Here, we're raising the ladder up to a platform with... another ladder. This piece of architecture makes me imagine a mode of ownership that could accompany it. Maybe you don't own the treehouse, but you have a copy of the key that unlocks the ladder to the treehouse, and you are entitled to make one additional copy and lend it out. Maybe you can buy a timeshare in the treehouse. Maybe the treehouse is a building block in a decentralized art residency program.
I have this idea of building a thing that feels like the internet, but it's made of teahouses and treehouses. Html Radio would be the communications system that connects all the different teahouses. You can record images and observations, package them into simple html pages like this, and send them around. You can leave messages and send invitations. If you want to ride your bike from one teahouse to another, and stay for the night, you can request a stay over html radio. It would be like the internet equivalent of a telephone made from tin cans and string.
The 'Freemium' model is widely accepted in the digital product space. Electronics are expected to be lightweight and portable, and digital services to be low-cost and high quality. You see the opposite trends in housing. Housing is scarcer and more expensive than ever. You can't build a house the way you can build an app. Construction is loud, disruptive, and expensive. Everything is heavy and involves trucks. I see teahouses as an opportunity to build compact physical spaces that have the kind of transcendent lightness characteristic of digital services. An architecture that lends itself to rapid reorganization. I'm imagining an operation with the same totalizing vision as The Green New Deal, but on the scale of a high school theater production.
I see 'Ultralight Architecture' as a cross between theatrical stage construction, and boat building. This might seem like an odd combo, but I think it's a good fit. Stage construction is light and moveable, but it generally lacks durability and isn't functional for outdoor use. Ideas and processes from boat building can fill in some of these gaps. I'd like to create stage furniture that you can sleep and shower in. The 'theatrical production' could be the physical construction of another stage set. I want to design things with enough intention that their assembly can function as it's own kind of theater.
Part of the dream of 3d printing, in it's early years, was the design of self-reproducing machines: 3d printers that can 'print' themselves. That goal is impossible in some ways, and possible in others. I like the spirit of that ambition. When I think of a house that can build a replica itself, I think of something that's more like a work of participatory theater, and less like a warehouse full of robots.
A lot of this essay is about 'scaffolding', building one thing on top of another. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to build a tree of ideas, with trunks and branches and shoots and buds and leaves. Fujimori's ladder is a scaffold upon which to climb a vine of ideation.
The container is the house of the teahouse. It's the workshop where the teahouse get's assembled, and the perch on top of which the teahouse sits. The roof of the container is a stage. Pretty much everything is made of plywood and cardboard. Fiberglass and epoxy are selectively used, similarly to in boat building. Stretched and painted canvasses provide planes of color. The little houses have good hats and good boots i.e. good rooves and sturdy anchoring. There is a simple gantry crane for lifting building blocks between levels.
Two teahouses can live in one 20 foot container. By arranging them in different ways relative to the container, and employing visual accessories and lighting effects, the teahouses can be staged like a school, a library, a hospital, a church, a prison, a cemetery. The idea is to provide a habitable spatial framework for building images of institutional structures, and offering creative space dedicated to their re-imagining.
Walking is sacred. I like walking, and I like trucks, and wheelbarrows are like trucks for walking, so I love wheelbarrows.
This flipbook is about plodding along through different ideas. With an empty 20ft container, some electric power tools, a stack of plywood, and a few months of focussed work, I could accomplish a lot.