Appearing as a cross between a Tokyo capsule hotel and a pixellated prefab treehouse, the T-Tree housing community offers residents the opportunity to live among the clouds. One of 20 incredible finalists in our ReBurbia competition to save the suburbs, the sustainable community was designed by Adil Azhiyev and Ivan Kudryavtsev of Light+Space to help alleviate the problems of suburban sprawl with a site-sensitive vertical structure composed of two design elements — a central core containing an elevator and stars, and a lofted series of prefab housing modules. Like the trunk of a tree the core serves as the base, while the housing modules are stacked one on top of the other to create a tower of alternating cubes and activated space.
Although prefab residential skyscrapers such as this has been explored in the past, the design of the T-Tree is thoroughly dynamic, modern, and convenient. Each prefabricated housing module includes a full range of built-in facilities, including furniture, toilets, showers and kitchens. Each encapsulated living space is powered by additional modules containing energy generating wind turbines found on the top of each tower. These produce 25% of the structure’s required energy.
As one of the finalists in the ReBURBIA competition, the T-Tree submission has inspired a passionate debate about the use of space in the context of functionality. Is this design just a fancy rendering or does it effectively address the problems that are facing suburbia today?
+ T-Tree
+ ReBurbia Competition
Come on…
You should know better…
This was done 42 years ago by Moshe Safdie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67).
The only ‘novelty’ is the 3D rendering and the leaf shaped windows.
This submission is pretty far off the mark for how the competition is framed -reforming suburbia. It is a slightly zoomier version of the discredited idea of towers in the park, which turned out to be towers in the parking lot when the concept came off the drawing board and into reality. The design does nothing to break down the isolations and segregation of sprawl.