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Groby’s Treehouse

Part 2 Project 2024
Liam Whittington
 De Montfort University | UK
Groby’s Treehouse is an outpost dedicated to facilitating the healing of a post-industrial landscape by the introduction and monitoring of biodiversity.

The Treehouse occupies a quarried site in Leicestershire with a long history of extraction and contends that facilitating a variety of methods for local communities to ‘give back’ to the land themselves is the long-term solution for land recovery.

The architectural program is diachronic – it is designed to adapt and grow over time, with the intention of expediting the various phases of remediating, surveying and monitoring the regeneration of wildlife as and when it is required.

To successfully remediate the site, low-grade tree specimens within the landscape must initially be removed – these materials are then repurposed and used to build the Treehouse.

An ambition to grow and educate a woodland culture of passionate people from the local community and enable them to engage more intimately with their natural landscapes are both for the benefits of biodiversity and mental wellbeing.

By reuniting a community to its long-lost landscape by repurposing forgotten industrial lines of connection, the Treehouse provides accessibility and opportunity of lasting benefits for generations to come.

Tutor(s)
Tim Barwell
Ben Cowd
2024
01 – Groby’s Treehouse – Community rewilding of Groby Quarry, Leicestershire.
02 – Restoring Connectivity & Access to the Quarry – Repurposing historic lines of connection between the village of Groby and the quarry.
03 – Facilitating Rewilding & Monitoring Biodiversity – Widening public access to wild landscapes for the benefits of biodiversity and mental wellbeing.
04 – Remediated Timber Construction Techniques – Non-native trees remediated from the site are used to construct the lightweight timber frame that leans and clings to the quarry face.
05 – Diachronic Designs for Evolving Architectures – Adopting principles of longevity, socio-cultural sustainability and a low-carbon material economy.
06 – Planning Irregularities – A diachronic program designed to adapt and grow over time.
07 – Observatories of Nature – The tower contains a sequence of observatories containing moments of intensity where the user becomes closest with nature and can monitor wildlife at wide-ranging scales.
08 – An Auxiliary to Monitoring Wildlife – Facilitating a variety of methods for the user to monitor their environment as a plan for long-term and sustained land regeneration and maintenance.
09 – Vertical Connections to Nature – Negotiating challenging terrain over the quarry edge to observe all levels of a revived landscape.
10 – Nature’s Reclamation of the Treehouse – Past phase structures are allowed to decay and encourage nature to grow from their ruins, closing the cycle to a circular economy of timber.
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