Tree house: a proposal for making affordable, flexible and ecologically appropriate housing for Ethiopia

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002

Like every other country in the world, Ethiopia has a housing crisis. People flock to the cities, and there are not enough resources for them to live in anything other than the most primitive of huts, prone to fire hazards and terrible sanitary problems.

Ahadu Abaineh proposes to ameliorate the problem by growing trees, He suggests that trees will both greatly improve the urban ecological balance and form the structure of houses that can reduce consumption of expensive and environmentally destructive manufactured products. His proposal is simple: use growing trees to make the basic load-bearing structure of a house (basically one tree at each corner), create a frame out of untreated poles, then create walls out of a flexible and easily altered material like mud, used in traditional fashion. The only factory-made material needed extensively is the corrugated metal of the roof, which protects the fragile walls and channels rain to water the trees. The structure took six weeks to erect.

Such houses can grow and be altered with ease as the traditional extended family changes. The first experimental one has been built in the suburbs of Addis Ababa and, though neighbours were initially hostile, they have since queued up to see it as if it were a museum. Already transferable skills have been learned by the builders.

All members of the jury were moved by the notion of making a living building that could last for a very long time in harmony with nature. Abaineh has already started to plant groves of local zigba and wanza seedlings. They are small now, but they could transform life for thousands.

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Ahadu Abaineh, Addle Ababa