Gallery: A Clever Idea for Creating Houses With Built-In Trees
Illustration: Vo Trong Nghia Architects01House-For-Trees-06
Vo Trong Nghia Architects has offices in Ho Chin Minh City and Hanoi, the two fastest growing cities in Vietnam.
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The entire country has an urban growth rate of 3.4 percent—a number that motivated Vo Trong Nghia Architects to build House for Trees.
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Houses for Trees is a series of large-scale, concrete, homes that also zone, protect, and draw attention to five endangered city trees.
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The homes create a kind of cohabitation for humans and trees.
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When it rains, basins on top of the structures collect and drain water, both nourishing the trees and preventing street floods.
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Each one is like an indoor potted plant that somehow ingested an *Alice in Wonderland* mushroom: they’re comically big and with trees—not flowers or a cactus—sprouting out of the top.
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The effect is a new canopy layer in a city built in the middle of a natural rainforest.
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In keeping with the constraints of designing for dense urban areas, each concrete ‘pot’ had a build budget of $155,000.
