If products looked anything like the natural resources they come from, we’d be going around in sheep-shaped sweaters and turning on lamps that look like veins of coal. The Swedish architects Anders Berensson and Ulf Mejergren of Visiondivision level out this relationship between raw materials and the designed environment with their design for Chop Stick, a whole-tree snack shack at the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Read more!

“The design is based on the universal notion that you need to sacrifice something in order to make something new,” they write in their design brief about the project, which opened in June. “Every product is a compound of different pieces of nature, whether it is a cell phone, a car, a stone floor or a wood board; they have all been harvested in one way or another.”

So for the concession stand, Visiondivision sacrificed a six-ton yellow poplar and used very nearly all its parts to build the stand (shingled with poplar bark), the hardwood swings, and the tree-trunk-slice tables. The snacks on offer are presumably free of wood chips, though you will find poplar bark syrup in the cookies.

Photo courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art/100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park

How did the architects get a tiny shack to bench-press a six-ton tree? First they extracted the wood pieces they would need for the kiosk’s structural supports, studs, and pillars, and for the swings and outdoor furniture. By obsessively modeling different kinds of cuts in the trunk and how the removed pieces would refit into them, Berensson and Mejergren arrived at a truss-frame construction that situates two pieces of wood directly under the tree. They used larger wood pieces for the kiosk wall facing the treetop, the heavier load.

This isn’t their first foray into gravity-defying treescaping, by the way. Berensson and Mejergren are the geniuses who brought us the Patient Gardener, the umbrella-like enclosure of cherry-tree trunks in Italy that will take 60 years to grow together. But we won’t have to wait that long for Chop Stick’s sap cookies. Though the snack shack is closed for the season, it will reopen on April 1.

Photo courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art/100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park

All photos courtesy of Visiondivision, except where noted.

[via Gizmag]

by Lamar Anderson

posted in sustainable design Uncategorized

tagged Indianapolis, indianapolis museum of art, museums, parks, treehouse, Visiondivision

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