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Baubotanik - Construction Botany - Builds Bridges
Baubotanik is an architectural technique in which plants and trees are purposely grown into living usable structures.
BAUBOTANIK—literally ‘construction botany’—is an architectural technique in which plants and trees are purposely grown into living usable structures—like the living root bridges found in parts of northern India.
— Haggard Hawks 🦅 (@HaggardHawks) May 23, 2021
📸 Ashwin Kumar pic.twitter.com/Kr1X6mhWsT
Science fiction readers have reveled in this idea - if not the term - for generations. Author Jack Vance described house trees in his 1954 novel The Houses of Iszm:
...[There were] houses with buttressed pods for the high-gravity worlds of Cleo 8 and Martinon's Fort, and loose complex houses with pods like balloons for Fei, where gravity was only half that of Iszm. There were trees comprised of a central columnar trunk and four vast leaves, arching out and over to the ground to form four domed halls illuminated by the pale green transmitted light.
(The Houses of Iszm by Jack Vance)There was a tough-trunked tree supporting a single turretlike pod, with lanceolate foliage spiking outward at the base: a watch-tower for the feuding tribesmen of Eta Scorpionis...
"Your language has no words to tell what an Iszic feels for his house. He grows it, grows into it. His ashes are given it when he dies. He drinks its ichor; it breathes his breath..."
(Read more about Jack Vance's house trees)
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