When a Tree House No Longer Says ‘House’, Are We Virtually There?

Abstract

In the spring of 2013, Akira Suzuki, the Japanese architectural critic, editor and Professor of Architecture at Musashino Art University, issued an invitation to three architects to design and self‐build a tree house for HC Andersen Park in the suburbs of Tokyo. He observes how the resulting ephemeral structures, built out of the trees themselves, invited interaction with visitors and, and were ‘less material buildings with solid roofs and walls than “conditions” or “happenings”’. He discerns that the widespread adoption of social media in Japan has resulted in a paradigm shift. This has moved creativity away from the folly, as an object of contemplation, scale‐less and position‐less on the landscape's horizon and solitary in the mind. In its place, the solitary browsing of networks is causing people to meet in actual space, which resists the easy flows of internet connectivity without imposing walls or rooms.