MIT plants seeds of a new kind of house

Faced with global warming, a projected energy crunch, and suburban sprawl, a team of MIT researchers has envisioned a radical antidote: truly ``green" homes, nurtured from seedling to tree house.

The ``fab tree hab" is a fanciful orb of a home that is literally alive, with a frame of growing tree trunks grafted together, insulation made of clay and straw, and vines instead of vinyl siding. The heating, cooling, and plumbing would all mimic natural processes.

``The structure is a statement against cutting down timber," said Mitchell Joachim , the architect who designed the house, ``composed of 100 percent living nutrients."

Joachim, who recently earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he was inspired in part by a report by the university's Energy Research Council this spring, which stressed the need for greener buildings to help curb the carbon dioxide emissions that drive global warming.

In a utopian dream world it would be possible ``to grow a whole village from seeds," Joachim said, but subdivisions won't turn into forests overnight. First, he said, people would have to accept arboreal abodes -- and even then it would take years to weave and shape growing tree branches into a house. The first step, he said, could be green garages that would help offset a small part of the emissions of cars parked inside.

``The thing that strikes me," said Martin Moeller , senior vice president and curator of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, is ``they're trying to explore actual scientific connections to natural processes. . . . You have people trying to reconceive the fundamentals of the building."

CAROLYN Y. JOHNSON