Creative, modular, smart, and extremely sustainable, Bert is a treehouse concept designed by Austrian studio Precht for tiny house start-up Baumbau.
Bert was conceptualized as a treehouse that was shaped by the forest. Like a trunk of a tree the building connects to the soil on a minimal footprint. All functions are stacked above and branch out in different directions. The interiors are kept in dark fabric which creates a cozy, cave-like atmosphere and orients the views towards the large glass openings.
The leaf-like shingles on the facade are kept in various shades of browns and camouflages the structures with the natural background.
For regions with little cultivated forestry and wood-craftmenship, the main wood-structure can be replaced by steel. With that concept, Baumbau can work globally on unique structures.
More and more, the building industry is shaped by efficiency and profitability. Our cities are formed by an ‘International Style’ of buildings that have a structure of concrete and steel plus a curtain-wall facade. Those buildings are easy to construct and really profitable. But they are a copy of a copy of a copy and they uniform our cities world-wide. No matter if Beijing, Vancouver, London or Rio, the glass-towers make our cities look similar to each other. But we used to build more diverse, climate appropriate and culturally defining. During the last decades, we’ve lost thousand years of building intelligence and building traditions. Architecture that is shaped by profit and greed becomes lazy and boring.
Although Bert was designed as a tiny home, it is also possible to arrange the modules in larger configurations. From garden houses to multifamily homes to hotels or developments in the city. Bert is conceived as a modular building system and all its parts are prefabricated in a factory and put together on site. Throughout its life-span, Bert is flexible to grow taller and wider by adding new modules.
“We know that buildings like Bert are not the path forward on a big scale, but I think as an industry, we need to dare more, try more and experiment more towards a more diverse future of our cities.”
Bert is developed as an independent character with solar panels either on roof or off-site, a composting toilet and a water treatment facility on the ground floor.
