Philip Jodidio: Tree Houses

I just read the TASCHEN newsletter and wanted to share this brand-new book straight away. Doesn’t it look great? Tree Houses: Fairy Tale Castles in the Air is a stunningly illustrated study that, as the publisher puts it, offers a tour of some of the best tree houses in the world — from playful structures hidden in suburban gardens to serious feats of architecture lifted into the canopy.

The book is hardcover, 26 × 34 cm, 352 pages, and feels exactly as substantial as you would expect from a TASCHEN production. Inside there are houses suspended between three trunks in the Pacific Northwest, stilted cabins above Japanese moss gardens, futuristic capsules in Sweden, plus the sort of ramshackle plywood platforms that look as if a child’s grandfather built them on a long Saturday. The mixture is the point: high architecture and pure imagination side by side.

The author is Philip Jodidio, who has edited TASCHEN’s Architecture Now! series for many years. He writes about buildings the way some critics write about films — with a love for detail, a sense of context, and a refusal to be too solemn. There are short essays on the cultural history of building in trees, on the structural challenges of attaching anything to something living, and on the way a small wooden room with a view of leaves seems to do something quite specific to the human nervous system.

It is the kind of book that you put on the coffee table and then realise, three weeks later, that everyone who has visited has spent at least ten minutes flipping through it. Highly recommended for anyone who loves architecture, design, childhood, or simply trees.