Foresting Architecture

Can a city be built with living trees, and what would it take to live with a forest? Foresting Architecture puts the question to an image model and to a studio at once. The image series of 2022 explores an architecture literally forested with living trees, enabled by research conducted with an image model: atriums that read as clearings, galleries wrapped around trunks, terraces spiralling up a living column, and rooms cut into the timber of a tree that is still growing. A second group, Foresting Interiorities, stays inside: a trunk as the column of a timber room with a window onto the city, shelves carved around it, a pool room whose ceiling opens onto the forest. The archive holds thirteen numbered sub-series, a set of mock-ups, and a set of ponds; twelve images are shown here.

The premise continues the Treehouses study of the same year, which asked whether vertical living could be built with rapid-growth oaks and similar living trees on site rather than with cut, shredded, and glued timber. Foresting Architecture takes that doubt about materials to the scale of a building type: if a building is grown, its structure, its envelope, and its interior can no longer be separated, and the images test what such a building would have to look like to be lived in.

The studio followed in spring 2023: ARC 696 Advanced Design Studio at the University of Texas at Austin, open to undergraduate and graduate students, under the title Foresting Architecture: a research hub for grown buildings. The series received the Metaverse Architecture and Design Award 2023 of Interior Design magazine as the winner of the category AI-generated design. The question of trees in architecture is taken up in writing in my chapter The Advent of Trees in Architecture: The new features of data-centric building typologies, in Diffusions: A Taxonomy of Synthetic Imaginations in Architecture Design, edited by Matias del Campo (Wiley, 2024), and, with Leticia Peña Gómez Portugal, in Spanish in Bitácora Arquitectura in 2024.

Within the lab’s generated work of 2022 and 2023 the series is a pilot study: a way of finding out what an image model already believes a forested building looks like, before that belief is measured across thousands of cities in the LCA-GCS dataset. Its questions continue in Carbon Hinterlands, where the same studio format turns from trees to pasture.