7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING?

| LEBBEUS WOODS

LEBBEUS WOODS

A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING?

It is interesting to see the latest developments in neuroscience being used to justify an approach to
design that has been around for a very long time. In short, this approach is to use natural forms as an
inspiration for architectural forms. The author of the following article argues that science informs us
that our being inside our own bodies (and not only in our minds or, if you will, our brains), makes us
especially receptive to the embodiments of other living things, such as trees, her prime example. In
other words, we feel most comfortable, most at home, in an embodied environment, as opposed to an
environment that we perceive only as an abstraction of ideas.

It is a very seductive argument in a time such as the present when people living in wholly artificial
and unnatural cities, far from aboriginal landscapes, often feel overwhelmed by abstractions of every
kind, from the dry statistics of global financial crises to the impassioned but still cerebral ideological
debates that dominate our politics. Many of us yearn for experiences that take us out of the narrow
human world and reconnect us with the less constrictive, richer and in a sense more hopeful world of
Nature. The Green movements emerging today testify to this need, as do trends in architecture that
emphasize sustainability and the pre-eminence of the organic. It is a mistake to consider them as
strictly pragmatic.

The last time this approach was taken up in full force was in the
period during and immediately following the First World War.
Lasting only a few years, it constituted a movement that was
called by critics and later historians “Expressionism.” The natural
forms that inspired architects such as Bruno and Max Taut, Hans
Poelzig, the Luckhardt Brothers, Hans Scharoun, and others were
not so much from the organic world reflecting today’s concerns,
but rather from the inorganic, mineral world of rocks and
crystals that underlay the industrial revolution then in full swing.
Still, the idea of a reconnection with a deeper level of Nature was—and remains—the driving
impulse. (left) The interior of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin, 1919, by Hans Poelzig. A design inspired by
stalactite formations in a mineral cave.

My point here is not to dismiss these architectural movements and trends as merely passing fashions.
To the contrary, they are critical counterpoints to dominant trends of our society that—carried too far
—become more destructive than creative. Their short-lived nature indicates, however, the limits of
trying to embody this need for reconnection only in architectural forms.

LW

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 1/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

(above) Tod’s retail store, Tokyo, by Toyo Ito.

January 7, 2012

SEEING THE BUILDINGS FOR THE TREES

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 2/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

By Sarah Williams Goldhagen

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists

conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape
architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the
mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations
we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in
metaphors grounded in that embodiment.

This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human
activity. Across cultures, “important” is big and “unimportant” is small, just as your caretakers were
once much larger than you. Sometimes your head is “in the clouds.” You approach a task “step by
step.”

Some architects are catching on to human cognition’s embodied nature. A few are especially
intrigued by metaphors that express bodily experience in the world.

Take the visual metaphor of a tree as shelter. Most people live around, use and look at trees. Children
climb them. People gather under them. Nearly everyone at some point uses one to escape the sun.

Recently, architects have deployed tree metaphors in many different se ings. At the Kanagawa
Institute of Technology in Japan, Junya Ishigami created an elegant “forest” out of slender, white-
enameled metal saplings that congregate in clusters and open into clearings of vocational work
spaces. In Seville, Spain, a German architect, Jürgen Mayer H., gave definition and shade to the city’s
Plaza de la Encarnación with his Metropol Parasol, a lilting, waffled construction of laminated timber.

Such projects follow earlier, very different tree-inspired buildings, like Toyo Ito’s well-known Tod’s,
a retail store in Tokyo, and the Mediathèque media library, an exhibition space and cinema in Sendai,
Japan, which is so well supported by irregular, hollowed-out, sinuous “trunks” (housing elevators
and staircases) that it survived the enormous earthquake last March.

Why should tree metaphors appeal to architects? Why should they be useful, even good, for people?
In the Seville project, tree imagery helps construct a distinctive public place that offers shelter and
areas to congregate. As under spreading trees, the boundaries defining these spaces are permeable;
easy to enter and exit, they offer nature’s spatial freedom yet help people to feel more firmly rooted
where they are. And tree metaphors, deployed architecturally, simultaneously lament nature’s
absence and symbolically insert its presence.

Tree metaphors also refer to the experience of living in a body on earth. Trees are static, stable objects.
Someone connected to a community is “rooted” there; a psychologically sturdy friend’s feet are
firmly “planted” on the ground. We use trees to describe human bodies and souls: the area from our
neck to pelvis is our “trunk”; someone reliable is “solid as an oak”; someone exploring a new area of
inquiry is “branching out.”

Buildings aren’t nature, of course. Tree metaphors like the branching-out facade of Mr. Ito’s Tod’s
surprise people. But because the surprise comes along with the implied reassurance of structural
integrity (they’re trees, after all), it prompts us to focus on the built environment, perhaps to
reconsider its role in our everyday lives.

Architects may also like tree metaphors because a tree’s overall structure is regular, while its fine-
grained composition, its tangles of branches, are irregular, an arrangement conducive to the kind of
design experimentation offered by new digital technologies.
https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 3/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

But the design opportunities that tree metaphors present fail to explain their appearance in such a
diverse range of buildings. Trees are familiar. Tree metaphors allow for an architectural inventiveness
that stretches people without estranging them.

Trees are just one of the growing number of embodied metaphors used in contemporary architecture:
Zaha Hadid builds riverlike spaces, while the Japanese firm Sanaa offers up a habitable
mountainscape of a student center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Swi erland.

How many designers are clued in to the ongoing cognitive revolution and its potential for the built
environment is unclear. But this collection of architects and projects herald more than just another
stylistic or pyrotechnic, technology-driven trend. They point toward how the built environment could
— and should — be radically reconceptualized around the fundamental workings of the human
mind. We need, and are ever more in a position to create, a richer built environment, grounded in the
way people actually experience the world around them.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, the architecture critic for The New Republic, is writing a book about how people
experience the contemporary built environment.

Following are projects referenced in the article:

(above) Metropol Parasol, Spain, by architect Jürgen Mayer H.

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 4/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

(above) Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Japan, by Junya Ishigami and Associates.

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 5/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

(above) Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan, by Toyo Ito.

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 6/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

(above) Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, France, by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA).

Related post on the LW blog: h ps://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/building-landscapes/

10 Comments
https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 7/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

Jump to comment form | comment rss [?] | trackback uri [?]

Francisco Vasconcelos 1.28.12I believe it’s … Phenomenology ^_^
/ 2am
Reply
Caleb Crawford 1.30.12 / 1pmThis is an interesting thesis, and the relation to “nature deficit
disorder” hadn’t occurred to me until your post. Also recall that Art Nouveau and independents
such as Gaudi occurred in the period before WWI, during some of the middle industrial
revolution’s greatest miseries. Couple with that the general interest in natural history, which took
on an even greater focus with Darwin. There are the fantastic drawings of Ernst Haeckel, which
inspired designers of his day. Today we have, in addition to biomorphic form (conventional
construction inspired by natural form), biomimic design – design which responds to the
performative qualities of natural systems, but may have no overt biomorphic form. Annie has a
thesis that the biomorphic goes back even further and has been examining early American floral
motifs…

Reply
K.S 1.30.12 / 8pmThe classical columns – Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic, are
abstractions of tree trunks – probably the first building materials mankind used.

“And tree metaphors, deployed architecturally, simultaneously lament nature’s absence and
symbolically insert its presence.”

Where is this going to lead us? A whole world that has become giant symbol for a ghosted nature?

Reply
metamechanics 1.31.12 / 2amAs Francisco notes – phenomenology.
Lately reading a lot of Edmund Husserl again and trying to model and draw my dreams. The
articles second paragraph hit the nail on the head for me regarding my architecture in dreams –
associative. As I get all Gallileo in thinking (husserl reference) or perform rational
mathematization on the dreams and thus strip the dreams of meaning – autoCAD, 3D modeling,
numerical and categorical placement of form and space – I start to remember the sources for much
of the architecture. The architecture is essentially an associative collage of the most phenomenol
aspects of experienced or visually sensed architecuture I have witnessed AWAKE. Now the
interesting thing to note is, some of the associations take a while to locate in my memory, as if I
had completely forgo en the source.
Which brings me to a question that leads to a point in reference to this article – how much of what
we design is simply associative collaging of our memories of design and architecture?
I would argue all of it, nothing is stand alone original, but can be original in assembly.
The cultural cycle is a result of societys desire for one type of nostalgia over another. Abstract
rational modernism is a nostalgia for rational thinking. What is most interesting and someone
above notes this, is the extreme abstract rational modernism is now trying to approach the organic
at the level of the organic complexity – or in other words, we are become more consciouss of our
subconciouss – we are now closer to documenting the phenomenon in a Gallilean manner that we
have ever been before….the rational known mind merging with the unknown mind.
Good article, tanks.

Reply
Federico Lepre 2.3.12 / 7pmThe form is always derived from a real image. The reorganization
and the study of this image are the major part in creating the design. For example: a tree. A tree as
an image is not a tree as a living organism (and we might add that is a stretch to even give it
connotations or connections with sustainable green movements), a tree is a form, which means a
set of straight lines. When you take that as inspiration, even unconsciously, a tree reorganized
these lines or simply play with these lines, in my mind creates a fusion between the most ‘intimate
https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 8/9
7/27/2020 A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? | LEBBEUS WOODS

and romantic “Me”, among my knowledge, my thoughts, and in general my all.

Although the initial shape can be the result was a tree that can be more varied, diverse and eclectic
as “product”.
I think that talk of “tree” as an image that creates a “comfort” that create more livable and “more
familiar” spaces is a poor argument like the binomial “” important “is big and” unimportant “is
small”. As a contrast image of the “factory” can be more familiar and more comforting. It all
depends on how I manage this image.
Fear of a city too abstract and alienating for people is stupidity as well as the belief that “a tree”
and “nature itself” images are “good”.
Thiat’s because when we try to define “good” collective imagination that create “good” conditions
of life or anything we choose to generalize people, to create an image of people and this is a fad
wrong and too unrealistic. There are no spaces “good” by definition and spaces “bad”, there are
“designed spaces”, and spaces that pretend to be courtly without too many bases with too many
claims. The la er are usually the spaces created by architecture or sustainable reasoning too,
simply because they generalize the “beauty” in the most technical aspects and less abstract. As an
architect I have to create deep spaces and “Spaces” and a person must think and live in the space I
occupy and live. We are complex and there isn’t a collective image that can give us a general and
satisfying “comfort”.

Reply
Dominique Lamandé 2.6.12 /this tendency of art to appuier on natural forms, is reccurent in
5amcreation. have you heard of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson? Andre
BLOCK? Frederick Kiesler?

Reply
A Synthetic Architecture »[…] A TREE IS A TREE IS A…BUILDING? « LEBBEUS WOODS
Blog Archive » Commentary[…]
On A TREE IS A TREE IS A…
BUILDING? « LEBBEUSReply
WOODS 2.6.12 / 6am
Dominique Lamandé 2.6.12 /h p://lamandedominique.blogspot.com/p/art-architecture_06.html
9pm
Reply
A TREE IS A TREE IS A…[…] time. It short, this approach is to use natural forms as an
BUILDING? « Things I grab,inspiration for architectural forms.Via
motley collection 2.8.12 /lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com Share
12pmthis:Twi erFacebookTumblrLinkedInDiggLike this:LikeBe the first
to like this […]

Reply
A TREE IS A TREE IS A…[…] time. It short, this approach is to use natural forms as an
BUILDING? | concerturbaininspiration for architectural forms.Via
2.9.12 / 9amlebbeuswoods.wordpress.com Évaluez ceci : Share […]

Reply

Blog at WordPress.com.

Entries RSS Comments RSS

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-tree-is-a-tree-is-a-building/ 9/9