Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:29:29 +0000

I grew up in a small town in the middle of farm country, which meant* an inexhaustible supply of worn fencing, old plywood, broken 2x4s and enough baler twine to stretch to the moon, or so it seemed. And we built treehouses. We built the shit out of treehouses, with three-story constructions that ran 20' up old maples, ladders from chunks of wood nailed to the trunk, old tarp roofs held on by twine, kids scrambling up and down the thing to add bits and tear bits off.

I was around 12-13 at the time, and then one day I went down to the place and nobody was around and I looked up at one of our treehouses and I realized that we were all going to die. Some switch had been thrown in my brain where I'd finally accrued enough instinctive knowledge of physics and engineering that I saw very clearly that what we had built should not support a chipmunk, let alone five or six rampaging tweenagers.

So I sort of stopped hanging out with the treehousers after a while, and then over the next few weeks we all sort of stopped... treehousing. I think it was kind of a mass maturity onset thing.

Point being, I'm still kind of convinced that the laws of physics just don't apply when you're doing stuff like building treehouses out of string and rotten cardboard. Kids with purity of intent have some sort of reality-defying aura around them, letting them do things that any adult with a lick of sense would realize should result in instant death.

And then one day you get up and you realize that you can't build treehouses any more. You've hit some sort of mental point where you're like Wile E. Coyote ten feet past the cliff edge, just now feeling the first pluck of gravity.

It kinda sucked.

I know it's a trade-off, and now I can drive cars and stay up late reading comics and have sexings with a lady, but I miss the treehouses.

All that to say that I don't think these are treehouses. Real treehouses stink of plywood glue and baler twine and have a stolen Penthouse buried in the wet leaves around the trunk. Real treehouses are built by kids that can barely swing the hammer. These are... something else.

Adult Me respects the design and is glad that yuppies can provide their helicoptered children with hermetically sealed IKEA-furnished little domiciles, but Kid Me utterly rejects "treehouse" being applied to this stuff.

*I'm not sure how that worked, but there seems to be a weird farm alchemy where in addition to milk, meat and vegetables, they produce scrap lumber and baler twine.
posted by Shepherd at 11:04 AM on January 29 [27 favorites]

And then you have the inhabitat gang, Justin at Materialicious and Harry at Mocoloco ; really, I am just going to have to move a couple of time zones east to keep on top of the ultra-competitive modern treehouse blogosphere.

Anyhow, the designer tells Dezeen about it:

Eight year-old Jorin and his big sister Matana, ten, sought a tree fort refuge on their downtown Toronto property to evoke the pleasures of cottage country during busy summers in the city.

Rather than being constructed on the tree, the project wraps itself around the mature pine tree and is supported on three pilotis above an S-shaped bench that skirts around the columns, tree trunk and slide pole.

With ample shading provided by low hanging boughs, a translucent corrugated fiberglass was used to clad the project. Throughout the day, the opalescent skin transmits the movement of shadows from the exterior to the interior.

The slats on the interior were painted colours selected by Jorin and Matana on three sides which, depending on the sun, reflects colour back onto the skin.

There is no information about what kind of wood is used; a commenter on Dezeen thinks it looks like pressure treated lumber. I certainly hope not; PTL is made with a copper wood preservative (at least they don't use arsenic any more) and I don't think it plays nice with kids.