What can a miniature treehouse teach us about designing a city?
Join The London Society for a private, members-only behind-the-scenes tour of Bonsai Treehouses, the Museum of Architecture’s summer exhibition in Oxford Square Gardens, Connaught Village.
More than 25 architectural practices have taken on an unusual challenge: designing a treehouse for a living bonsai. The results range from miniature villages and suspended platforms to habitats for insects and structures inspired by underground fungal networks.
But behind the playfulness are some serious questions about architecture and city-making.
Each practice had to respond to a particular living tree, working with its branches, trunk, roots and irregularities rather than starting with a blank site.
The results explore ideas that matter far beyond miniature architecture: how we build with what already exists, how design can support other forms of life, what makes a collection of buildings into a community, and why care and stewardship matter long after a project is complete.
Contributors include Foster + Partners, Arup Architecture, Haptic Architects, Mamou-Mani Architects, White Arkitekter, Stride Treglown and Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design, alongside established and emerging practices from across the profession.
It is a chance to enjoy an imaginative exhibition while asking some bigger questions about scale, nature, adaptability and how architects approach the challenge of making places. Meet and hear from two architect participants on how they approached the brief and bonsai expert Peter Warren on the art of bonsai and how the trees have been used by the architects.
Join us for a closer look at some tiny buildings with surprisingly big things to say about the future of our city.