is not only on
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the surface yeah requires so much patience yes you have to wait some time yes it is not so slow maybe four yes it's a time but I
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started early enough you grow older these things now the trees are doing a lot regarding microclimate shade and so on and the wall also give the biodiversity and as
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other aspects like for example is a sound barrier normally trees are seen as a kind of but in fact they are not and here we only try to combine these
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aspects that we have the canopy and we have the sound barrier wall it's only 50 centimeter and it's all in one here you can see this is just the wall right and
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on both sides we have the tree structure so all together is like this and it's a living wall a sound barrier and a tree in one just giving a lot of benefits to a building for example protecting
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against heat and so on this is based off on a kind of a Lego system and it blocks like this yeah and we they are pre cultivated and they have all numbers
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which layer all the trees and the plants are in and you just sowhat's building today's basically we have this here for example here you can
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see and then again here yeah again here's the watering system for example so we have the the types here and they run all along the walls and they are
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dripping time by time embeds it and so this is completely different from the green wall because this is a liberal wall right it's a new system we developed for the Northam and Eastern European market that is very cold and
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dry in winter and many of other green wall systems fail because they there's not enough soil so this is very massive in a way but this is completely different because it is self-sustaining
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and self-supporting so it can stand in front of a building and it can even carry part of the building this is designed as a load-bearing structure it will carry all the loads in the future
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this can work with smaller projects for sure not with the skyscraper yeah normally you have to keep distance between a building and a tree and since
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we form the tree and make a tree more comparable with the engineered structure is more stiff and that we can really fuse the building and the between on the
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same side so do you think that this can be something scalable it's absolutely scalable you can use it really for building as high as a tree can grow so
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30 meter and we made some design proposals even for whole streets where all the street trees are fused with the building in this way so the people don't
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live in a house they live in a tree behind there some rooms for sure that our traditional anyway but they really if you go out of the door you stand in the tree into the canopy we have quite a
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bit of steel in this project and it will become less steel and it will become more and more tree we think that in a few years these trees will be inter ground and when they become one organism
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we can take out the posts and then we have to cut the trees like the connection to the pots and we can take on the pot the pots are just there to create this instance huge green volume
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and to be able to form them so we have actually a design tree or a tree house whatever you want to call it it's also a kind of speculation but the tree will form the space inside this
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building in the future we are not building the roof we will we think that the tree will do this this commercial
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get a deer you know one want to really replace technical material in total so it's not a kind of snail romantic idea of coming back to nature and ignoring
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technical development definitely not it's really adding something that is technically developed but is a part of nature to our technical world
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kind of a low-tech shading element because you don't need shade in the winter so we don't have these in the winter and you'll need to change into some others when the Leafs are there and you have a natural way of shading a
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building so we are discussing it also with these high-tech climate engineers for buildings they are also interested in this low-tech approach to say okay
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how can we use the tree to do this and so we don't need very expensive technical elements we do it well we can build a house that is at the same time a
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tree you have to rethink the relationship between the city and and the landscape surrounding the city because we have this idea of identifying the city and not building around because
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we don't want to destroy the nature and on the other hand we have not enough apartments we know we have not enough space for housing so they become very expensive up to now we we always think that we are not supposed to build
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anywhere because it's destroying nature or it's destroying the landscape if you are designing buildings in a way that they become even a benefit they can even
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make the the landscape that has formerly maybe been an agricultural land make it even better in terms of ecology so with then we have to rethink this relationship that can be one idea of
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creating ecology plus houses three houses house trees we have quite a bit of steel in this project and it will become less steel and it will become more and more trees
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so then these columns might be taken out so what we did is we chose a way of construction if you look closely you can see that there are many screws but they are constructed in a way so we could
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take out the screws and take out the columns and still leave some of the other metal structure inside which is then inter grown with the tree it gives you a timeline in to see the pot you can already see some pots have been taken
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out because the trees have already into grown and key you can see how the tree is becoming more like one organism and we have already taken out some steel elements and columns after eighteen
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years could you could be eighteen could be 25 okay and so the proportion of the building in general including the tree is changing and for many architects they cannot deal
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with it because they are very much afraid by the natural processes so you have to really learn to think in time buildings the architects they are
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normally designed as a kind of a piece of art that is finished and we cannot do it like this we have to deal with all these processes of development and we have to take advantage of this because
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it's very interesting so what we do we always draw a timeline and not completely fixed timelines we just open up possibilities how it could develop it will stay interesting for the rest of
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our lives and the rest of the life of the project and we guess or we think that the project will become much older than they will outlive us we are pretty sure if they are taken care of but most of the trees I mean these trees they can
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reach ages of several hundred years so we are pretty sure that they were out liver you
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