Group Project Arboreal Hut

Arboreal Hut coalesced from the combination of radically questioning and rethinking the possibilities of wood architecture, designing, and constructing an innovative robotic arm end-effector from a band saw, and the exploration of possibilities of a simple curve cut into tree logs. The process began through an intensely iterative process of cutting with a stationary band saw or "booleaning" wood logs starting at a small scale and then increasing to the scale of a tree. The tools defined the opportunities and constraints of the design, first with the stationary band saw and then the studio generated robotic arm band saw end-effector. With the robotic arm, a series of curved cuts could be programmed to generate a taxonomy of joints and structural optimizations of the tree logs at the scale of a building, which resulted in an architecture completely composed from wood and its off-cuts, and virtually zero waste material.